Torres began to work as a civil engineer for a few months on railway projects as his father did, but his curiosity and desire to learn led him to give up joining the Corps to dedicate himself in "thinking about my things". As a young entrepreneur who had inherited a considerable family fortune, he immediately set out on a long trip through Europe in 1877, visiting Italy, France and Switzerland, to know the scientific and technical advances of the day, especially in the incipient area of electricity. for a cable car with which he obtained a level of safety suitable for the transport of people, not only cargo. The patent was extended to other countries: United States,
Austria, Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Italy. His cable car used a novel multi-cable support system, in which one end of a cable is anchored to fixed
counterweights and the other (through a system of
pulleys) to mobile counterweights. With this system the axial force of the cables via is constant and equal to the weight of the counterweight, regardless of the load in the shuttle. What will vary with this load is the deflection of the via cables, which will increase by raising the counterweight. Thus, the safety coefficient of these cables is perfectly known, and is independent of the shuttle load. The resulting design is very strong and remains safe in case of a support cable failure. In April 1889 Torres presented his cableway in Switzerland, a place very interested in this means of transport due to its geography, between Pilatus-Kulm and Pilatus-Klimsenhorn (
Mount Pilatus). It was an aerial funicular with a length of 2 km and a gradient of 300 m. In 1890 he traveled to that country to convince different authorities of its construction. He failed to convince the Swiss, who did not grant any reliability to the work of a Spanish engineer, and even the newspapers
Nebelspalter and
Eulm Spiegel published articles and satirical drawings about the project. This disappointment, known as the "Swiss failure", led him to focus on other fields for several years. The journey was 280 meters, with a drop of 28 meters, lasted for just over three minutes, and the gondola had the capacity to board up to 18 people on each trip. The execution of the project was the responsibility of the
Society of Engineering Studies and Works of Bilbao, which was established in 1906 by Valentín Gorbeña Ayarragaray, one of his closest friends, with the sole purpose of developing or marketing Torres' patents. The Ulia cable car transported passengers until its closure in 1917. over the
Niagara River in Ontario, Canada. The successful result of this type of cable car gave him the opportunity to design the
Spanish Aerocar based on
J. Enoch Thompson's idea at
Niagara Falls in Canada. The cableway of 550 meters in length is an aerial cable car that spans the
whirlpool in the
Niagara Gorge on the Canadian side. It travels at about . The load per cable via is , with a
safety coefficient for the cables of 4.6. and carries 35 standing passengers over a one-kilometre trip. It was constructed between 1914 and 1916. For its construction and assembly, the
Niagara Spanish Aerocar Company Limited was set up from the Society of Engineering Studies and Works, with a capital of $110,000 (roughly $ million in ), and a planned concession of 20 years. The construction was directed by Torres' son,
Gonzalo Torres Polanco. It completed its first tests on 15 February in 1916 and was officially inaugurated on 8 August, opening to the public the following day. The cableway, with small modifications, runs to this day with no accidents worthy of mention, constituting a popular tourist and cinematic attraction. The Aero Car is believed to be the sole remaining example of Torres' design for an aerial ferry. Although constructed and operated in Canada, it was a Spanish project from beginning to end: designed by a Spaniard and constructed by a Spanish company with Spanish capital. In 1991, the
Niagara Parks Commission received the on the 75th anniversary of the Aero Car, in recognition of its commitment to preserving Torres' design. A plaque, mounted on a boulder in front of Aero Car Gift Shop recalls this fact:
International Historic Civil Engineering Site. The Niagara Spanish Aerocar. A tribute to the distinguished Spanish Engineer who designed the Niagara Spanish Aerocar. This was only one of his many outstanding contributions to the engineering profession. Engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo (1852–1936). Constructed 1914–1916. CSCE. The Canadian Society for Civil Engineering. 2010. Asociación de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos de España. Spanish aerial ferry of the Niagara.
