2023-09-20 08:06:02
The construction of the S-80 submarines, or Isaac Peral class, is the star industrial project of the Navy. And it is already warming up after some delay. According to the Ministry of Defense, Navantia will deliver the first unit of the series at the end of 2023 and will complete its task five years later. Barely five years for Spain to climb several steps and be at the forefront when it comes to this type of ships. Although today I am not here to tell you its characteristics, exposed a thousand times, or the evolution of the project. This Tuesday we will focus on the names that, as agreed in 2012, these monsters of the seas will wear on their hulls. Each one, a praise to a national inventor.
S-81 Isaac Peral
The first name is also the most popular: Isaac Peral. There is little to say about this character that is not already known. Born in Cartagena in 1851, he invented the first submarine with names and surnames capable of moving underwater using electrical energy. «It must be said clearly that it is the first ship that sailed in immersion. Before that there was nothing, because what is usually given as a previous example of a submarine, the confederate HL Hunle was a monitor, which is a type of ship that is always afloat,” Javier Sanmateo explained to César Cervera almost a decade ago. Isaac Peral, the inventor’s great-grandson. It was a revolution in terms of propulsion and elements such as the periscope and the air regeneration system.
It wasn’t a coincidence. Peral had acquired enviable technical training in centers such as the popular San Fernando Astronomical Observatory. Military since his youth, his history was always linked to the Navy. That cocktail of knowledge allowed him to put his idea into practice and gain popularity in that nineteenth-century Spain full of inventors. And rightly so, since his prototype undertook a feat such as sailing 9 kilometers underwater and landing a shot at a target located 300 meters away. Unfortunately, he went from heaven to media hell. Disowned after he did not receive approval from the Navy, he switched to civilian enterprise with the Manzanares Thermoelectric Company, in Ciudad Real.
S-82 Narciso Monturiol
Narciso Monturiol and Estarriol, a name more written outside of history, was born in Figueras (Gerona) in 1819. Narrated by Antoni Roca Rosell, professor of the history of science and technology, who came from a family of artisans, but who did not follow his path . First he went through a career in medicine, which he abandoned, and then he directed his life towards law. Although what really attracted him was engineering and technology. Our protagonist traveled a lot, but it was in Barcelona where he founded socialist and republican magazines such as ‘La Fraternidad’ or ‘La madre de familia’. His thirties brought with him a passion for politics, which is why in 1848 he created the Federal Republican Party.
His life was a carousel. He went into exile and returned to Spain; He participated in the invention of all kinds of gadgets such as a folder printing machine and a cigarette making machine; both, in the mid-fifties. That’s what he was doing when he was forced to move to Cadaqués for political reasons. There, while he survived by painting portraits in the street, he realized a difficulty that he wanted to solve. “He saw that coral fishermen made great profits from their extraction, which compensated for the great risk of each dive,” explains Roca in his article about this character for the Royal Academy of History. His solution was to think of an underwater navigation system, a kind of submersible, that would alleviate the difficulties of these operators.
Narciso Monturiol ABC
Monturiol, already a defender of the fact that whoever mastered this technology would take control of the seven seas, forged the ‘Submarine Navigation Project. He ‘Ictíneo‘or fish-boat’. The idea was received with open arms: in a flash 75,000 reales were raised and a prototype was built that was stranded in the port of Barcelona in 1859. After countless tests, the ‘Ictíneo’ was presented to the public on December 23. February of that same year; It was seven meters long – long – and operated, logically, by human traction. He immediately jumped into the media and earned the admiration of society; to such an extent that General O’Donnell, head of the Government, witnessed the first rehearsals.
It didn’t help at all. The authorities did not see the invention as viable and declined its production through a report from the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences. But Monturiol was not willing to give up and designed a new and improved submersible, the ‘Ictíneo II’, larger and faster than his first offspring; and he also did it through popular subscription, the ‘crowdfunding’ of the time. Once again, fortune eluded him. His company went bankrupt and our protagonist turned and dedicated his life to his other great passion: politics. During his last stage in this world he was a deputy for Manresa in the Cortes of the First Republic for the Federal Party. And so on, until his death in 1885.
S-83 Cosme García
The submarine S-83 will bear the name Cosme Garciaa character as peculiar as he is isolated who has been studied in depth by the academic Agustín Ramón Rodríguez González. In ‘Cosme García, a forgotten genius’, the historian maintains that our protagonist was born in La Rioja in 1818 and that little is known about his childhood beyond the fact that he joined the Militia battalion as a cornet. National of his hometown. Little more. It was already during his adulthood when he was bitten by the invention bug and patented his first three devices: a breech-loading rifle, a portable printing press and a machine for dating letters. The last one went well; in fact, it was used by the Postal Service for years.
