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Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (28 December 1852 - 18 December 1936) was a Spanish engineer and mathematician of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
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[edit] Biography
Torres was born on 28 December 1852, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, in Santa Cruz de Iguña, Molledo (Cantabria), Spain. The family resided for the most part in Bilbao, where Torres' father worked as a railway engineer, although they also spent long periods in his mother's family home on Mt. Santander. In Bilbao he studied to enter an advanced high-school program and later spent two years in Paris to complete his studies. In 1870, his father was transferred, bringing his family to Madrid. The same year, Torres began his higher studies in the Official School of the Road Engineers' Corps. He temporarily suspended his studies in 1873 order to volunteer for the defense of Bilbao, which had been surrounded by Carlist troops during the third Carlist war. Returning to Madrid, he completed his studies in 1876, fourth (of a total of seven students)in his graduating class.
He began his career with the same train company for which his father had worked, but he immediately set out on a long trip through Europe to get to know the scientific and technical advances of the day firsthand, especially in the incipient area of electricity. Upon returning to Spain, he took up residence in Santander where he financed his own work and began a regiment of study and investigation that he never abandoned. The fruit of these investigations appeared in his first scientific work in 1893.
He married in 1885 and eventually had eight children.
In 1899 he moved to Madrid and became involved in that city's cultural life. From the work he carried out in these years, the Atheneaum created the Laboratory of Applied Mechanics of which he was named director. The Laboratory dedicated itself to the manufacture of scientific instruments. That same year, he entered the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences in Madrid, of which entity he was president in 1910. Among the works of the Laboratory, the cinematography of Gonzalo Brañas and the X-ray spectrograph of Cabrera and Costa are notable.
In 1916 King Alfonso XIII bestowed the Echegaray Medal upon him; in 1918, he declined the offer of the position of Minister of Development. In 1920, he entered the Royal Spanish Academy, in the seat that had been occupied by Pérez Galdós, and became a member of the department of Mechanics of the Paris Academy of Science. In 1922 the Sorbonne named him an Honorary Doctor and, in 1927, he was named one of the twelve associated members of the Academy.
Torres died in Madrid, in the heat of the Spanish Civil War on 18 December 1936, ten days shy of his eighty-fourth birthday.
[edit] Work
[edit] Aerostatics
In 1902, Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented to the Science Academies of Madrid and Paris the project of a new type of dirigible that would solve the serious problem of suspending the gondola by including an internal frame of flexible cables that would give the airship rigidity by way of interior pressure.
In 1905, with the help of Alfredo Kindelán, Torres directed the construction of the first Spanish dirigible in the Army Military Aerostatics Service, created in 1896 and located in Guadalajara. It was completed successfully, and the new airship, the España, made numerous test and exhibition flights. As a result, a collaboration began between Torres and the French company Astra, which managed to buy the patent with a cession of rights extended to all countries except Spain, in order to make possible the construction of the dirigible in its country. So, in 1911, the construction of dirigibles known as theAstra-Torres was begun. Some were acquired by the French and British armies at the beginning of 1913, and were used during the First World War for diverse tasks, principally naval protection and inspection.
In 1918, Torres designed, in collaboration with the engineer Emilio Herrera Linares, a transatlantic dirigible, which was named Hispania, aiming to claim the honor of the first transatlantic flight for Spain. Due to finance problems, the project was delayed and it was the British John Alcock and Arthur Brown who crossed the Atlantic without stop from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vickers Vimy twin-engine plane, in sixteen hours and twelve minutes.
[edit] Ferries
Torres' experimentation in the area of ferries and cable cars began very early during his residence in the town of his birth, Molledo. There, in 1887, he constructed the first ferry in order to overcome a depression of some 40 metres. The ferry was some 200 metres across and was pulled by a pair of cows, with one log seat. This experiment was the basis for the request for his first patent, which he sought in the same year: an aerial cable car with multiple cables, with which it obtained a level of safety suitable for the transport of people, not only cargo. Later, he constructed the ferry of the Río León, of greater speed and already with a motor, but which continued to be used solely for the transport of materials, not of people. In 1890 he presented his ferry in Switzerland, a country very interested in that transport due to its geography and which was already coming to use cable cars for bulk transport, but Torres' project was dismissed, allowing certain ironic commentary from the Swiss press. In 1907, Torres constructed the first ferry suitable for the public transportation of people, in Monte Ulía in San Sebastián. The problem of safety was solved by means of an ingenious system of multiple support cables. The resulting design was very strong and perfectly resisted the rupture of one of the support cables. The execution pf the project was the responsibility of the Society of Engineering Studies and Works of Bilbao, which successfully constructed other ferries in Chamonix, Río de Janeiro, and others. But it is doubtless the Spanish Aerocar in the Niagara Falls in Canada which has gained the greatest fame in this area of activity, although from a scientific point of view it was not the most important. The ferry of 580 meters in length is an aerial cable car that unites the United States and Canada, constructed between 1914 and 1916, a Spanish project from beginning to end: devised by a Spaniard, constructed by a Spanish company with Spanish capital (The Niagara Spanish Aerocar Co. Limited); a bronze plaque,located on a monolith at the entrance of the access station recalls this fact: Spanish aerial ferry of the Niagara. Leonardo Quevedo Torres (1852-1936). It was inaugurated in tests on 15 February 1916 and was officially inaugurated on 8 August 1916, opening to the public the following day; the ferry, with small modifications, continues to run to this day, with no accidents worthy of mention, constituting a popular tourist and cinematic attraction.
[edit] Radio Control: the Telekino
In 1903, Torres presented the Telekino at the Paris Academy of Science, accompanied by a brief, and making an experimental demonstration. In the same year, he obtained a patent in France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States. The Telekino consisted of a robot that executed commands transmitted by electromagnetic waves. It constituted the world's first apparatus for radio control and was a pioneer in the field of command from a distance. In 1906, in the presence of the king and before a great crowd, Torres successfully demonstrated the invention in the port of Bilbao, guiding a boat from the shore. Later, he would try to apply the Telekino to projectiles and torpedoes, but had to abandon the project due to lack of financing.
