Ramón Verea

In 1878 Ramón Silvestre Verea García (1833-1899), a Spaniard living in New York, patented a direct-multiplying machine, which proved to be the second patented, but first manufactured machine of this type.

Ramón Verea is a very interesting person. Born in San Miguel, Spain, he enrolled the University of Santiago de Compostela, but didn't achieve good academic results and only 20 years old decided to leave his study and to begin his real life adventure. In 1854 he shipped to Cuba, where he worked as a teacher, wrote two novels and writes as a journalist for a newspaper.

In 1865 Verea moved to New York, where he worked in a biweekly Spanish-language newspaper. Hearing the complains of his spanish friends and insinuations of his american friends, that the Spanish have fallen behind in the historical process of scientific and technical progress, that the Spanish had no capacity to adapt, that his time had passed, he decided to prove the opposite. Later on Verea asserted that he did not make the machine to sell the patent or to put it to use, but simply to show that it could be done and that a Spaniard could invent as well as an American. There is certainly another reason for Verea's invention—in New York Verea also traded Spanish gold and banknotes and that got him interested in calculation.

On September 10th, 1878, Verea received a U.S. patent No 207918 for his machine. It seems, he manufactured also two prototypes, one of them sent together with the patent application to the US Patent Office, and second, which the same year (1878) was exposed and won a medal of the World Inventions Exhibition in Matanzas, Cuba. The newspaper Scientific American included an article about it. But then the sands closed over it. Verea never tried to market it. He just walked away and never invented anything else. As he said: "I just moved the desire to contribute something to the advancement of science and a little self-esteem. I am a journalist and not a scientist and also what I wanted to show ... is already proven."

The prototype of the Verea's machine, sent to to the Patent Office

The prototype of Verea's machine, which was sent by the inventor to the US Patent Office, together with the application in July, 1878, was kept in the tanks of the headquarters of IBM in White Plains (New York) to be part of the collection begun in 1930 by the founder of IBM—Thomas Watson.

After a time Verea moved to Guatemala, exiled for his strong opposition to U.S. colonial policy, and then to Buenos Aires, Argentina. In that city he founded the journal El Progreso, and continued to publish and act as a journalist. He died alone and poor in the capital of Argentina in 1899.

One of the patent drawings of the Verea's machine

Verea's calculator was a made of iron and steel machine about 22 kilograms, 14 inches long, 12 wide and 8 high. It was able to add, multiply and divide numbers of nine figures, allowing up to six numbers in the multiplier and fifteen in the product. The multiplication solved through the direct method, based on a mechanism patented by Edmund D. Barbour (machine of Barbour) in 1872. The basis of his machine was a ten-sided metal cylinder. Each side had a column of holes with ten different diameters. Verea saw how to do the whole multiplication in one stroke of a lever. The device could solve 698,543,721 x 807,689 in twenty seconds, an amazing speed for the time.