Santiago Antunez de Mayolo

Santiago Ángel de la Paz Antúnez de Mayolo Gomero (Huacllán, Aija, Áncash, January 10, 1887 - Lima, April 20, 1967) was a Peruvian physicist, engineer and mathematician. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943.

Graduated in mathematical sciences at the University of San Marcos, he traveled to France to obtain the title of Electrical Engineer at the University of Grenoble. He returned to Peru in 1912. He taught at the university in San Marcos and toured Peru, looking for waterfalls for the installation of power plants. The fundamental studies for the construction of the Cañón del Pato hydroelectric power station are owed to him, as well as the design of the Machu Picchu hydroelectric power station and the great Mantaro hydroelectric complex, which today bears his name. He was also a precursor of modern Physics, since in his work entitled Hypothesis on the constitution of matter (1924), he proposed the existence of a non-electrical energy, which he called Neutral Element , eight years before the discovery of the neutron. Likewise, in 1932 he published another study entitled The three constitutive elements of matter , in which he predicted the existence of the positron (positive electron), shortly before it was demonstrated experimentally.

In his honor, the main university center in Huaraz, capital of the department of Ancash, bears his name.

Biography

He was born on the hacienda (today a populated center) of Bella Vista in the Huacllán annex (today Huacllán District) which at that time belonged to the Province of Huaraz (today it belongs to the Province of Aija) of the Department of Áncash. His parents were Ángel C. Antúnez de Mayolo Valenzuela and María Bárbara Gomero y Quijano.

He studied at the Colegio Nacional de la Libertad (Huaraz) and then at the Colegio Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Lima), in the latter he had the famous Peruvian writer Abraham Valdelomar as a classmate and friend. In 1905 he entered the Mathematical Sciences section of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Lima as a student, where he had Artidoro García Godos, José Granda Esquivel, Enrique Hermosa and Federico Villarreal as teachers. On December 24, 1906, during the closing of the academic year, he received from President José Pardo y Barreda a distinction for his high grades and he was presented with the gold medal for his promotion.

In 1907, after the death of his father, his family decided to send him to continue his studies in Europe. On the recommendation of the engineer Emilio Guaarini, an Italian physicist who had worked in Peru as an electricity professor at the School of Arts and Crafts in Lima, Antúnez de Mayolo chose the Electrotechnical Institute of the University of Grenoble in France, to continue his engineering studies.. Studies in Grenoble lasted until 1909. On August 14 of that year he was awarded the Electrical Engineer diploma and three months later he received the Industrial Chemistry and Electrochemical Studies diploma.

In 1910, he completed a year's internship in the workshops of the Alioth Electricity Company in Münchenstein-Bâle, near Basel, Switzerland, which a few years earlier had been entrusted with the construction of all the electrical equipment for the powerful hydroelectric power stations in Hauterive and Montbovon; learning the technologies developed by Alioth, which also included the construction of electric locomotives.

At the end of his internship in 1911 he toured different European countries visiting electrosteel plants. In this way, he got to know the Le Creusot plant and the Paul Giraud steelworks in France, the Stassano steelworks in Milan in Italy, the Saint Poelten plant in Austria, the Dusseldorf plant in Germany and the Trollhatan foundry in Sweden, recognizing in these places the technological applications of the moment. Likewise, also interested in the subject of fertilizers, he toured the electrochemical plants of Piano d'Orta in Italy and the facilities of the Norwegian Saltpeter Society in Nottoden.

From Norway he went to London and from there, in February 1912, he traveled to New York enrolling in a course in applied electricity at Columbia University. It is in New York where he met the Norwegian Lucie Rynning, whom he married on June 28, 1912, returning with her to Peru in December of the same year. They both had a son, Santiago Erik Antúnez de Mayolo Rynning, a historian and lawyer who would become a deputy in the Congress of the Republic and who died in May 2012.

In 1923 he received a doctorate in Mathematical Sciences from the University of San Marcos. In 1924 he participated in the III Pan-American Scientific Congress held in Lima.

In August 1933, he was appointed professor in the Electricity Department of the National School of Arts and Crafts in Lima. There he taught the subjects of Applied and Industrial Electricity. His teaching work continued uninterruptedly until 1959.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, he carried out extensive scientific work, researching not only in the field of engineering and physics, but also in archeology and history.

Professional Performance

Monument of Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo at the National University of Callao.

In 1913, Guillermo Billinghurst was president of Peru, whom Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo placed under his orders as soon as he arrived from abroad; However, he was offered a meagerly paid position to study the navigability of rivers in the unexplored jungle of Madre de Dios, an offer that was rejected on the recommendation of his friend, the senator for Ancash, Germán Schreiber Waddington.

Rejected the offer, Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo left for the town of Aija, Áncash, in the company of his wife Lucie. While there, his eldest son, Erick Santiago, was born on April 4, 1913.

At the beginning of May of that year, he left Aija for Huaraz with the goal of knowing and exploring the Cañón del Pato, in order to observe the potential energy of the waters of the Santa River as it passes through said gorge and thus confirm the feasibility of his musings: installing a powerful hydroelectric power station to supply the region and a future synthetic fertilizer factory. After touring the Cañón del Pato and carrying out the corresponding calculations and measurements, he confirmed his idea of building a hydroelectric plant there.

