Feature

He Steered a Boat Full of People From a Yacht-Club Balcony

By , Tech Cheat Codes Team

Published 6 min read

Photo: Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo in a dark suit and tie, photographed around 1912.
Image: Mundo Gráfico, Nov 27, 1912 (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons; resized and placed on a blurred background
On this page · 3 sections
  1. A tricycle first, then the water
  2. The balcony, the estuary, the eight
  3. References

One hundred twenty-one years ago today, on Nov 7, 1905, Leonardo Torres-Quevedo stood on the terrace of Bilbao's Club Marítimo and steered an electric boat out on the Abra with radio telegraph clicks. The boat was the Vizcaya. Eight people rode it. Nobody on the boat was driving.

Torres-Quevedo was a Spanish engineer who had spent the early 1900s inventing airships and worrying about who would die testing them. His answer was a machine he named the Telekino — from the Greek for distant motion — a radio receiver that could take a short list of orders and turn them into real moves: forward, back, left, right, lights, a flag. He patented the idea in France and Britain in 1903 and showed it to the Paris Academy of Sciences the same year.

A tricycle first, then the water

Before the Abra, he practiced somewhere safer. In Madrid he ran a tricycle from a wireless telegraph key at about the length of a small gym. Then he put a dinghy on the pond at the Casa de Campo and steered it from the bank, out to roughly 250 meters. The clicks were not a single on-off trick. The Telekino could pick among several commands, which is the part later engineers still treat as the start of modern remote control.

Nikola Tesla had shown a radio-steered boat at Madison Square Garden in 1898. Torres-Quevedo's system was built for a longer menu of orders, and for machines he did not want a human inside.

Photo: museum display of the Telekino transmitter, a tall wooden cabinet with dials, coils and a telegraph key. Telekino transmitter on display. Photo: MdeVicente, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The balcony, the estuary, the eight

On that November day in Bilbao, authorities watched from shore while Torres-Quevedo worked the key from the yacht-club terrace. The Vizcaya left the club, crossed into the middle of the estuary, turned, reversed, and came back. Reports from the time put the working range past two kilometers — more than a mile of open water between the hand on the key and the boat that answered it.

A December 1905 write-up in La Energía Eléctrica and later IEEE histories treat the Bilbao runs as the proof that the Telekino was not a parlor trick. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers eventually put a Milestone plaque on the work, crediting Torres-Quevedo with laying down modern wireless remote-control principles.

Photo: museum display of the Telekino receiver, a wooden cabinet with meters, switches and wiring. Telekino receiver — the box aboard that turned radio clicks into engine and steering moves. Photo: MdeVicente, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

He had built the Telekino so airship tests would not kill a crew. On the Abra that November, the crew was the proof: eight people riding a boat that nobody on deck was driving.

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References