Croatian inventors and innovators are the creators of an entire scope of awesome developments, thoughts and advancements which have obligated whole world! Here’s our choice of the Top 10 Croatian developments which have unequivocally affected different fields of human undertaking!
Necktie (Cravat)
The necktie that spread from Europe traces back to Croatian mercenaries serving in France during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). These mercenaries from the Croatian Military Frontier, wearing their traditional small, knotted neckerchiefs, aroused the interest of the Parisians. Because of the difference between the Croatian word for Croats, Hrvati, and the French word, Croates, the garment gained the name cravat (cravate in French).
Parachute – Faust Vrančić
The Dalmatian polymath and inventor Fausto Veranzio (1551–1617) examined da Vinci’s parachute sketch and kept the square frame but replaced the canopy with a bulging sail-like piece of cloth that he came to realize decelerates a fall more effectively. A now-famous depiction of a parachute that he dubbed Homo Volans (Flying Man), showing a man parachuting from a tower, presumably St Mark’s Campanile in Venice, appeared in his book on mechanics, Machinae Novae (“New Machines”, published in 1615 or 1616), alongside a number of other devices and technical concepts.
Intelligiant (water cannon) – John Mišković
A water cannon is a device that shoots a high-velocity stream of water. Typically, a water cannon can deliver a large volume of water, often over dozens of meters. They are used in firefighting, large vehicle washing, riot control, and mining.
Torpedo – Ivan Lupus
Ivan Lupus was a Commander of the Austrian Frigate “Venus”. In 1860 he designed and manufactured a torpedo, which was later fulfilled by British engineer Robert Whitehead!
Electric light-bulb with a metal filament (tungsten) – Franjo Hanaman
Franjo Hanaman was a Croatian inventor, engineer, and chemist, who gained world recognition for inventing the world’s first applied electric light-bulb with a metal filament (tungsten) with his assistant Alexander Just, independently of his contemporaries. They were granted the Hungarian Patent #34541 on December 13, 1904 in Budapest His invention of tungsten filament was also applied in improving early diodes and triodes.
Mechanical pencil – Slavoljub Penkala
Penkala became renowned for further development of the mechanical pencil (1906) – then called an “automatic pencil” – and the first solid-ink fountain pen (1907). Collaborating with an entrepreneur by the name of Edmund Moster, he started the Penkala-Moster Company and built a pen-and-pencil factory that was one of the biggest in the world at the time. The company, now called TOZ Penkala, still exists today.
Puretic power block – Mario Puratić
While he was working as a tuna and sardine fisherman from San Pedro, California, Puratić started thinking about the difficulty of hauling seine nets. The original power block he designed was essentially a simple winch which used a V-shaped roller coated with hard rubber. It was suspended from a davit, and powered from the warp end of the winch by a looping rope.
Dactyloscopy (fingerprint identification) – Ivan Vučetić
In 1891 Vucetich began the first filing of fingerprints based on ideas of Francis Galton which he expanded significantly. He became the director of the Center for Dactyloscopy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the time, he included the Bertillon system alongside the fingerprint files. In 1892 Vucetich made the first positive identification of a criminal in a case where Francisca Rojas had killed her two children and then cut her throat, trying to put the blame on the outside attacker. A bloody print identified her as the killer.
Zeppelin – David Schwarz
David Schwarz is known for creating an airship with a rigid envelope made entirely of metal. Schwarz died only months before the airship was flown. Some sources have claimed that Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin purchased Schwarz’s airship patent from his widow. He was the father of the opera and operetta soprano Vera Schwarz (1888–1964).
Mp3 Player – Tomislav Uzelac
Uzelac studied at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) under professor Mario Kovač, working on MP3 software decoding. In 1997 he created AMP, and also graduated with an engineer’s degree from FER. Two students from the University of Utah, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev adapted it to work on Windows and called it Winamp.
