Sylvester Tornasol

Professor Sylvester Tornasol (original and in French: Professeur Tryphon Tournesol) is a character from The Adventures of Tintin, perhaps the fourth in importance after Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock, characterized by being an eccentric and practically deaf inventor.

His physical image is inspired by that of the professor and inventor Auguste Piccard, a friend of Hergé.

History

The resource of the slightly eccentric and distracted wise man already had antecedents in The Adventures of Tintin: for example, Filemón Ciclón, the Egyptologist from The Pharaoh's Cigars, or the specialist in numismatics and philately who appears in Ottokar's Scepter, Néstor Halambique. Hergé introduced Tornasol in Red Rackham's Treasure as a deaf scientist who offers the expeditioners a shark-shaped submarine. The resource of deafness fostered comic situations.

At the end of this album, it is Tornasol who, with the money obtained from the sale of the submarine to the government, buys the castle of Moulinsart for Captain Haddock, in compensation for letting him test the submarine on the Unicorn expedition.

The roles he plays in the stories are among the most varied, ranging from the distracted trigger of some gags through deafness or his eccentricities, to being the one who solves a certain problem scientifically or to developing a device that It will have some use in the plot. Many times the adventure revolves around him: both in The Seven Crystal Balls and its sequel The Temple of the Sun, and later in The Tornasol Affair i>, he is kidnapped and the rest of the characters have to come to his rescue. In Target: the Moon and its sequel Landing on the Moon he develops the technology that allows the trip to the Moon. These two volumes constitute more of an exception regarding the character of Tornasol and science in general. Well, he says that his specialty is astronautics, he works in high-tech facilities surrounded by a large team of scientists and he wears hearing aids to hear, so the typical confusions of his deafness do not take place and his activity as a scientist is more like how scientific activity is developed in general. Characteristics of Professor Tornasol are carrying a pendulum and practicing dowsing.

In the other stories he works alone and carries out activities in various fields. In Red Rackham's Treasure he is an inventor of eccentric gadgets, most of them of little use; in Tintin in the Land of Black Gold he discovers the component that sabotages gasoline, the way to cancel it and a cure for the curious illnesses that afflict Hernández and Fernández; in The Tornasol Affair he invents a powerful weapon based on ultrasound; in Coke Stock he is developing motorized skates; In The Castafiore Jewels he investigates the possibilities of color television; and in Tintin and the 'Pícaros' a treatment against alcoholism.