Leonardo Torres Quevedo

Leonardo Torres Quevedo (leoˈnaɾðo ˈtores keˈβeðo; 28 December 1852 – 18 December 1936) was a Spanish civil engineer, mathematician, and inventor. A prolific and versatile innovator, his fields of interest in engineering were very extensive and included mechanics, aeronautics, and automatics. One of his greatest achievements was El Ajedrecista, a chess automaton that demonstrated the capability of machines to be programmed to follow specified rules (heuristics) and marked the beginnings of research into the development of artificial intelligence. He wrote acclaimed theoretical papers related to analog calculus, developing several machines for the resolution of some types of algebraic equations, and presented the designs for a special-purpose electromechanical machine in his 1914 paper Essays on Automatics, which has been qualified by British historian Brian Randell as "a fascinating work which well repays reading even today", where he also proposed a way to store floating-point numbers and automata with discernment capacity. He successfully demonstrated the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine by producing a typewriter-controlled calculating machine in 1920. Torres was a key figure in the development of radio control with his Telekine, creating modern wireless remote-control operation principles. He made significant contributions in the field of airships, from a mooring post with a superior pivoting platform to be able to moor a dirigible outdoors, to the Astra-Torres airship, a trilobed cross section structure which was widely used by the Allied Powers during World War I. He conceived a new cable car system to transport people safely, an area that culminated in the Whirlpool Aero Car located in Niagara Falls, that carries 35 standing passengers over a one-kilometre trip. In naval engineering, he patented innovative designs of catamarans and boats to carried dirigible balloons. Furthermore, he was a noted speaker and supporter of Esperanto. Torres was born on 28 December 1852, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, in Santa Cruz de Iguña, Cantabria, Spain.