2016Croatian Inventions - First Day Cover

Penkala

Eduard Penkala was born in a small town Liptovský sv. Mikuláš (Republic of Slovakia) on 20 April 1871. Still as a young boy he showed talents in technics. He finished elementary school in his native town and secondary education (Gymnasium) in Bielitz, where he passed his final secondary school exam on 28. September 1892. He arrived to Zagreb in 1902, and registered his first invention in 1905. It was a rotating toothbrush. Next year, on 24 January 1906, he registered at the Patent Office an important invention. It was the Automatic mechanical pencil, entered in the registry in Budapest under number 36946 and it meant a real revolution in the development of stationery.

Until Penkala's invention, black lead pencils were either made of wood (which means that they had to be sharpened) or were mechanical with very complicated way of exchanging and insertion of the black lead refill. The automatic pencil by engineer Penkala did not need sharpening and its thin black lead refill (graphite) was coming out from the pencil body when pressed against paper as it was used up. Today, when an average person cannot imagine life without PC and electronic mail, the invention by Penkala may not seem revolutionary, but more than hundred years ago it indeed changed the world of stationery. Mechanical pencil became an indispensable object of use to anyone who knew how to write. Not even full seven months elapsed after patenting of the automatic pencil by Slavoljub Penkala before its production was initiated. Automatic pencil became a real hit in the European and world market and its success brought excellent business results to the company Edmund Moster & Co.

Writing with such mechanical pencil (named penkala) was a real pleasure. While the black lead refill was being used up, the rest of the refill was automatically coming out from the body of the pencil. Penkala's automatic pencils were produced in almost any colour as well as the refills they contained. The offers to buy the patent for automatic pencil were coming from all parts of the world, even from Japan. However, engineer Penkala did not want to sell his patent. His pencils were produced only in the factory Edmund Moster & CO.

Engineer Penkala died on 5 February 1922 at the peak of his creative power and in the most fruitful years of his life. We shall never find out how many of his ideas remained unrealised.

Miroslav Tišler

Torpedo

When in 1860 as the commander of the frigate Bellona, Giovanni Biagio Luppis (born in Rijeka) was encharged with controlling littoral area and Dalmatian coast and thus had to spend a couple of winter months on board of a ship, he had the chance to think about new weapon which would enable him to perform this task from the shore, in more comfortable conditions than from the board of a ship. Luppis thus designs a small ship filled with explosive with the aim to launch it from the coast and target the enemy, guided and kept on course by means of a kind of leads. With full confidence in his weapon, called “the guardian of the coast” (salvacoste), he addressed the Ministry of War in Vienna; however, because of some evident deficiencies he did not get support for the project. Therefore, with the support of his friend Giovanni Ciotta, also former officer, and a respectable politician and later for many years a mayor of Rijeka, in August 1864 Captain Luppis signed a contract with the English engineer Robert Whitehead and started to work together with him at the invention of a new submarine weapon.

Whitehead immediately realised that the approach of Luppis was old-fashioned and that the weapon had to be „transformed into a fish” and immerged into the water. Therefore, with a completely changed concept, he started to construct a new weapon – torpedo – which already before Christmas, on 21 December 1866 was presented in Rijeka to a special Committee of the Navy Department of the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of War.

Torpedo has not yet been sufficiently developed at that time, but soon it was improved and became efficient. Already in the seventies of the 19th century first deliveries were made from the torpedo factory “Whitehead”, which substantially contributed to the reputation of Rijeka and our engineers.

At the beginning of the 20th century to the torpedo a gyroscope for keeping it on course was added, which made it much more reliable. The factory in Rijeka reached its peak at the time of World War II, when it produced several thousand torpedoes. After the war the production slowly declined and fully ceased in the middle of 60-ties of the previous century. This was the end of the hundred year old tradition of production of the one of technologically best developed weapons of the time.

Ervin Dubrović