The word "hallo": The legend has it that "hallo" was first used over the telephone by Tivadar Puskás, Hungarian-born inventor of the first telephone exchange. In the first long-distance telephone call he used the word "hallom" – Hungarian for "I hear you", and it was misinterpreted as a greeting.
The carburetor: The device that mixes air and fuel for an internal combustion engine was invented by Hungarian engineers János Csonka and Donát Bánki in 1893. Some sources say that Bánki got the idea while walking home from Budapest Technical University, when he saw a flower-girl who was sprinkling her flowers by blowing water spray from her mouth onto them.
Vitamin C: Albert Szent-Györgyi had been trying to isolate vitamin C for some time when in 1932 his wife gave him paprika for dinner, and it occurred to him that this was the only plant that he never experimented with. So he took it to lab, and the rest is a history. In 1937 Albert Szent-Györgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine "for his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion processes, with special reference to vitamin C…".
The ballpoint pen: When in 1931 Hungarian journalist László Bíró got fed up with the waste of time on filling up fountain pens and cleaning up the smudges, he noticed that ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly and smudge-free. But it was too viscous to be used in the fountain pen, so he developed a new tip of tiny ball that was turning easily in its socket to pick up ink from a cartridge and deposit it on the paper.
The hologram: Hologram is a flat optical image that looks three-dimensional to the naked eye. Holography was invented in 1947 by Hungarian physicist Dénes Gábor as a by-product of electron microscopy research. For this work he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971.