Analogue calculating machines {{multiple image|direction=vertical Since the middle of the 19th century, several mechanical devices were known, including
integrators, multipliers, etc. The work of Torres in this matter is framed within this tradition, which began in 1893 with the presentation of the "Memória sobre las máquinas algébricas" ("Memory about algebraic machines") at the
Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences in Madrid. This paper was commented in a report by
Eduardo Saavedra in 1894 and published in the . Saavedra, who considered Torres' calculating machine as "an extraordinary event in the course of Spanish scientific production", recommended that the final project of the device be financed. Later on, in 1900, he presented a more detailed work, "Machines à calculer" ("Calculating machines") at the Paris
Academy of Sciences. The commission formed by
Marcel Deprez,
Henri Poincaré and
Paul Appell, asked the academy for its publication, These works examined mathematical and physical analogies that underlay analogue calculation or continuous quantities, and how to establish mechanically the relationships between them, expressed in mathematical formulae. The study included
complex variables and used the
logarithmic scale. From a practical standpoint, it showed that mechanisms such as turning disks could be used endlessly with precision, so that changes in variables were unlimited in both directions. Torres developed a whole series of analogue mechanical calculating machines that used certain elements known as
arithmophores, which consisted of a moving part and an index that made it possible to read the quantity according to the position shown thereon. The aforesaid moving part was a graduated disk or a drum turning on an axis. The angular movements were proportional to the
logarithms of the magnitudes to be represented. Between 1910 and 1920, using a number of such elements, Torres built a machine that was able to compute the roots of arbitrary
polynomials of order eight, including the complex ones, with a precision down to thousandths. This machine could calculated the equation: \alpha = \frac{A_1 X^a + A_2 X^b + A_3 X^c + A_4 X^d + A_5 X^e}{A_6 X^f + A_7 X^g + A_8 X^h} \, where
X is the variable and
A1 ...
A8 is the coefficient of each term. Considering the case of α = 1, it becomes the following formula, and the root of the algebraic equation can be obtained: A_1 X^a + A_2 X^b + A_3 X^c + A_4 X^d + A_5 X^e - A_6 X^f - A_7 X^g - A_8 X^h = 0 \, By calculated each term on a logarithmic scale, they can be calculated only by sums and products like
A1 +
a × log(
X), which can handle a very wide range of values, and the relative error during calculation is constant regardless of the size of the value. However, to calculate the sum of each term, it is necessary to accurately obtain log(u + v) from the calculated values log(u) and log(v) on a logarithmic scale. For this calculation, Torres invented a unique mechanism called the "endless spindle" ("
fusee sans fin"), a complex differential
gear using a
helical gear shaped like a wine bottle, which allowed the mechanical expression of the relation y=\log(10^x+1). Putting log(u) – log(v) = log(u/v) = V, then u/v = 10 V, and the following formula is used to calculate log(u + v): \log (u + v) = \log (v (u / v + 1)) = \log (v) + \log (u / v + 1) = \log (v) + \log(10^V + 1)\,, the same technique which is the basis of the modern electronic
logarithmic number system. Torres devised another machine around 1900 with a small computing using gears and
linkages to obtain the complex number solution of the
quadratic equation X2 – pX + q = 0. Nowadays, all these machines are kept in the Torres Quevedo Museum at the School of Civil Engineering of the
Technical University of Madrid.
