WODITSKA, István (CSERMELY from 1913)

From 1878 to 1881 W. studied at the Mining Academy in Banská Štiavnica, where he in 1883 passed a state examination in metallurgy. Until 1887 he worked as an assistant of I. Scheneka, co-inventor of improved lead battery at the department of general and special chemistry in Banská Štiavnica. W. primarily dealt with electro-technology and electrochemistry. The knowledge he acquired at the academy was later used in practice. He worked as a specialist in the field of analytical chemistry at the Mining Directorate in the Romanian Baia Mare until 1895. Between 1887 and 1892 he designed and built the electrolytic copper factory and managed it between 1895 and 1907, after its extension and relocation in Banska Bystrica. With an annual production of 120 tones of electrolytic copper the factory was considered the most modern cooper factory in Hungary. During his activities in Baia Mare in 1891 he published a comprehensive monograph on electro-technology with an emphasis focusing on the use of electricity in the mining and metallurgical industries. He also wrote an extensive monograph on the mining region of Baia Mare. Being known as a specialist for metallurgical production, he was at the end of 1890s given a task to design a project for the installation of a large cooper plant, which would use the ore from the imperial mines of Altai. The project was successfully executed.
W. would continuously go on study tours: in 1893 he studied at the metallurgical plants in Příbram, Prussia and Saxony, he visited the "Deutsche Gold-und Silber-Scheideanstalt" (German plant for separating gold and silver, Degussa) in Frankfurt am Main, and metallurgical plant Hoboken in Belgium. In 1911 he studied metallurgy of copper and lead in Austria and Germany. In 1904 he established a new cooper works, which was designed after the American example in Bălane (Romania). In 1908 he as a mining consultant in Banská Štiavnica started to manage metallurgical plant until 1919. He was promoted to principal mining consultant in 1913.
During World War I he was active everywhere where new cooper works or plants for the production of electrolytic copper were built (Hunedoara in Romania, Csepelwerk of Manfred Weiss in Budapest, etc.).