Dr. Walter Endrei was born in Budapest in 1921. After graduating from high school in 1939, he worked at a number of textile mills in various positions (as a dyer, printer, and a technician in the spinning and weaving departments) and attended a school specializing in textiles from 1941 to 1942, and university from 1943 to 1947. He was appointed Department Head of the Central Administration of the Textile Industry in 1948, a position from which he was dismissed “for political reasons” in 1949. He then spent four years as a textile-patent application referee in the Patent Office, while simultaneously beginning to give lectures at the Polytechnic, followed by four years as a “documentarist of technical information” at the Ministry of Light Industry. Dr. Endrei took part in the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and as a result lost his job at the ministry, but quickly found a place with a textile export company, where he stayed until his retirement in 1981 as Head of Technical Development. He began publishing articles about historical textile technology in 1953.

His first book dealt with spinning and weaving since the Middle Ages, edited by the Sorbonne in 1968. He got his first passport in 1969 in order to travel to Prato, Italy, for a conference. Between 1969 and 1990, he presented at more than twenty international conferences. He qualified as a university lecturer in 1978 and was offered a professorship at Eötvös Loránd University after his retirement from the export company. At the time of his fellowship, in addition to his lecturing, he was Vice President of the Committee of History of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Science, and an adviser of the Goldberger Textile Museum in Budapest.

Dr. Edrei passed away in November 2000.