Ramón Verea

Ramón Silvestre Verea Garcia ( born December 1, 1833 in Esmoris in San Miguel de Curantes in Pontevedra, † February 6, 1899 in Buenos Aires ) was a Spanish journalist, known as a designer of calculating machines.

Verea was originally a priest and studied at the Seminary of Santiago de Compostela. After six years of study, he decided to become a priest and went to Cuba in 1855. He was there teacher, writer and journalist. When he lived in Colón, he invented a machine for folding of newspapers, whose patent he sold later in New York. In 1865 he went to New York City. He was first a journalist, but retained his interest in technology and was the late 1860s and early 1870s in Havana, where he worked as an agent for imported modern machinery and equipment. In 1875 he was back in New York, where he continued his trade agency and in 1877 director of the newspaper El Cronista was. In 1879 he visited his homeland again. In 1882 he founded a printing press in New York and in 1884 he founded the magazine El Progreso. Dissatisfied with the U.S. intervention in Cuba, he left the country in 1895 and went to Guatemala, where he published several books. In 1897 he went to Buenos Aires, where he also founded a magazine and worked as a journalist.

To show his own words, that the Spaniards were capable of inventions he built a calculating machine in 1878 and applied for a patent (issued 1878). The idea may have come to him as he had to do for his next career changer activity (Gold, Spanish foreign exchange) calculations. It was a multiplication body abacus, the second such machine according to Edward Barbour (1841-1925) in Boston, who in 1872 received a patent on it. In the 19th century there were two successors with machines of this type, the Frenchman Léon Bollée and the Swiss Otto Steiger, who founded one of the first commercially successful series of calculators on this principle.

The prototype of his machine, which he sent to the Patent Office, is in the collection of Thomas J. Watson, IBM. He built a second machine, which he exhibited in 1878 at an inventors' exhibition in Cuba and thus won a prize. He did not build another machine and then turned to other things.