Aerostatics No.1 at an air show in 1911 In 1902, Torres started the project of a new type of
dirigible that would solve the serious problem of suspending the
gondola. He applied for a patent in France wrote "Note sur le calcul d'un ballon dirigeable a quille et suspentes interieures" ("Note on the calculus of a dirigible balloon with interior suspension and keel"), and presented both to Madrid and Paris' Academies of Science. By the end of that year the report at Paris's Academy of Science was included in the French journal ''
L'Aérophile, and an English-language summary was published in the British The Aeronautical Journal''. In 1904, Torres was appointed director of the Centre for Aeronautical Research in Madrid, a civil institution created by the
government of Spain "for the technical and experimental study of the air navigation problem and the management of remote engine maneuvers." From March 1905, with Army Engineer Captain
Alfredo Kindelán as Technical Assistant, he supervised the construction of the first Spanish dirigible in the Army Military Aerostatics Service, located in
Guadalajara, which was completed in June 1908. The new airship, named
Torres Quevedo in his honour, made successful test flights with passengers in the gondola. Despite this, in 1907 and 1909 he had requested an improved patent for his airship in France. He moved all the material to a rented
hangar in
Sartrouville (Paris), beginning a collaboration with the
Société Astra, a new Aeronautical Society integrated in the conglomerate of French petroleum businessman
Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and directed by
Édouard Surcouf, who had been familiar with Torres' work since 1901. The Astra company managed to buy the patent with a cession of rights extended to all countries except Spain, making the use of said system free in the country. In 1911, the construction of dirigibles known as the
Astra-Torres airships was begun and Torres would receive
royalties of 3 francs for every m3 of each airship sold. . In
Issy-les-Moulineaux (south-west of Paris) in February 1911, the trials of 'Astra-Torres no.1' were successful, with a volume of 1590m³ and a speed of up to 53 km/h. Other Astra-Torres dirigibles followed, including the Astra-Torres XIV (
HMA.No 3 to the
Royal Naval Air Service), which broke the then world speed record for airships in September 1913 by reaching 83.2 km/h, and the
Pilâtre de Rozier (Astra-Torres XV) named after the aerostier
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, which at 24,300 m3 was the same size of the German '
Zeppelins' and could reach speeds of around 85 km/h. The distinctive trilobed design was also employed in the United Kingdom in the
Coastal,
C Star, and
North Sea airships. The
Entente powers used these dirigibles during the
First World War (1914–1918) for diverse tasks, principally to the escort of convoys, the continuous surveillance of coasts and the search, from bases in
Marseille, Tunisia and Algeria, for German submarines in the
Bay of Biscay, the
English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea. In 1919, Torres also designed, based on a proposal from engineer
Emilio Herrera Linares, a transatlantic dirigible, which was named
Hispania, aiming to claim the honour of the first
transatlantic flight for Spain. Owing to financial problems, the project was finally not carried out. The success of the trilobed blimps during the war even drew the attention of the
Imperial Japanese Navy in 1922, who acquired the
Nieuport AT-2 with almost 263 ft long, maximum diameter 54 ft and with a hydrogen capacity of 363,950 ft 3. This type of non-rigid airship continued to be manufactured in various countries during the post war era, especially those by the French
Zodiac Company which influenced the design of most later dirigibles.
Radio control: the Telekino Torres was a pioneer in
remote control technology. He began to develop a
radio control system around 1901 or 1902, as a way of testing his airships without risking human lives. Between 1902 and 1903, he applied for patents in France, Spain, and Great Britain, under the name "Systéme dit Télékine pour commander à distance un mouvement mécanique" ("Means or method for directing mechanical movements at or from a distance"). On 3 August 1903, he presented the
Telekino at the Paris Academy of Sciences, together with a detailed memory, and making a practical demonstration to its members. For the construction of this first model, Torres received help from
Gabriel Koenigs, director of the Mechanics Laboratory of the
Sorbonne, and
Octave Rochefort, who collaborated by providing
wireless telegraphy devices. In 1904 Torres chose to conduct initial
Telekino testings in the
Beti Jai fronton of Madrid, which became the temporary headquarters of the Centre for Aeronautical Research, first in an electric
three-wheeled land vehicle with an effective range of just 20 to 30 meters, which has been considered the first known example of a radio-controlled
unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). and later testing a dinghy on the
Bilbao Abra from the terrace of the
Club Marítimo in the presence of the president of the Provincial Council and other authorities. Witness to the success of these tests,
José Echegaray highlighted how "no one moves" the Telekino, "it moves automatically." It was an automaton of "a certain intelligence, not conscious, but disciplined"; "a material device, without intelligence, interpreting, as if it were intelligent, the instructions communicated to it in a succession of
Hertzian waves." These feats were also echoed in the international press. Milestone Plaque at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the
Technical University of Madrid. On 25 September 1906, in the presence of the king
Alfonso XIII and before a great crowd, Torres successfully demonstrated the invention in the
port of Bilbao, guiding the boat
Vizcaya from the shore with people on board, demonstrating a standoff range of 2 km. By applying the
Telekino to electrically powered vessels, he was able to select different positions for the
steering engine and different velocities for the
propelling engine independently. He was also able to act over other mechanisms such a
light, for switching on or off, and a
flag, for raising or dropping it, at the same time. Specifically, Torres was able to do up to 19 different actions with his prototypes. The positive results of those experiences encouraged Torres to apply the Spanish government for the financial aid required to use his
Telekino to steer submarine
torpedoes, a technological field which was just starting out. His application was denied, which caused him to abandon the improvement of the
Telekino. On 15 March 2007, the prestigious
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated a Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing to the
Telekino, based on the research work developed at Technical University of Madrid by Prof.
