Leonardo Torres Quevedo
Leonardo Torres Quevedo (also Leonardo Torres y Quevedo ; born December 28, 1852 in Santa Cruz de Iguna near Molledo , Cantabria , Spain ; † December 18, 1936 in Madrid ) was a Spanish engineer and mathematician .
Life
Leonardo Torres Quevedo grew up in Bilbao , where his father worked as a railway engineer. To round off his education, he spent two years in Paris . In 1870 his father was transferred to Madrid, where Torres began studying at the College of Road Construction (Escuela Oficial del Cuerpo de Ingenieros de Caminos) . In 1873 he temporarily interrupted his studies to take part in the fighting in the defense of Bilbao against the Carlist in the Third Carlist War. In 1876 he graduated fourth in his class. He began with a job in the railway company , in which his father was also active, but soon went on a major trip through Europe to find out about scientific and technical advances, especially in the field of electricity . He then settled in Santander to pursue scientific work that led to its first publication in 1893.
He married in 1885. The marriage had eight children.
In 1899 he moved to Madrid. Because of his work there, a laboratory for applied mechanics was opened in 1901 and he became its director. In the same year he became a member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales . In 1910 he became its president. Among the works of the laboratory were cinematographic works of Gonzalo Brañas, the X-ray - spectrometer of Cabrera and Costa and the microtome of Santiago Ramón y Cajal important.
King Alfonso XIII awarded him the Echegaray Medal in 1916 . In 1918 he refused an appointment as development minister. In 1920 he became a member of the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) in the chair of Benito Pérez Galdós and a member of the Mechanics Section of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. The Sorbonne awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1922 . In 1927 he was appointed one of the twelve associate foreign members of the Académie des sciences.
He was a supporter of Esperanto , for which he also campaigned within the framework of the International Commission for Spiritual Cooperation in the League of Nations .
Leonardo Torres Quevedo died in Madrid on December 18, 1936, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War , just 10 days before his 84th birthday.
Services
Airships
In 1902 he presented his project of a new, semi-rigid airship to the academies in Madrid and Paris , which solved the problems of suspending the gondola with internal rope struts that gave the airship the necessary stability due to the internal pressure. In 1905 he led the construction of the airship España , which successfully completed numerous test and demonstration runs. Then began the cooperation between Torres and the French company Astra , which began in 1911 with the construction of the Astra-Torres airships , some of which were sold to the French and British armed forces from 1913 and used in the First World War .
In 1918, together with Emilio Herrera Linares, he designed an airship called Hispania for the transatlantic flight in the hope of gaining the fame of the first transatlantic flight for Spain. However, due to financial problems, the project was delayed so that the British John Alcock and Arthur Brown , the first nonstop - Atlantic crossing from Newfoundland to Ireland in a twin-engined Vickers Vimy succeeded.
Chess machine
From 1910 on, Torres began to develop a chess machine called El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player) , which could automatically play the endgame of king and rook against a king played by humans. The device was demonstrated in Paris in 1914 with great success. It is considered the first chess machine in the world.
Aerial ropeways
As early as 1885/1887 Torres had built an aerial cableway with Göpel drive to access his house in his birthplace, for which he applied for a patent : an aerial cableway with several suspension cables to achieve the safety required for passenger transport. Following this principle, he later built the Transbordador del río León , a slightly larger and motor-driven cable car that was suitable for transporting people, but was only used as a material cable car. His attempts to sell this cable car in Switzerland in 1890 were unsuccessful. In 1907 he built his first cable car in San Sebastián (Monte Ulia) for passenger transport alone, with a 14-seater cabin, six suspension ropes and a pneumatic safety brake. This system was subsequently implemented in Chamonix , Rio de Janeiro and other places. He undoubtedly attracted the greatest attention with his Whirlpool Aero Car or Spanish Aero Car , built between 1914 and 1916 by a Spanish company with Spanish capital , which crosses the Whirlpool Rapids in the Niagara River and is still in operation.
Radio remote control: the telekino
In 1903 Torres presented his tele - cinema , controlled by a radio remote control, to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In the same year he received patents for him in Spain, France, Great Britain and the USA. The device contained one of the first radio remote controls in the world and was a forerunner of the remote control . In 1906, Torres demonstrated his invention to the king and a large crowd in the port of Bilbao by piloting a boat from the shore. He later tried to use his invention in guns and torpedoes, but had to give up due to lack of financial means. In 2007 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded the Telekino a Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing .
Analog calculators
Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented his memorandum on algebraic calculating machines (Memoria sobre las Máquinas algebraicas) to the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences in 1893 , and developed a first model of his calculating machine , which was then regarded as a great advance in Spanish science. In 1895 he presented his memorandum at a congress in Bordeaux . In 1900 he presented his later work Algebraic Calculators (Máquinas algébricas) to the Académie des sciences in Paris. In practice, he constructed a number of calculating machines that could perform complex calculations. In the Museo Torres Quevedo of the ETS de Ingenieros de Caminos de Madrid at the Polytechnic University of Madrid , some of these algebraic calculators are.
Web links
- torresquevedo.org - website about Leonardo Torres Quevedo with extensive bibliography (Spanish)
- Brian Randell From analytical engine to electronic digital computer: The contributions of Ludgate, Torres and Bush , IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 4, 1983, pp. 327-341, pdf
Individual evidence
- ↑ In Spanish media, the name is spelled without "y" throughout.
- ↑ LEONARDO TORRES QUEVEDO Y EL ESPERANTO (Spanish and English)
- ^ Image of the Transbordador de Ulia ( Memento of August 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 28, 2015
- ↑ Description of the Whirlpool Aero Car on the Niagara Parks website
- ↑ report on the awarding of the milestone for the telecine (English)
- ^ Memoria sobre las Máquinas algebricas (sic) Publication in Revista de Obras Públicas , 1895
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Torres Quevedo, Leonardo |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Torres y Quevedo, Leonardo |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Spanish engineer and mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 28, 1852 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Santa Cruz de Iguna near Molledo, Cantabria , Spain |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 18, 1936 |
| Place of death | Madrid |