Leonardo Torres Quevedo

Leonardo Torres Quevedo (December 28, 1852, Santa Cruz de Iguña, Molledo, Cantabria – December 18, 1936, Madrid) was a Spanish civil engineer, mathematician, and inventor of the late 19th century. 19th century and early 20th century. A prolific and versatile innovator, he was a renowned figure both in his country and abroad for his notable contributions in the field of applied mechanics and mathematics, as well as in other fields of engineering, including cable cars, airships, or radio control.. His pioneering work in automatics, conceptual and practical, achieved international resonance and his devices have been cited as precursors of cybernetics, analog calculus, and computer science.

Biography

He was born on December 28, 1852, in Santa Cruz de Iguña, in Molledo, Cantabria. His father, Luis Torres Vildósola y Urquijo, was a civil engineer in Bilbao, where he worked as a railway engineer. The family normally resided there, although they also spent long periods of time on the maternal site in La Montaña Cantabra, especially when the father directed the construction of the railway bridge from Santander to Alar del Rey. His mother was Valentina de Quevedo y Maza and her maternal grandparents, José Manuel de Quevedo and Apolinaria de la Maza y Escalera. His paternal grandparents were José Luis Torres Vildósola and Cayetana María de Urquijo, despite what was stated by some of his biographers, since it appears reflected in the baptismal certificate. During his childhood, he spent long periods of time separated from his parents due to work trips. Therefore, he was cared for by the ladies of Barrenechea, relatives of his father, who declared him heir to his property, which facilitated his future independence.

He studied high school at the Instituto de Enseñanza Media in Bilbao and later went to Paris, to the Colegio de los Hermanos de la Doctrina Cristiana, to complete his studies for two years (1868 and 1869). The family settled in Madrid in 1870 and the following year he began his higher studies at the Official School of the Corps of Civil Engineers. He temporarily suspended his studies in 1873 to go as a volunteer to defend Bilbao, which had been besieged by Carlist troops during the Third Carlist War. Once the siege of Bilbao was lifted, on May 2, 1874, he returned with his brother to Madrid, where he finished his studies in 1876, being the fourth of his promotion.

He began his career in the same railway company where his father worked, but he immediately embarked on a long journey through Europe to learn first-hand about scientific and technical advances, especially in the incipient area of electricity. Back in Spain, he settled in Santander, where he himself paid for his work and began a study and research activity that he would not abandon. As a result of the investigations in these years, his first scientific work would appear in 1893. On April 16, 1885, he married Luz Polanco y Navarro in Portolín, with whom he had eight children (Leonardo and Julia, who died young, Luz, Valentina, Luisa, Gonzalo, Leonardo and Fernando). He worked on his first ferries in 1887, and presented them in 1890 in Switzerland, although they were not accepted.

In 1889, he settled in Madrid, participating in its social, literary and scientific life. He presented his Memory on algebraic machines to the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences. In 1895, he presented the report Sur les machines algébriques at a congress in Bordeaux, and in 1900, Machines a calculer at the Paris Academy of Sciences.

From the work that the Athenaeum carried out in these years, the Applied Mechanics Laboratory was created in 1901, later Automatic, of which he was appointed director; the laboratory was dedicated to the manufacture of scientific instrumentation. That same year he entered the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Madrid, with a speech on algebraic machines. Years later, he would end up being president of this Royal Academy, in 1910. Among the laboratory's works, it is worth highlighting the magnetograph by Gonzalo Brañas, the X-ray spectrograph by Cabrera y Costa, and the microtome and panmicrotome by Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

In 1902, he presented a report with a draft of an airship to the Academies of Sciences in Madrid and Paris, and in 1903, the patent for the telekino. In 1910 he traveled to Argentina with the Infanta Isabel to propose, at the Fourth Pan-American Conference, the constitution of the Hispano-American Union of Scientific Biography and Technology. Aliadófilo, his patented airship designs were used by the English and French against zeppelins in the World War I. In 1926 the first issue of a Diccionario Tecnológico Hispano-Americano appeared. In 1912, he created his first chess automaton and in 1914, the Essays on Automata .

In 1916 his ferry over the Niagara River was inaugurated and King Alfonso XIII awarded him the Echegaray Medal; in 1918 he rejected the post of Minister of Public Works offered to him by the Marquis of Al Hoceima. In 1920 he entered the Royal Spanish Academy, in the chair that had been occupied by Benito Pérez Galdós, and became a member of the Mechanics section of the Paris Academy of Sciences. He was also elected president of the Spanish Mathematical Society, a position he held until 1924. Furthermore, in that year he created his second chess automaton. In 1922, the Sorbonne named him doctor honoris causa, and in 1927 he was named one of the twelve associate members of the Paris Academy of Sciences.

