page_title: Leonardo Torres y Quevedo
section_title: Aerostatics
hierarchical_section_title: Leonardo Torres y Quevedo / Work / Aerostatics
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: "L'Astra-Torres" construit en Tissus HUTCHINSON / qui accomplit de nombreux raids au cours des manoeuvres de l'Est 1911 / Espose a la 3e Exposition de Locomotion Aerienne 1911 / Edition du PNEU HUTCHINSON
context_page_description: Leonardo Torres y Quevedo was a Spanish civil engineer and mathematician of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his Telekine, Torres-Quevedo created wireless remote-control operation principles.
context_section_description: In 1902, Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented to the Science Academies of Madrid and Paris the project of a new type of dirigible that would solve the serious problem of suspending the gondola by including an internal frame of flexible cables that would give the airship rigidity by way of interior pressure.
  In 1905, with the help of Alfredo Kindelán, Torres directed the construction of the first Spanish dirigible in the Army Military Aerostatics Service, created in 1896 and located in Guadalajara. It was completed successfully, and the new airship, the España, made numerous test and exhibition flights. As a result, a collaboration began between Torres and the French company Astra, which managed to buy the patent with a cession of rights extended to all countries except Spain, in order to make possible the construction of the dirigible in its country. So, in 1911, the construction of dirigibles known as the Astra-Torres airships was begun. Some were acquired by the French and British armies at the beginning of 1913, and were used during the First World War for diverse tasks, principally naval protection and inspection.
  In 1918, Torres designed, in collaboration with the engineer Emilio Herrera Linares, a transatlantic dirigible, which was named Hispania, aiming to claim the honor of the first transatlantic flight for Spain. Owing to financial problems, the project was delayed and it was the Britons John Alcock and Arthur Brown who crossed the Atlantic without stop from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vickers Vimy twin-engine plane, in sixteen hours and twelve minutes.
caption: Airship Astra-Torres built in 1912
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