Ramón Verea

Ramón Silvestre Verea Aguiar y García was a Galician journalist, engineer and writer, born in Curantes on 11 December 1833 and died in Buenos Aires on 6 February 1899. He is known as the inventor of the Calculadora Alicia, a calculating machine with an internal multiplication table, dated to 1878. Beyond engineering he wrote fiction and polemical prose, including the novels La cruz de Cobblestone and Una mujer con dos maridos, and freethinking essays such as Catecismo librepensador, printed in New York and Managua in 1894, and La religión universal, which collected pieces published in El Progreso in 1886 and 1887. In 1896 he published En defensa de España in Guatemala, a work on Cuba, Venezuela and the idea of America for the Americans. His career therefore joined a mechanical invention with work as a journalist and writer.