He was a strong supporter of the international language Esperanto, which he supported, among other places, in the Committee for Cultural Cooperation of the League of Nations. He died in his house on Calle de Válgame Dios, in Madrid, at the beginning of the Civil War on December 18, 1936, when he was 10 days short of his 84th birthday.

Work

Aeronautics

In 1902, Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented to the Academies of Sciences of Spain and Paris the project for a new type of airship that solved the serious problem of suspension of the gondola by including an internal frame of flexible cables that provided rigidity to the gondola. dirigible by effect of internal pressure. This work deserved a very favorable report from both José Echegaray and Paul Émile Appell.

In 1904, he was appointed director of the Center for Aeronautical Testing, "intended for the technical and experimental study of the problem of air navigation and the direction of remote engine maneuvering".

Directible Spain 1909

Torres next to a model of his airship, in 1913.

In 1905, with the help of Captain Alfredo Kindelán, Torres Quevedo directed the construction of the first Spanish airship at the Military Aerostation Service of the Army located in Guadalajara. In 1909 they finished with great success, and the new airship, the España, made numerous exhibition and test flights. Perhaps the most important innovation in this airship was to make the balloon trefoil, so that increased security. As a result of this fact, the collaboration between Torres Quevedo and the French company Astra began, which came to buy the patent with a transfer of rights extended to all countries, except Spain, to enable the construction of the airship in the country. Thus, in 1911, the manufacture of airships known as Astra-Torres began. The distinctive three-lobed design was widely used by the French and British Army during World War I for a wide variety of tasks, primarily naval protection and inspection. Its wartime success even caught the attention of the Imperial Japanese Navy, who purchased a model in 1922.

In 1919, Torres Quevedo designed, in collaboration with the engineer Emilio Herrera Linares, a transatlantic airship, which they called Hispania, which reached the status of a patent, in order to carry out from Spain the first air crossing of the Atlantic. Due to financing problems, the project was delayed and it was the British John William Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown who crossed the Atlantic non-stop from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vickers Vimy biplane in 16 hours and 13 minutes.

Aircraft designed by Torres Quevedo continued to be manufactured after the patent expired in 1922, and airships are still being built today with some ideas inherited from his trilobe system.

Ferries

The Spanish AerocarThat goes through the Niagara Falls. Designed by Torres Quevedo, it was inaugurated in 1916 and still today it serves.

Statue to Torres Quevedo, at the Museum of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Spain (2010).

Torres Quevedo's experimentation in the area of ferries, funiculars or cable cars began very soon during his residence in his hometown, Molledo. There, in 1887, he built the first ferry in his house, which he called "Portolín ferry", to overcome a difference in level of about 40 meters: about 200 meters in length and animal traction, a couple of cows and a chair in the form of a gondola. This experiment was the basis for the application for his first patent, which he would apply for that same year, on September 17: an aerial funicular with multiple cables, with which he achieved a suitable safety factor. for the transport of people and not only things. Later he built the so-called ferry of the León river, larger, already with a motor, but which continued to be used exclusively for transporting materials, not people.

Between 1887 and 1889, he applied for the privilege of the patent in other countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom or Switzerland. In 1890 he presented his ferry in Switzerland, a country very interested in this transport due to its orography and which was already coming using funiculars to transport packages, but his project was rejected, allowing the Swiss press certain ironic comments. This was the first study carried out for the construction of a mountain cable car in the world, on the Klimsenhorn-Pilatus Kulm line. After this failure, he decided to dedicate himself to algebraic machines and in 1903 he resumed his projects, since on 15 The patent expired on February 1904. He prepared several projects in San Sebastián and Zaragoza, and in 1907 built the first ferry suitable for public transport of people, on Monte Ulía in San Sebastián. The security problem had been solved by means of an ingenious multiple cable-support system, freeing the anchors at one end that were replaced by counterweights. The resulting design was highly robust and perfectly resisted the rupture of one of the support cables. The project was carried out by the Bilbao Engineering Studies and Works Society, which successfully built other ferries in Chamonix, Bolzano, Grindelwald, Rio de Janeiro and other places.

But it is undoubtedly the Spanish Aerocar at Niagara Falls, in Canada, that has given him the greatest fame in this area of activity, although from a scientific point of view it is not the most important. The 550-meter-span ferry is an almost horizontal aerial funicular (the difference in elevation between the two ends is one meter) that joins two different points on the Canadian shore at a bend in the Niagara River known as The Whirlpool (The Whirlpool). It travels at about 7.2 km/h (120m/min). The load per cable via is nine tons, with a safety coefficient of the cables of 4.6. It was built between 1914 and 1916 being a Spanish project from start to finish: designed by a Spaniard, built by a Spanish company with Spanish capital (The Niagara Spanish Aerocar Co. Limited); a bronze plaque, located on a monolith at the entrance to the access station, recalls this fact: «Spanish air ferry from Niagara. Leonardo Torres Quevedo (1852–1936)». It was inaugurated in tests on February 15, 1916 and was officially inaugurated on August 8, 1916, opening to the public the next day; the shuttle, with minor modifications, is still in operation today, without any noteworthy accidents in a century of service, constituting a popular tourist and film attraction.

