Famous Croatian inventors

Faust Vrančić

1551

Faust was a Croatian[-Venetian polymath and bishop from Šibenik, then part of the Venetian Republic. Veranzio's masterwork, Machinae Novae (Venice 1615 or 1616),contained 49 large pictures depicting 56 different machines, devices, and technical concepts. One of the illustrations in Machinae Novae is a sketch of a parachute dubbed Homo Volans ("The Flying Man").

Marin Getaldić

1568

Marino Ghetaldi was a Ragusan scientist. A mathematician and physicist who studied in Italy, England and Belgium, his b

Ruđer Bošković

1711

The hardest inventions to understand and appreciate are the abstract ones. They may not have practical devices to show but they forever change the way we see the world. This is why you should remember Ruđer Bošković, Dubrovnik-born mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher – the father of modern physics. His famous work Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis/Theory of Natural Philosophy (Vienna, 1758) contains modern theories that were proven and embraced only two centuries later.

Ivan Lupis

1813

Giovanni Luppis (or Ivan Lupis) was born in the city of Rijeka (then Fiume) in 1813. He was an officer of the Austro-Hungarian Navy who headed a commission to develop the first prototypes of the self-propelled torpedo.

Anton Lučić

1855

Anthony Francis Lucas was an American Croatian-born oil explorer. With Pattillo Higgins he organized the drilling of an oil well near Beaumont, Texas, that became known as Spindletop. This led to the widespread exploitation of oil and the start of the petroleum age.

Slavoljub Penkala

1871

Slavoljub Eduard Penkala (20 April 1871 – 5 February 1922) was a Croatian engineer and inventor of Dutch-Polish descent. He became renowned for the development of the mechanical pencil and the first solid-ink fountain pen. 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.

Marcel Kiepach

1894

Marcel was a Croatian inventor. The works and inventions of this child prodigy belong to the areas of electronics, magnetism, acoustics, transmission of sound signals, and transformers. In Berlin on March 16, 1910, as a boy of sixteen, Marcel patented a maritime compass that indicates north regardless of the presence of iron or magnetic forces.

Lidija Colombo

1922

She was a member of the team at the “Ruđer
Bošković Institute ”that constructed the first laser in Croatia in the early 1960s. For that achievement,she was awarded the “Nikola
Tesla ” award.

Mate Rimac

1988

Mate Rimac is a Croatian innovator, entrepreneur, and founder of the Croatian car company Rimac Automobili. Rimac started designing his electric supercar at the age of 20.