Antonio Pérez Yuste, who was the driving force behind the Milestone nomination.
Formal language In 1907, Torres introduced a
formal language for the description of mechanical drawings, and thus for mechanical devices, in
Vienna. He previously published "Sobre un sistema de notaciones y símbolos destinados a facilitar la descripción de las máquinas" ("System of notations and symbols intended to facilitate the description of the machines") in the
Revista de Obras Públicas. According to the Austrian computer scientist
Heinz Zemanek, this was equivalent to a
programming language for the numerical control of machine tools. He defined a table of symbols, a collection of rules and, as usual in his works, applied them to an example. This symbolic language reveals Torres' main capacities, both his ability to detect a problem, in this case a social problem of origin and its technical consequences, as well as his capacity for creation – invention – to give a rational, properly technical response. In the words of Torres: "
Charles Babbage and
Franz Reuleaux – and I suppose others as well, although I don't have news of them – have tried, without any success, to put remedy to this inconvenience; but although these eminent authors have failed, should not be a sufficient reason to abandon such an important effort". Babbage, Reuleaux and Torres failed. The world of machines continues without any other symbolic language than
descriptive geometry.
Laboratory of Automation As a member of the steering committee of the (JAE) established in 1907 in Madrid to promote research and scientific education in Spain, Torres played a leading role in the creation of three key state agencies that were the models for the JAE's support to research, regardless of the discipline: the Laboratory of Automation (1907) – of which he was named director, the construction of instruments – the Laboratories Association (1910) – the union of state laboratories and workshops – and the Institute of Science Materials (1911) – the budget allocation. The Laboratory of Automation produced the most varied instruments; it not only built its own inventions, but also provided services and support to universities and researchers of the JAE. Torres, the physicist
Blas Cabrera, and Juan Costa, the head of the workshop, jointly designed several scientific instruments (Weiss-type electromagnet, an
X-ray spectrometer, a mechanism to handle through remote control a Bunge scale, a reservoir of variable height with
micrometer movements for magnetic-chemical measurements, and some on). , head of the
Spectroscopy Section of the Laboratory of Physical Research and
Miguel A. Catalán's teacher, ordered Torres's workshop a
spectrographic equipment; requested an
interferometer for a variable distance, Michelson- type;
Juan Negrín requested a
stalagmometer, and
Santiago Ramón y Cajal commissioned a
microtome and panmicrotome, and a projector for film screenings. The development of the Laboratory of Automation reached its peak with the reform of the , to house the School of Industrial Engineers and the JAE, and the
National Museum of Natural Sciences, also expanding the own Laboratory.
