DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT
Agustín de Betancourt Digital Project
The Agustín de Betancourt Digital Project is a project of the Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia that has been promoted by the Centro de Estudios Históricos de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo (CEHOPU), CEDEX, Ministerio de Formento, and the Fundación Juanelo Turriano, who are, as well, effective collaborators of the Project.
The Project’s aim is the recuperation, digitalization and publication on the Internet of the works of the brilliant Canarian engineer and inventor: memoirs, reports, publications, drawings, plans, replicas of models of machines and buildings conceived by him, personal letters… The project has the pretension of being the world reference site on Agustín de Betancourt.
The recuperation of Betancourt’s works means to follow his vital itinerary; this in practice implies digitalizing in different institutions —and in some cases, private collections— of Tenerife, Madrid, Paris, London and Saint Petersburg, mainly. The localization of his works, the request for permissions, striking agreements, the trips with the technical team, the adaptation to the working conditions in each place and institution, solving of technical or strategic problems are some of the challenges of this project.
The presentation on the Internet of this work, in which there will be versions in Spanish, in English and in Russian, will have a complete digital library as the nucleus that will gather together the manuscript work of Agustín de Betancourt –with a special section for his correspondence— his memoirs and reports, the different editions of his published books, graphic work extracted from his different works —specially of the design of machines invented or used by him—, as well as reproductions of plans, models –that will be shown in a special section— and images of the engineering works done by Betancourt and his collaborators: bridges, canals, buildings, urban development plans, etc.
The page offers, as well, a contextualized approximation to the life and work of the Canarian engineer displayed in different sections.
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On one hand, we have the biographical information and the historical and scientific context of our personage. The biography section of Agustín de Betancourt y Molina sketches the different stages of the life of the brilliant Canarian engineer. From his first twenty—one years in Tenerife (up to 1778), his formative years in Madrid, his stay as a scholarship holder in Paris —city where he would return several occasions—, his very badly known stay in England, his Spanish period and his definitive settling in Russia (1808—1824). The historical context tells about the political, the cultural and the scientific—technological background of the period: Canaries in the second half of the 18th century, the Enlightened Spain of Carlos III and its decline with Carlos IV and Godoy, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the England of the Industrial Revolution, Russia in the first quarter of the 19th century.
On the other hand, there is a section dedicated toMachines and Inventions, where there is a compilation of models of European machines of the end of the 18th century, collected for the Real Gabinete de Máquinas, described by Betancourt and his collaborators. And more precisely, those machines and devices that can be considered invented by Agustín de Betancourt himself. There is also a section dedicated to the collaborators and legacy of the engineer from Tenerife. Referring to the first group it will be centred on the people directly related to Betancourt’s work, like Bartolomé Sureda, Juan López de Peñalver, Rafael Bauzá, José María de Lanz or Abraham Louis Breguet, and, with respect to the legacy the attention is centred on his institutional works, the Schools of Roads, Canals and Docks in Spain and in Russia, and his theoretical-practical works on machines.
Finally, there is a section called Reference materials which includes not only the data of the most important works upon the Canarian engineer: books, articles and webpages, but also the references in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. The section is completed with a section dedicated to works of special interest on the era or on the history of engineering or technology.