He returned to Lima in August 1913 encouraged to present to President Billinghurst his studies on hydroelectricity in the Cañón del Pato; however, he encountered a serious obstacle in the Minister of Development and Public Works, Fermín Málaga Santolalla, who called such a project impossible. This did not discourage Antúnez de Mayolo, who, in partnership with Marcial Pastor, deputy for Lambayeque, founded the Cañón del Pato Hydroelectric Company on September 23, 1913, with the aim of promoting his industrialization project in the Santa region. However, a few years later the partners would liquidate the project.

In May 1914, he began working as an electrical engineer at the Explotadora Huallanca Mining Company in the province of Dos de Mayo in Huánuco. This German capital company operated the San Francisco mine. There he was in charge of drawing up the plans of some tunnels and participating in the installation of electrical transmission lines for the mines. While in that position, the First World War broke out, which resulted in the mining company reducing personnel and Antúnez de Mayolo having to look for a new job. Trying his luck, he went to the Monzón region, taking the opportunity to write the final results of his research on the hydroelectricity of the Cañón del Pato, calling it the & # 34; Proyecto Hidro-Eléctrico Químico del Cañón del Pato & # 34;

In February 1916, he returned to Lima to occupy the position of deputy chief engineer of Lighting and Motive Power in the Associated Electric Companies, directed in those years by Mariano Ignacio Prado Ugarteche, as general manager. In said company he began to design and direct the electrical interconnection works with Callao, which until that year received the electrical supply service from the Gas Company. At the same time, he had started in June 1916 as a professor in electricity and physics courses at the old School of Engineers of Peru. The teaching work would be carried out without interruption until 1959, when he retired as Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry of the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos.

Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo worked in the Associated Electric Companies until 1924, the year in which the Italian company Latinalux took over. During said period, he participated in the expansions of the Santa Rosa, Chosica and Yanacoto power plants; in the lighting works in Lima for the lavish celebrations of the centenary of the Independence of Peru in 1921; and he outlined the vast work of transforming overhead distribution networks into underground networks that began in August 1923.

In 1923 he graduated as a Doctor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of San Marcos, with the thesis on the “Kinetic Theory of the Newtonian Potential and some applications to the Physical Sciences”.

Antúnez de Mayolo also ventured into politics; in 1931 he was elected to integrate the Constituent Congress of that year; however, he was frustrated due to the annulment of the first elections due to the uprisings and uprisings that occurred against the candidacy of President Luis M. Sánchez Cerro.

In 1943 he was appointed technical adviser to the Peruvian Corporation of Santa, which was to build the Cañón del Pato Hydroelectric Power Station, entrusting him with the preparation of the necessary studies, not only in the execution of said project, but also for the electrification of the Peru. For this reason, he traveled and studied the beds of the Vilcanota and Urubamba rivers in Cusco, the bed of the Mantaro river as it passes through Huancavelica and the Pongo de Manseriche in Amazonas. From this, he proposed the construction of hydroelectric plants in each of these places that would materialize years later. Thus, in 1958 the Cañón del Pato Hydroelectric Power Plant was inaugurated; in 1964 the Machu Picchu Hydroelectric Power Plant; and in 1973, the Mantaro Hydroelectric Plant.

In 1953 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry of the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, being invited to travel to Europe in 1954 by the British Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain in order to visit scientific institutions and give lectures at the universities of Madrid and Paris.

In 1964 he published his study on “Light, Matter and Gravitation”, and in October of that same year, on the occasion of a forum on the Mantaro River Hydroelectric Project, he gave the conference “Study of a Plan of Electrification of Peru”, where he gathered for the last time the most important projects to guarantee the electricity supply in Peru.

Until his last years, he continued to investigate and disseminate his studies, as happened with his research on the Chavín and Tiahuanaco cultures, published in 1965.

In 1966, he received recognition from the Congress of the Republic, awarding him the Commander's Medal for his relevant merits and important services rendered to the country as a man of science and for his studies that verified the hydroelectric potential of the Mantaro.

Important contributions

He prepared numerous studies and projects that covered the specialties of physics, engineering, history and archaeology; distinguishing in them his desire to solve the shortcomings of energy and industrialization of Peru.

The first published project was his study on the hydroelectric potential of the Cañón del Pato, which he titled "Project for the Hydro-Electro-Chemical Installation of the Cañón del Pato on the Santa River-Perú" Originally prepared in 1915 and updated in 1940, it was the backbone of his engineering projects, to which he dedicated a large part of his life until he saw it crystallize in 1958 with the inauguration of the Cañón del Pato Hydroelectric Plant, the first plant built in a vault. underground.

In 1920 he published "The Water Falls of the Department of Ancash", and three years later he presented "Transportation of 140,000 HP from the Cañón del Pato to Lima and the Railroad from Lima to Chimbote&# 34;, with which he complemented the initial project of the Cañón del Pato Hydroelectric Power Plant and the industrialization of that region.