Chess automaton: El Ajedrecista By the beginning of 1910 Torres commenced his work to make a chess-playing automaton, which he dubbed
El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player). As opposed to
The Turk and
Ajeeb,
El Ajedrecista was an
electromechanical machine with true integrated automation that could automatically play a king and rook endgame against the king from any position, without any human intervention. The pieces had a metallic mesh at their base, which closed an electric circuit that encoded their position in the
board. When the black king was moved by hand, an
algorithm calculated and performed the next best move for the white player. If an
illegal move was made by the opposite player, the automaton would signal it by turning on a light. If the opposing player made three illegal moves, the automaton would stop playing. The automaton does not deliver
checkmate in the minimum number of moves, nor always within the 50 moves allotted by the
fifty-move rule, because of the simple algorithm that calculates the moves. It did, however, checkmate the opponent every time.
Claude Shannon, in his paper
Programming a Computer for Playing Chess (1950), pointed out that Torres' idea was quite advanced for that period. This example recorded in portable game notation shows how White checkmates the black King, following Torres' algorithm: [FEN "8/8/1k6/8/R7/8/5K2/8 w - - 0 1"] 1. Rh4 Kc5 2. Kf3 Kd5 3. Ke3 Kd6 4. Rh5 Kc6 5. Ke4 Kd6 6. Rg5 Kc6 7. Kd4 Kd6 8. Rg6+ Kd7 9. Kd5 Ke7 10. Rh6 Kf7 11. Ra6 Ke7 12. Rb6 Kf7 13. Ke5 Ke7 14. Rb7+ Kd8 15. Ke6 Kc8 16. Rh7 Kb8 17. Rg7 Ka8 18. Kd6 Kb8 19. Kc6 Ka8 20. Kb6 Kb8 21. Rg8# It created great excitement when it made its public debut at the
University of Paris in 1914. Its internal construction was published by
Henri Vigneron in the French magazine
La Nature. On 6 November 1915
Scientific American magazine in their Supplement 2079 pp. 296–298 published an illustrated article entitled "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices. He Would Substitute Machinery for the Human Mind". It was summarized as follows: at the 1951 Cybernetics Conference. In November 1922, about to turn 70, Torres finished the construction designs of a second chess player, in which, under his direction, his son Gonzalo had introduced various improvements. The mechanical arms to move pieces were replaced for
electromagnets located under the board, sliding the pieces from one square to another. This version included a
gramophone, with a voice recording announcing checkmate when the automaton won the game. Torres initially presented it in 1923 in Paris. Gonzalo later exposed the second chess player at several international meetings, introducing it to a wider audience at the 1951 Paris conference on computers and human thinking.
Norbert Wiener played on 12 or 13 January.
El Ajedrecista defeated
Savielly Tartakower at the conference, for representing a landmark in the development of decision-making automation and computer chess, anticipating later
software-based
chess programs by several decades.
Essays on Automatics {{blockquote |It has been commonly assumed (see Metropolis and Worlton 1980) that Charles Babbage's work on a mechanical digital program-controlled computer, which he started in 1835 and pursued off and on until his death in 1871, had been completely forgotten and was only belatedly recognized as a forerunner to the modern digital computer. Ludgate, Torres y Quevedo, and Bush give the lie to this belief, and all made fascinating contributions that deserve to be better known. in the magazine
La Ilustración Española y Americana, March 15, 1916. On 19 November 1914, Torres published "Ensayos sobre Automática. Su definición. Extensión teórica de sus aplicaciones" (Essays on Automatics. Its Definition – Theoretical Extent of Its Applications) in the
Revista de Obras Públicas. It was translated into French with the title "Essais sur l'Automatique" in the
Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées, 1915, vol. 2, pp. 601–611. This paper is Torres' major written work on the subject he called
Automatics, "another type of automaton of great interest: those that imitate, not the simple gestures, but the thoughtful actions of a man, and which can sometimes replace him". He drew a distinction between the simpler sort of automaton, which has invariable mechanical relationships and the more complicated, interesting kind, whose relationships between operating parts alter "suddenly when necessary circumstances arise". Such an automaton must have sense organs, that is, "
thermometers,
magnetic compasses,
dynamometers,
manometers", and limbs, as Torres called them, mechanisms capable of executing the instructions that would come from the sense organs. The automaton postulated by Torres would be able to make decisions so long as "the rules the automaton must follow are known precisely". The paper provides the main link between Torres and Babbage. He gives a brief history of Babbage's efforts at constructing a mechanical
Difference engine and