Good old Cosme was walking around Barcelona in the mid-fifties when it occurred to him that it was necessary to devise a ship that could navigate the bottom of the waters. «Its first experimental prototype was built at the Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima in Barcelona, and was little more than a closed metal boat propelled by articulated oars from the inside, barely three meters long and half as wide and high, tested with medium success in the waters of the port of Barcelona around 1858,” explains Rodríguez in one of his essays about this character. With the accumulated experience, the inventor devised a new prototype: the ‘Garcibuzo‘, six meters long by two meters wide.
In the tests, the mill was submerged for three-quarters of an hour, but not even that helped the ‘Garcibuzo’ to gain the trust of the Spanish authorities. Among many other things, due to the irruption of ‘Ictíneo’. García then tried to sell his submersible to France, but was also rejected. In the end, he had no choice but to turn the page and dedicate himself to other tasks. «He still patented two more new breech-loading rifles, the second of which was patented on June 1, 1863, and admitted after severe tests by the Army; About five hundred weapons were built from it in the Oviedo factory,” reveals the expert. But, when the technical specifications changed, he lost all his money. This pioneer died in 1874, ruined, forgotten and in complete obscurantism.
S-84 Mateo García de los Reyes
Mateo García de los Reyes, the last name of the series, leads us to a character who is both pioneering and controversial. The majority of historians – among them, Agustín Ramón Rodríguez himself – maintain that he was the creator of our country’s submarine weapon. Meanwhile, many others maintain that this honor rests on the shoulders of Admiral Augusto Miranda Godoy. Beyond controversies, what is clear is that this compatriot born in Spanish Uruguay was linked to the sea since he was baptized in 1872 by the same chaplain of the frigate on which his father was stationed. His thing, in the end, was a family thing, and no one was surprised that, as a boy, he joined the Navy as a midshipman.
And from there, to glory. García de los Reyes went through a thousand and one destinations and achieved as many promotions. Although his seniority was not highly appreciated in his body. An example is that he spent no less than fifteen years waiting to be promoted to lieutenant captain. Researcher José María Madueño Galán maintains that the officer even considered the idea of leaving the Navy; His civil profession, an electrical engineer, earned him a much higher income in return. The multiple medals and honors he received did not seem like an incentive. However, the situation changed on November 17, 1915, when Don Alfonso XIII signed his name on the famous ‘Miranda Law’, which marked the birth of the Submarine Weapon in these parts.
Mateo García de los Reyes Spanish Navy
García de los Reyes was chosen to lead this new Weapon. Its objective was, as stated in the ‘Miranda Law’, “to specialize in submarines, and study its construction methods and see how this new weapon could be of interest to Spain, proposing the measures to be adopted in view.” of the needs of the national industry. And boy did it go well. To begin with, he traveled in 1915 to Quince, in the United States, to supervise the construction of the first operational reddish submersible, and in 1916 he did the same, traveling to Italy, where three other ships had been ordered. A year later he was appointed keel commander of the first Italian-made ship.
From then on, his life was linked to submersibles, whether as commander of the Cartagena Naval Submarine Base, whether as director of the Submarine School. And that, to name just two of the many positions he held for twelve years. Already in 1928 Alfonso XIII gave him the Navy portfolio in the Government chaired by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. That was his downfall. In 1936, when the Civil War broke out, the Republican militiamen sought him out, eager for revenge for his collaboration with the ‘dictablanda’. García de los Reyes was imprisoned and, back in November 1936, shot in Paracuellos. This is how Madueño explains it in a biographical dossier about the character for the Royal Academy of History:
«They put him on a truck, along with other soldiers, civilians and religious people, and he was taken to the Paracuellos del Jarama camp. When the prisoners’ trucks arrived at the intersection of the highway with the San José stream, they stopped next to the group of pine trees, they took García de los Reyes and the other detainees down, in groups of between ten and twenty-five, and, always tied, they were led away. He led them on foot about 200 meters in the direction of the San Miguel hill, next to the edge of the graves, shooting them by pickets of thirty or forty militiamen, then they threw them into them, some alive, and the gravediggers forcibly recruited in the town “They covered them with dirt.”
#forgotten #military #geniuses #give #Navys #S80 #submarines