Agustín de Betancourt was born in 1758 in Puerto de la Cruz in the Orotava Valley of Tenerife. He remained on the island until he arrived in Madrid at the age of twenty to train at the Royal Studies of San Isidro, where he shone in mathematics and physics, and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where he acquired great skill in drawing.
He completed his training at the Ponts et Chaussées school in Paris with great teachers such as Perronet, Prony and Monge, from whom he learned the French teaching model that he later transferred to Spain. Before, together with the team of Spanish pensioners in France, which he directed, he formed a collection of plans, models and models that, once in Madrid, constituted the Royal Machinery Cabinet, the seed of the School of Civil and Canal Engineers. which he founded in 1802.
In 1799, he had promoted the creation of the profession of Road and Canal Engineers and the Inspection of Roads and Canals, which he himself transformed in 1803 into the Corps of Road and Canal Engineers.
Throughout his life there were many contributions to technology, with his own inventions or improvements by others: the double-acting steam engine, the optical telegraph, the diving piston lock and the hot-air balloon, among others. . He is also the author of documents of extraordinary value, such as the memoirs on the Almadén mines, the report on the Imperial Canal and, above all, the Essay on the Composition of Machines, which is considered the first world treatise on kinematics.
In 1808, as a consequence of the uncertain political situation in Spain, he entered the service of Tsar Alexander I and soon founded the Institute of Communication Routes. The Russian stage is the one of plenitude as an engineer, leaving us with works such as the Moscow Picadero, the Nizhny Novgorod fair, several bridges, the Kazan cannon factory and the Krondstadt dredger, as well as valuable contributions to the St. Isaac's Cathedral. in Saint Petersburg.
Since July 14, 1824 he rests in the Saint Petersburg cemetery, together with his daughter Carolina and near the great mathematician Leonhard Euler.
The stamp commemorates the 200th anniversary of the death of this great engineer of the Enlightenment.