Analytical engine. He described the Analytical Engine as exemplifying his theories as to the potential power of machines, and takes the problem of designing such an engine as a challenge to his skills as an inventor of electromechanical devices. Contains a complete design (albeit one that Torres regarded as theoretical rather than practical) for a machine capable of calculating completely automatically the value of the formula a^x(y - z)^2, for a sequence of sets of values of the variables involved. It demonstrates cunning electromechanical gadgets for storing decimal digits, for performing arithmetic operations using built-in function tables, and for comparing the values of two quantities. The whole machine was to be controlled from a
read-only program (complete with provisions for
conditional branching), represented by a pattern of conducting areas mounted around the surface of a rotating cylinder. It also introduced the idea of
floating-point arithmetic, which historian Randell says was described "almost casually", He did it in the following way: The paper ends with a comparison of the advantages of electromechanical devices that were all that were available to Babbage. It establishes that Torres would have been quite capable of building a general-purpose electromechanical computer more than 20 years ahead of its time, had the practical need, motivation, and financing been present.
Analytical machines {{blockquote |"The achievements of
George Stibitz,
Howard Aiken and
IBM, and
Konrad Zuse crown the transitory but capital period of relays and theoreticians. This stage of the march towards automatic calculation was built on a summary and proven technology, that of electromagnetic relays. The very modesty of this technological level contributes to giving a brilliant relief to the quality of the intellectual contributions of Torres y Quevedo,
Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon." Torres went ahead to prove his theories with a series of working prototypes. He demonstrated twice, in 1914 and in 1920, that all of the cogwheel mechanisms of a calculating machine like that of Babbage could be implemented using electromechanical parts. His 1914 analytical machine used a small memory built with electromagnets, capable of evaluating p × q – b. From the
user interface point of view, this machine can be regarded as the predecessor of current computers that use a
keyboard as an
input interface. In terms of usage, it was also assumed that calculations could be performed remotely by extending
electric wires, and is considered to be a rudimentary version of today's online systems that use communication lines. Torres had no thought of making such a machine commercially, viewing it instead as a means of demonstrating his ideas and techniques. Furthermore, in his paper about this device, he pointed out the need for various automatic machines to represent continuous numerical values as finite, discrete values for processing and evaluation, where Torres' invention would be recognized as one of the first digital calculation systems: "In 1920, the Spaniard Leonardo Torres Quevedo built a fully automatic electromagnetic arithmometer. To do this, he used relay technology, developed for the needs of the telephone."
Naval projects In those days when the outbreak of the
Great War was anticipated, Torres designed a transport ship intended to accompany fleets. On 30 July 1913, he patented the "Buque campamento" ("Camp-Vessel"), an
airship carrier with a
mooring mast and a hold large enough to house up to two inflated units, and
hydrogen cylinders. He had thought of the possibility of combining aeronautics with the navy in this way, offering his patent to
Vickers Limited, although the conglomerate did not show interest in the project. Negotiations continued, and Torres reached Admiral
Reginald Bacon, who, on 17 March 1914, wrote from the
Coventry Ordnance Works that "the experience of the Navy has invariably been that any auxiliary craft carried on board ship are of very little real service". A few years later, in 1922, the
Spanish Navy would construct a real airship carrier, the
Dédalo, to be used in the
war against Morocco. In 1916 Torres patented in Spain a new kind of ship, a multihull steel vessel which received the name of "Binave" ("Twin Ship"). He applied for the patent of the Binave in the United Kingdom with the name "Improvements in Ships" in 1917, and it was built by the
Euskalduna company in Bilbao in 1918, with several test departures such as the successful round trip to
Santoña on 28 September. The tests would be resumed in 1919, obtaining the certificate of implementation of the patent on 12 November of that year. The design introduces new features, including two 30 HP
Hispano-Suiza marine engines, and the ability to modify its configuration when sailing, positioning two
rudders at the stern of each
float, and placing the propellers
aft too. As a result of the experience acquired in the tests, to improve stability in 1920 it was considered appropriate to add a lower
keel to each of the floats proposed in the patent, making it similar to modern
catamarans, whose development would become widespread from the 1990s onwards.