In October 1923 he presented the Kinetic Theory of Newtonian Potential and some applications to the Physical Sciences which, according to Antúnez de Mayolo himself “is about a new aspect of the theory of potential of Newtonian forces (...) by interpreting the meaning of the speed of light.”

Existence of the neutron and positron

In 1924, during the III Pan American Scientific Congress, he presented the paper Hypothesis on the constitution of matter, in which he predicted the existence of the neutral element, eight years before its discovery by the English physicist James Chadwick, who called it a "Neutron". He was among the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943. It should be noted in this regard that currently no specialized work on the neutron mentions Antúnez de Mayolo's prediction, not even in History of the Neutron by Donald J. Hughes, an aspect that, due to historical evidence, an effort must be made to achieve it.

In 1930 he published his study New Law of Planetary Distances in the Solar System and its physical interpretation, which includes the still almost unknown planet Pluto, recently discovered by the scientist V. Slipher on that date from Lowell Observatory.

In 1932 he published his study The Three Constituent Elements of Matter, in which he predicted the existence of the Positron, defining it as the positive electron in cosmic rays, shortly before it was demonstrated experimentally by the American physicist Carl David Anderson, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936. In this regard, Antúnez de Mayolo himself refers to this discovery and his efforts to disseminate it in scientific spheres:

"In the early 1932, I prepared a job predicting the existence of the positive electron in cosmic rays, a job that required to take to Paris for what I asked President General Sánchez Cerro to give me a passage back and forth to France. General Sánchez Cerro denied me such help and then referred my work to our minister in France, Mr. Francisco García Calderón, asking him to refer him to the Paris Academy of Sciences, as he did."

In 1934 he published an article called The World is a system in Unstable Equilibrium in which he confirmed the existence of the neutron by saying “matter always contains nuclear neutral around which the active polar elements: positive electricity and negative electricity, forming electrical corpuscles: protons, electrons and positrons, which constitute what we call matter. The free polar elements without neutral that reveal themselves to us, among other ways, as electromagnetic fields, form energy as a power of action».

Other studies

In 1934 he published in French his study on electromagnetic fields and the gravitational field Une meme equation pour le champ electromagnetique et le champ gravitationnel, which he presents to the Italian Royal Academy of Sciences.

In 1935 he published the work The Ruins of Tinyash, which includes a mature and rigorous archaeological study. In it he recounts his expedition to Alto Marañón, which includes a visit to Chavín de Huántar and presents the discovery, in the town of Tinyash, of a lithic stela with a drawing of a human divinity, which he attributed to be the "Apu of Tinyash".

In 1936 he published Gravitation, which brought together his studies in the fields of light, matter, electromagnetic fields and gravity, which he later complemented with the publications of his works on electromechanical theory of light in 1940 and on the quantification of the electromagnetic field in his work A new key at the crossroads of Physics, published in 1942.

In 1944, as technical adviser to the Peruvian Corporation of Santa, in charge of the construction of the Cañón del Pato Power Plant, he produced a detailed report called Alto Marañón or Pongo de Manseriche Project, which contemplated the construction of a dam in said pongo to obtain a waterfall in this way and thus install a hydroelectric power station. Project that unfortunately was not adopted with interest by the Ministry of Development and Public Works.

In 1945 he presented the Project for the construction of the Pongo Hydroelectric Power Station on the Mantaro River. This study followed another referring to the hydroelectric potential of the Vilcanota and Urubamba rivers in Cusco, with which the idea of a General National Electrification Plan was later organized, to which he added his initial project of the Cañón del Pato. Studies that, later in 1958, served as the basis for the construction of the Machu Picchu Hydroelectric Power Plant and the Mantaro Hydroelectric Power Plant.

In 1946 he presented his proposal for the Diversion of the Chamaya River towards the Lambayeque coast, with the aim of irrigating the extensive Olmos pampas. The project elaborated in 1945 contemplated the damming of the waters of the Chamaya River and the diversion of its waters through a 54-kilometer-long tunnel towards the Olmos River ravine for the irrigation of some 100,000 hectares of land projected in the Lambayeque desert.

In 1951 he carried out the study La Gran Lima and the Diversion of the Mantaro River to the Rímac considering the rapid growth of the capital and the demand for more electricity. The completion many years after the Marcapomacocha and Marca II projects, which brought the waters of the Atlantic slope to the capital, crossing the mountain range through tunnels and canals, demonstrated the feasibility of the Antúnez de Mayolo project.

Main editions

• Cynetic Theory of Newtonian Potential and Some Physical Applications (1923)
• New law of planetary distances in the solar system and its physical interpretation (1925)
• The genesis of the electrical services of Lima (1929)
• The three primary constituent elements of matter (1932)
• Determination of the constant alpha of fine structure by the unitary theory of the electromagnetic field (1935)
• Electromagnetic theory of light and its relations with Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and quanto theory (1940)
• A new key to the crossroads of physics (1942)
• Cosmic space-matter (1949)
• Cosmic energies and the riddle of life (1950)
• The electric language of the corpuscular theory of light (1954)
• Relation of an idea to its realization or the Hydroelectric Center of the Pato Canyon (1957)
• The divinity of the Chavín and Tiahuanaco cultures (1966).