Radio control: the Telekino

In 1903, Torres Quevedo presented the Telekino at the Paris Academy of Sciences, accompanied by a memoir and making an experimental demonstration. In that same year he obtained the patent in France, Spain, Great Britain and the United States. ^{[citation needed ]}

Receiving telekine

The telekino consisted of an automaton that executed orders transmitted by hertzian waves. With the telekino, Torres Quevedo established the operational principles of the modern wireless remote control system and was a pioneer in the field of remote control.

In March 1905, he tried out the first tests of the telekino, driving the world's first land vehicle at the Beti Jai fronton in Madrid.

On November 7, 1906, in the presence of Alfonso XIII and before a large crowd, he successfully demonstrated the invention in the port of Bilbao by guiding a boat from the shore; he would later try to apply the telekino to shells and torpedoes, but had to abandon the project due to lack of funding.

In 2006, the telekino was recognized by the IEEE as a "milestone", a 'milestone' for the history of engineering on a global scale.

Analog calculating machines

Front view of El Ajedrecista

Analog calculating machines seek the solution of mathematical equations by transferring them to physical phenomena. The numbers are represented by physical magnitudes, which can be rotations of certain axes, potentials, electrical or electromagnetic states, and so on.

A mathematical process is transformed, in these machines, into an operational process of certain physical magnitudes that leads to a physical result that corresponds to the sought mathematical solution. The mathematical problem is solved by means of a physical model of the same. Since the middle of the 19th century, various mechanical devices have been known, such as integrators, multipliers, etc., not to mention Charles Babbage's analytical engine; The work of Torres Quevedo in this area is framed within this tradition, which began in 1893 with the presentation at the Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of the Memory on algebraic machines. In his time, this was considered an extraordinary event in the course of Spanish scientific production.

In 1895, he presented the Report Sur les machines algébraiques at a Congress in Bordeaux of the Asociation pour l'Avancement des Sciences. Later, in 1900, he presented the Memory Machines á calculer, at the French Academy of Sciences. In them, he examines the mathematical and physical analogies that are the basis of analogical calculation or of continuous quantities, and how to mechanically establish the relationships between them, expressed in mathematical formulas. His study includes complex variables, and uses the logarithmic scale. From a practical point of view, he shows that it is necessary to use endless mechanisms, such as rotating disks, so that the variations of the variables are unlimited in both directions.

In the practical field, Torres Quevedo built a whole series of analog calculating machines, all of them mechanical. One of them is The Chess Player, presented at the Paris Fair in 1914 and considered the first video game in history. In these machines there are certain elements, called arithmophores, which are made up of a mobile and an index that allows reading the quantity represented for each position of the same. The mobile is a disk or a graduated drum that rotates around its axis. The angular displacements are proportional to the logarithms of the magnitudes to be represented.

Endless spindle

Using a diversity of elements of this type, it puts to the point a machine to solve algebraic equations: resolution of an equation of eight terms, obtaining its roots, even the complex ones, with a precision of milliseconds. A component of such a machine was the so-called "endless spine", of great mechanical complexity, which allowed to mechanically express the relationship and=lorg(10x+1){displaystyle and=log(10^{x}+1)}, with the objective of obtaining the logarithm of a sum as a sum of logarithms. As it was an analog machine, the variable can travel any value (not only prefixed discrete values). In the face of a polynomial equation, when rotating all the representative wheels of the unknown, the final result is giving the values of the sum of the variable terms, when this sum coincides with the value of the second member, the wheel of the unknown marks a root.

For demonstration purposes, Torres Quevedo also built a machine to solve a quadratic equation with complex coefficients, and an integrator. Currently, the Torres Quevedo machine is kept in the museum of the Higher Technical School of Civil Engineering, Canals and Ports of the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

A new approach: electromechanical calculating machines

A new theory, the automatic one

In his Essays on automatics first published in 1914, Torres Quevedo formulates what will henceforth be a new branch of engineering, automatics.

They are in the descriptions of machines many examples of these abrupt interventions; but it is evident that the study of this form of automation does not belong to the kinematics. So it's never been studied systematically, that I know.This deficiency should be corrected by adding to the theory of machines a special, automatic section, which examines the procedures that can be applied to the construction of automatons endowed with a more or less complicated relationship life.

With the development of the Telekino, Torres Quevedo came to the conclusion that with it he had not only manufactured the first remote control in history, but that this machine was itself an automaton, that is, a machine that could work autonomously executing actions responding to orders and depending on certain circumstances of their environment.