Other inventions and miscellaneous activities at the
Hispanic Society of America in New York City. Apart from the aforementioned inventions, Torres patented the "Indicadores coordinados" ("Coordinate Indicator", 1901), a guidance system for vehicles and pedestrians using markers installed on
streetlights throughout an entire city, which he proposed for Madrid and Paris under the name of "Guide Torres", the "Dianemologo" (1907), an apparatus for copying a speech as it is delivery without the need for
shorthand, "Globos fusiformes deformables" ("Deformable Fusiform Balloons", 1914), a
fusiform envelope with a variable section depending on the volume of the hydrogen contained, and "Enclavamientos T.Q." ("Interlocks T.Q.", 1918), a
railway interlock of his own design to protect the movement of trains within a certain area. In the last years of his life, Torres turned his attention to the field of
educational disciplines, to investigate those elements or machines that could help educators in their task. His last patents related to subjects such as typewriters and their improvement (1922–23), the marginal
pagination of books (1926), and, especially, the "Puntero Proyectable" (Projectable Pointer, 1930), and the "Proyector Didáctico" (Didactic Projector, 1930). The Projectable Pointer was based on the
shadow produced on a plate or screen by an opaque body in motion. The presenter had the option to move the pointer on any place on the plate (today a
slide) at operate with an articulated system. The Didactic Projector improved the way slides were placed on glass plates for projection.
Esperantist In the early 1900s, Torres learned the international language
Esperanto, and was an advocate of the language throughout his life. From 1922 to 1926 he participated in the work of the
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the
League of Nations, where such figures as
Albert Einstein,
Marie Curie,
Gilbert Murray and
Henri Bergson, its first president, attended. Torres proposed to the Committee that it study the role of an artistic auxiliary language to facilitate the scientific ones relations between the peoples. Although almost half of the Committee members were in favor of Esperanto, his motion was strongly opposed by President Bergson, receiving a clear notice from French diplomats to put the influence of French culture first, which included the French ambassador in
Bern, who considered Torres a "farouchement espérantiste" ("fierce Esperantist"). In 1925 he participated as the official representative of the
Spanish government in the "Conference on the Use of Esperanto in Pure and Applied Sciences" held in Paris, together with
Vicente Inglada and
Emilio Herrera Linares. That same year, he joined to the Honorary Committee of the (HEA) founded by
Julio Mangada, and continued defending the language in other forums until his death in 1936.
Spanish-American Technological Dictionary In 1910 Torres traveled to
Argentina with the Infanta
Isabel to assist at the International Scientific Congress held in
Buenos Aires, one of the events organized to mark the centenary of the
independence of Argentina. At the congress, he proposed, along with the Argentinean engineer
Santiago Barabino, the constitution of a Spanish-American board of scientific technology, which would eventually become the "Unión Internacional Hispano–Americana de Bibliografía y Terminología Científicas". The first task was the publication of a technological dictionary of the Spanish language to tackle the problems caused by the increasing use of scientific and technological neologisms, as well as the adaptation of words from other languages, confronted with the avalanche of foreign terms. As a result of the work of this board, the
Diccionario Tecnológico Hispanoamericano (Hispanic American Technological Dictionary) began to be published in
fascicles between 1926 and 1930, although it did not see a complete edition until 1983, with a second expanded edition in 1990. == Distinctions ==