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The Most Famous

INVENTORS from Spain

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This page contains a list of the greatest Spanish Inventors. The pantheon dataset contains 354 Inventors, 4 of which were born in Spain. This makes Spain the birth place of the 16th most number of Inventors behind Croatia and Czechia.

Top 4

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Spanish Inventors of all time. This list of famous Spanish Inventors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Abbas ibn Firnas

1. Abbas ibn Firnas (810 - 887)

With an HPI of 69.63, Abbas ibn Firnas is the most famous Spanish Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 42 different languages on wikipedia.

Abu al-Qasim Abbas ibn Firnas ibn Wirdas al-Takurini (Arabic: أبو القاسم عباس بن فرناس بن ورداس التاكرني; c. 809/810 – 887 A.D.), also known as Abbas ibn Firnas (Arabic: عباس ابن فرناس) was an Andalusi polymath: an inventor, astronomer, physician, chemist, engineer, Andalusi musician, and Arabic-language poet. He was reported to have experimented with unpowered flight.Ibn Firnas made various contributions in the field of astronomy and engineering. He constructed a device which indicated the motion of the planets and stars in the Universe. In addition, ibn Firnas came up with a procedure to manufacture colourless glass and made magnifying lenses for reading, which were known as reading stones.

Photo of Juan de la Cierva, 1st Count of la Cierva

2. Juan de la Cierva, 1st Count of la Cierva (1895 - 1936)

With an HPI of 55.58, Juan de la Cierva, 1st Count of la Cierva is the 2nd most famous Spanish Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 27 different languages.

Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu, 1st Count of la Cierva ([ˈxwan de la ˈθjeɾβaj koðoɾˈni.u]; 21 September 1895 – 9 December 1936), was a Spanish civil engineer, pilot and a self-taught aeronautical engineer. His most famous accomplishment was the invention in 1920 of a rotorcraft called Autogiro, a single-rotor type of aircraft that came to be called autogyro in the English language. In 1923, after four years of experimentation, De la Cierva developed the articulated rotor, which resulted in the world's first successful flight of a stable rotary-wing aircraft, with his C.4 prototype.

Photo of Narcís Monturiol

3. Narcís Monturiol (1819 - 1885)

With an HPI of 54.68, Narcís Monturiol is the 3rd most famous Spanish Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Narcís Monturiol i Estarriol (Catalan pronunciation: [nəɾˈsiz muntuɾiˈɔl i əstəriˈɔl]; Narciso Monturiol Estarriol, in Spanish, 28 September 1819 – 6 September 1885) was a Spanish inventor, artist and engineer born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. He was the inventor of the first air-independent and combustion-engine-driven submarine.

Photo of Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

4. Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852 - 1936)

With an HPI of 51.13, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo is the 4th most famous Spanish Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Leonardo Torres Quevedo (Spanish: [leoˈnaɾðo ˈtores keˈβeðo]; 28 December 1852 – 18 December 1936) was a Spanish civil engineer, mathematician, and inventor of the late 19th century and early 20th century. A member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1920, he was also a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences, among other institutions. Torres was a prolific and versatile innovator in various fields of engineering, including mechanics, aeronautics and automatics. One of his greatest achievements was El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player) of 1912, an electromagnetic device capable of playing a limited form of chess 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.His first major project was the patent for a new cable car system in 1887 to transport people safely, an area that culminated in 1916 with the Whirlpool Aero Car located in Niagara Falls, that carries 35 standing passengers over a one-kilometre trip. In between, he published Sur les machines algébriques (1895) and Machines à calculer (1901), technical works that gave him a notorious reputation in France, carrying out the construction of several analog machines for the resolution of algebraic equations.From 1902 to 1911, Torres made significant aeronautical contributions, most notably a mooring post with a superior pivoting platform to be able to moor a dirigible outdoors, and the Astra-Torres airship, a trilobed cross section structure that was widely used by the Allied Powers during World War I. He was also a key figure in the development of radio control in 1901 with the Telekine, which he created modern wireless remote-control operation principles.Torres' pioneering advances included the designs for a special-purpose electromechanical calculator 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 an early form of floating point values and automata with discernment capacity. He successfully demonstrated the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine by producing a typewriter-controlled calculating machine in 1920.He continued conceiving original designs until his retirement in 1930, especially in naval engineering, such as the Camp-Vessel (a dirigible-carrying boat), and the Binave (a multihull steel ship). In addition to his inventing work, Torres also stood out in the field of letters, and was a noted speaker and supporter of Esperanto.

Pantheon has 4 people classified as inventors born between 810 and 1895. Of these 4, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased inventors include Abbas ibn Firnas, Juan de la Cierva, 1st Count of la Cierva, and Narcís Monturiol.

Deceased Inventors

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Which Inventors were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 3 most globally memorable Inventors since 1700.