The telekine study was the one that led me in this new direction.The telekine is, in sum, an automaton who executes the orders that are sent to him through the telegraph without threads. In addition, in order to interpret the orders and act at each time in the manner desired, it must take into consideration several circumstances. His relationship life is therefore quite complicated.

It is this new theory that he applied in the creation of his Chess Player.

The electromechanical arithmometer, the first computer

Based on this conclusion, Torres exploited the possibilities offered by this new branch of machine theory and applied it to the development of calculating machines. Thanks to this, he was able to overcome the numerous difficulties that until then had been posed by the creation of these machines by exclusively mechanical methods, and where Charles Babbage had failed, not for lack of means or talent, he achieved satisfactory results.

Babbage’s mechanical genius was necessary to deal with it, and yet, although for many years of hard work he devoted his great intelligence to the whole, although he spent his money and his country’s money on hands full in these studies, he did not get any satisfactory results.

[... ]

But despite his great merits, indisputable and indisputable; despite his intelligence, his enthusiasm and his constancy, he failed. His drawings and models are preserved in the Kensington Museum; but it is to be feared that they will never be useful to anyone.

In these Essays on Automatics, Torres develops the theory of what would later become his arithmometer: an electromechanical machine capable of performing calculations autonomously with a command input device (a typewriter), a processing unit, and value registers (a system of slats, pulleys, needles, brushes, electromagnets, and commutators), and an output device (again a typewriter). It is ultimately what "should consecrate our engineer internationally as the inventor of the first computer in the current sense of history".

Already in this text, Torres Quevedo describes not only the idea of a sequential operating machine to perform calculations, but also floating point arithmetic, thanks to which very large numbers can be handled in calculations, in what it constitutes the first appearance of the idea of floating point arithmetic in history.

The philosophical approach: can machines perform human tasks?

Portrait of Leonardo Torres Quevedo, by Franzen, in the magazine The Spanish and American Illustration March 15, 1916.

With the aforementioned work, Leonardo Torres Quevedo lays the foundations of what would later be called artificial intelligence and describes how machines can be built to perform more tasks than just those for which it is not necessary to ' think'.

[...] it is believed that [...] the operations that require the intervention of the mental faculties will never be mechanically executed.

[... ] I will try to prove in this note - from a purely theoretical point of view - that it is always possible to build an automaton whose acts, all, depend on certain circumstances more or less numerous, due to rules that can be arbitrarily imposed in themoment of construction.

Obviously, these rules should be such that they are sufficient to determine at any time, without any uncertainty, the behavior of the automaton.

In an interview with Torres Quevedo conducted by Scientific American in 1915, Torres Quevedo states that at least in theory almost all operations of a vast range could be performed by a machine, even those that are supposed to be they require the intervention of considerable intellectual capacity.

The text of Essays on Automatics on the other hand anticipates the formulation of the 'Chinese room' by John Searle. Descartes' statement that an automaton would never be capable of maintaining a reasonable dialogue, never mentioned by Alan Turing, is already discussed by Torres Quevedo when he states that:

There is not between the two cases the difference that Descartes saw. He certainly thought that the automaton, to answer reasonably, would have to make himself a reasoning, while in this case, as in all others, would be his builder who would think for him in advance.I think I have shown, with all that precedes, that one can easily conceive for an automaton the theoretical possibility of determining his action at a given time, weighing all the circumstances that he must take into consideration to perform the work entrusted to him.

With all this, Torres Quevedo is several decades ahead of the Computer Science theorists of the XX century as Alan Turing or Konrad Zuse among others.

Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1917), by Joaquín Sorolla, at the Hispanic Society of America, New York.

Pedagogical inventions

In the last years of his life, Torres Quevedo turned his attention to the field of pedagogy, to investigate those elements or machines that could help educators in their task. Patents on typewriters (patents no. 80121, 82369, 86155 and 87428), marginal pagination of manuals (patents no. 99176 and 99177) and those of the projectable pointer (patent no. 116770) and the educational projector (patent no. 117853).

The projectable pointer, also known as laser pointer is based on the shadow produced by an opaque body that moves close to the projected plate, this shadow is what you would use as a pointer. To do this, he designed an articulated system that allowed the speaker to move a point or points next to the projection plate, at will, which made it possible to mark the areas of interest on the transparency. Torres Quevedo thus expresses the need for this invention: «Well known are the difficulties that a teacher encounters to illustrate his speech, using light projections. He needs to position himself in front of the screen, taking care not to hide the projected figure in order to draw his students' attention to the details that interest them the most and show them with a pointer ».

He also built a teaching projector that improved the way slides were placed on glass plates for projection.

Main patents

Awards

• Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III
• Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso XII
• Medalla Echegaray
• Leader of the Legion of Honor
• Banda de la orden de la República
• Doctor honoris causa by the University of Paris
• Medalla Echegaray