Leonardo Torres Quevedo

[6] He made significant aeronautical contributions at the beginning of the 20th century, becoming the inventor of the non-rigid Astra-Torres airships, a trilobed structure that helped the British and French armies counter Germany's submarine warfare during World War I.[10] He advanced beyond the work of Charles Babbage in his 1914 paper Essays on Automatics,[11] where he speculated about thinking machines and included the design of a special-purpose electromechanical calculator, introducing concepts still relevant like floating-point arithmetic.[13] He conceived other original designs before his retirement in 1930, some of the most notable were in naval architecture projects, such as the Buque campamento (Camp-Vessel, 1913), a balloon carrier for transporting airships attached to a mooring mast of his creation,[14] and the Binave (Twin Ship, 1916), a multihull steel vessel driven by two propellers powered by marine engines.[17] Torres began to work as a civil engineer for a few months on railway projects as his father did, but his curiosity and desire to learn led him to give up joining the Corps to dedicate himself in "thinking about my things".[19] As a young entrepreneur who had inherited a considerable family fortune, he immediately set out on a long trip through Europe in 1877, visiting Italy, France and Switzerland, to know the scientific and technical advances of the day, especially in the incipient area of electricity.[29] The execution of the project was the responsibility of the Society of Engineering Studies and Works of Bilbao, which was established in 1906 by Valentín Gorbeña Ayarragaray, one of his closest friends, with the sole purpose of developing or marketing Torres' patents.The work of Torres in this matter is framed within this tradition, which began in 1893 with the presentation of the "Memória sobre las máquinas algébricas" ("Memory about algebraic machines") at the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences in Madrid.[46][47][48] Torres developed a whole series of analogue mechanical calculating machines that used certain elements known as arithmophores, which consisted of a moving part and an index that made it possible to read the quantity according to the position shown thereon.[60] In 1904, Torres was appointed director of the Centre for Aeronautical Research in Madrid, a civil institution created by the government of Spain "for the technical and experimental study of the air navigation problem and the management of remote engine maneuvers.[62][63] He moved all the material to a rented hangar in Sartrouville (Paris), beginning a collaboration with the Société Astra, a new Aeronautical Society integrated in the conglomerate of French petroleum businessman Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and directed by Édouard Surcouf, who had been familiar with Torres' work since 1901.[70] The Entente powers used these dirigibles during the First World War (1914–1918)[71] for diverse tasks, principally to the escort of convoys, the continuous surveillance of coasts and the search, from bases in Marseille, Tunisia and Algeria, for German submarines in the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea.[81] In 1905, Torres tested a second model of the Telekino remotely controlling the maneuvers of the electrically powered boat Vizcaya in the pond of the Casa de Campo in Madrid, achieving distances of up to about 250 m[85] from the terrace of the Club Marítimo del Abra, and with the assistance of the president of the Provincial Council and other authorities.The positive results of those experiences encouraged Torres to apply the Spanish government for the financial aid required to use his Telekino to steer submarine torpedoes, a technological field which was just starting out.In the words of Torres: "Charles Babbage and Franz Reuleaux – and I suppose others as well, although I don't have news of them – have tried, without any success, to put remedy to this inconvenience; but although these eminent authors have failed, should not be a sufficient reason to abandon such an important effort".Torres, the physicist Blas Cabrera, and Juan Costa, the head of the workshop, jointly designed several scientific instruments (Weiss-type electromagnet, an X-ray spectrometer, a mechanism to handle through remote control a Bunge scale, a reservoir of variable height with micrometer movements for magnetic-chemical measurements, and some on).This example recorded in portable game notation shows how White checkmates the black King, following Torres' algorithm:It created great excitement when it made its public debut at the University of Paris in 1914.[121] This paper is Torres' major written work on the subject he called Automatics, "another type of automaton of great interest: those that imitate, not the simple gestures, but the thoughtful actions of a man, and which can sometimes replace him".Negotiations continued, and Torres reached Admiral Reginald Bacon, who, on 17 March 1914, wrote from the Coventry Ordnance Works that "the experience of the Navy has invariably been that any auxiliary craft carried on board ship are of very little real service".[137] He applied for the patent of the Binave in the United Kingdom with the name "Improvements in Ships" in 1917,[138] and it was built by the Euskalduna company in Bilbao in 1918, with several test departures such as the successful round trip to Santoña on 28 September.The design introduces new features, including two 30 HP Hispano-Suiza marine engines, and the ability to modify its configuration when sailing, positioning two rudders at the stern of each float, and placing the propellers aft too.As a result of the experience acquired in the tests, to improve stability in 1920 it was considered appropriate to add a lower keel to each of the floats proposed in the patent, making it similar to modern catamarans, whose development would become widespread from the 1990s onwards.From 1922 to 1926 he participated in the work of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, where such figures as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Gilbert Murray and Henri Bergson, its first president, attended.In 1925 he participated as the official representative of the Spanish government in the "Conference on the Use of Esperanto in Pure and Applied Sciences" held in Paris, together with Vicente Inglada Ors [es] and Emilio Herrera Linares.Once the Spanish Civil War began, his daughter Luz was arrested by the militia, and the family had to resort to the fact that Torres was a Commander of the Legion of Honour to save her life, with the intervention of the French Embassy included.Created the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in 1939, the architect Ricardo Fernández Vallespín [es] was commissioned with the project and construction of a large building in Madrid to house the new Institute «Leonardo Torres Quevedo» of Applied Physics, which was completed in 1943.[186][187] Its dedicated to "designing and manufacturing instruments and investigating mechanical, electrical and electronic problems", and was the germ of the current Institute of Physical and Information Technologies "Leonardo Torres Quevedo" (ITEFI).[188] In 1953, the commemorative events for the centenary of his birth began,[189] which took place at the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences with the participation of high academic, scientific and university figures from the country and abroad, among them Louis Couffignal, Charles Lambert Manneback, and Aldo Ghizzetti [it]."[193][194] In 1978 his work was honoured in Madrid at the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro, an exposition that was organized by the College of Civil Engineers led by José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez [es].[197][198] The same year the Leonardo Torres Quevedo Foundation [es] (FLTQ) was created under his name as a non-profit organization to promote scientific research within the framework of the University of Cantabria and to training professionals in this area.The ceremony also included members of the Torres Quevedo family, who made a special trip from Spain to attend the anniversary celebrations and Carlos Gómez-Múgica [es], the Spanish Ambassador to Canada.