Biography
Torres was born on 28 December 1852, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, in Santa Cruz de Iguña, Besaya Valley (Cantabria), Spain. The family resided for the most part in Bilbao, where Leonardo's father worked as a railway engineer, although they also spent long periods in his mother's family home in the Cantabria's mountain region. In Bilbao he studied to enter an advanced high school program and later spent two years in Paris to complete his studies. In 1870, his father was transferred, bringing his family to Madrid. The same year, Torres began his higher studies in the Official School of the Road Engineers' Corps. He temporarily suspended his studies in 1873 to volunteer for the defense of Bilbao, which had been surrounded by Carlist troops during the Third Carlist War. Returning to Madrid, he completed his studies in 1876, fourth in his graduating class.
He began his career with the same train company for which his father had worked, but he immediately set out on a long trip through Europe to get to know the scientific and technical advances of the day firsthand, especially in the incipient area of electricity. Upon returning to Spain, he took up residence in Santander where he financed his own work and began a regimen of study and investigation that he never abandoned. The fruit of these investigations appeared in his first scientific work in 1893.
He married in 1885, and had eight children.
In 1899 he moved to Madrid and became involved in that city's cultural life. From the work he carried out in these years, the Athenæum of Madrid created the Laboratory of Applied Mechanics of which he was named director. The Laboratory dedicated itself to the manufacture of scientific instruments. That same year, he entered the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences in Madrid, of which entity he was president in 1910. Among the works of the Laboratory, the cinematography of Gonzalo Brañas and the X-ray spectrograph of Cabrera and Costa are notable.
In the early 1900s, Torres learned the international language Esperanto, and was an advocate of the language throughout his life.
In 1916 King Alfonso XIII of Spain bestowed the Echegaray Medal upon him; in 1918, he declined the offer of the position of Minister of Development. In 1920, he entered the Royal Spanish Academy, in the seat that had been occupied by Benito Pérez Galdós, and became a member of the department of Mechanics of the Paris Academy of Science. In 1922 the Sorbonne named him an Honorary Doctor and, in 1927, he was named one of the twelve associated members of the Academy.
Torres died in Madrid, in the heat of the Spanish Civil War on 18 December 1936, ten days shy of his eighty-fourth birthday.
Read more about this topic: Leonardo Torres Y Quevedo
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)