History UsefulNotes / JeronimoDeAyanz

Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1553 - 23 March 1613), remembered as ''El Nuevo Alcides'' ("The New Hercules") and ''El Caballero de las Prodigiosas Fuerzas'' ("The Knight of the Prodigious Strengths"), was a [[RenaissanceMan soldier, engineer, painter, poet, musician, businessman and cosmographer]] of the Spanish Empire. His name shouldn't ring any bells in modern pop culture, which readers will hopefully find downright criminal after learning about Ayanz's career, but the guy himself could be best described as a sort of Spanish, badass version of Creator/LeonardoDaVinci.

Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to UsefulNotes/PhilipII and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in the Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of ClockPunk automatons. Far from being all brawns, however, he turned out to be a natural strongman too, being famously able to bend four horseshoes with a single arm and iron bars with the neck. With those assets, his subsequent military career would be nothing short of outstanding: he deployed in Tunis under UsefulNotes/JohnOfAustria, in Italy under UsefulNotes/AlexanderFarnese and in Flanders under [[UsefulNotes/TheDukeOfAlba Fernando Álvarez de Toledo]], the infamous Duke of Alba, for whom he protagonized an especially notorious assault in Zierkzee where Ayanz [[{{Determinator}} received multiple wounds and yet kept wasting enemy after enemy]] like a videogame character. He returned to Spain to heal, but it wouldn't take much time to return to service, and after a NoodleIncident where he helped frustrate a French assassin's attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz.

In a curious example of OddFriendship of science and religion, Ayanz was friends with the Catholic mystic St. Teresa of Ávila, whom he helped found a monastery in Pamplona. Ayanz's own sister Leonor became a nun there and eventually rose to Teresa's assistant. The place is not very far from the modern Public Univeristy of Navarre, which currently features an elctronic and communications center a named after Ayanz.

Ayanz's feats earned him a lordship of the Order of Calatrava at the comparatively young age of 29, although his services would still be required in the Iberian Peninsula before he could live off that and focus on what he liked most, inventing things and improving the Spanish infrastructure of the time. He spent five years managing the naval base of Cartagena, always necessary against Muslim pirates that attacked the Mediterranean shores in the search of plunder and slaves, and right after, he sprung into action again to gather a force of BigDamnHeroes against UsefulNotes/SirFrancisDrake's English Armada in Coruña, where he fought along with María Pita. Only then, after having tasted almost every important conflict fought by the Spanish Empire at the time, he was appointed administrator of the Spanish mining system, which he worked tirelessly to perfect. Ayanz would die of illness in 1613, after adding a short but successful career as a businessman, but up to that point he had time to spare to invent a cavalcade of impressive and wildly anachronistic machines, which were all buried by King Philip III's lack of interest to develop them.

* Stirred by a mining accident in which he almost died in a tunnel, Ayanz debuted in the elysium of inventors with a steam-powered pump system to drain water and gas out of the mines, later patented in 1606 and successfully tested in Guadalcanal, which made Ayanz one of the first men in history in employ steam power for industrial purposes centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Credit of this innovation is usually given to either Edward Somerset or Thomas Savery, who built identical machines 50 years later. Also, the theoretical frame on which Ayanz's machine was based is no other that Bernouille's principle - a whole century before Daniel Bernouilli was born.
* More famously, Ayanz designed a fully functional, air-pump closed diving suit, which he publicly demonstrated in the Pisuerga river in 1602, keeping a man under the water for an entire hour in front of a King Philip III [[SkewedPriorities who couldn't wait to return to his hunting trips]]. This initial suit seems inspired by similar ideas by Vegetius and Giovanni Borelli, but Ayanz would further perfect it with designs that showcase autonomous snorkels with inner pumps powered by the diver's own arms, advanced diving bells that improved the earlier model of his contemporaneous Giuseppe Bono, and air containers almost two centuries before self-contained air supply equipment was even a thing. He got the approval to develop those things and initiated the tests in Spain and the Indies, but apparently their production turned out too costly and they were abandoned. His diving bell, however, ''might'' have been eventually used by pearl hunters in Isla Margarita, modern Venezuela. Also, in 2016 Spanish divers recreated his suit and successfully in the sameriver.

* ''Series/CuartoMilenio'' put the focus on him a few times when talking about forgotten Spanish geniuses, the first time in 2018.

* He appears in Baltasar Gracián's ''El Criticón''.

Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to UsefulNotes/PhilipII and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in the Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of ClockPunk automatons. Far from being all brawns, however, he turned out to be a natural strongman too, being famously able to bend four horseshoes with a single arm and iron bars with the neck. With those assets, his subsequent military career would be nothing short of outstanding: he deployed in Tunis under UsefulNotes/JohnOfAustria, in Italy under UsefulNotes/AlexanderFarnese and in Flanders under UsefulNotes/FernandoAlvarezDeToledoYPimentel, the infamous Duke of Alba, for whom he protagonized an especially notorious assault in Zierkzee where Ayanz [[{{Determinator}} received multiple wounds and yet kept wasting enemy after enemy]] like a videogame character. He returned to Spain to heal, but it wouldn't take much time to return to service, and after a NoodleIncident where he helped frustrate a French assassin's attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz.

Despite his presence in literature, no depiction of him has survived. By some weird confusion, a portrait actually depicting King Philip III is all over the Internet wrongly identified as Ayanz's portrait, as well as a drawing that originally depicted Michael Servetius. The image to the right is one of Ayanz's own drawings about the principle of air supply underwater.

* More famously, Ayanz designed a fully functional, air-pump closed diving suit, which he publicly demonstrated in the Pisuerga river in 1602, keeping a man under the water for an entire hour in front of a King Philip III [[SkewedPriorities who couldn't wait to return to his whoring and hunting trips]]. This initial suit seems inspired by similar ideas by Vegetius and Giovanni Borelli, but Ayanz would further perfect it with designs that showcase autonomous snorkels with inner pumps powered by the diver's own arms, advanced diving bells that improved the earlier model of his contemporaneous Giuseppe Bono, and air containers almost two centuries before self-contained air supply equipment was even a thing. He got the approval to develop those things and initiated the tests in Spain and the Indies, but apparently their production turned out too costly and they were abandoned. His diving bell, however, ''might'' have been eventually used by pearl hunters in Isla Margarita, modern Venezuela. Also, in 2016 Spanish divers recreated his suit and successfully in the sameriver.

[[quoteright:250:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/jeronimoayanz.jpg]]

Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to UsefulNotes/PhilipII and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in the Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of ClockPunk automatons. Far from being all brawns, however, he turned out to be a natural strongman too, being famously able to bend four horseshoes with a single arm and iron bars with the neck. With those assets, his subsequent military career would be nothing short of outstanding: he deployed in Tunis under UsefulNotes/JohnOfAustria, in Italy under UsefulNotes/AlexanderFarnese and in Flanders under UsefulNotes/FernandoAlvarezDeToledoYPimentel, the infamous Duke of Alba, for whom he protagonized an especially notorious assault in Zierkzee where Ayanz [[{{Determinator}} received multiple wounds and yet kept wasting enemy after enemy]] like a videogame character. He returned to Spain to heal, but it wouldn't take much time to return to service, and after a NoodleIncident where he helped frustrate a French attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz.

Ayanz's feats earned him a lordship of the Order of Calatrava at the comparatively young age of 29, although his services would still be required in the Iberian Peninsula before he could live off that and focus on what he liked most, inventing things and improving the Spanish infrastructure of the time. He spent five years managing the naval base of Cartagena, always necessary against Muslim pirates that attacked the Mediterranean shores in the search of plunder and slaves, and right after, he sprung into action again to gather a force of BigDamnHeroes against UsefulNotes/SirFrancisDrake's English Armada in Coruña, where he might have fought along María Pita. Only then, after having tasted almost every important conflict fought by the Spanish Empire at the time, he was appointed administrator of the Spanish mining system, which he worked tirelessly to perfect. Ayanz would die of illness in 1613, after adding a short but successful career as a businessman, but up to that point he had time to spare to invent a cavalcade of impressive and wildly anachronistic machines.

* More famously, Ayanz designed a fully functional, air-pump closed diving suit, which he publicly demonstrated in the Pisuerga river in 1602, keeping a man under the water for an entire hour in front of a King Philip III [[SkewedPriorities who couldn't wait to return to his hunting trips and whores]]. This initial suit seems inspired by similar ideas by Vegetius and Giovanni Borelli, but Ayanz would further perfect it with designs that showcase autonomous snorkels with inner pumps powered by the diver's own arms, advanced diving bells that improved the earlier model of his contemporaneous Giuseppe Bono, and air containers almost two centuries before self-contained air supply equipment was even a thing. He got the approval to develop those things and initiated the tests in Spain and the Indies, but apparently their production turned out too costly and they were abandoned. His diving bell, however, ''might'' have been eventually used by pearl hunters in Isla Margarita, modern Venezuela.

Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1553 - 23 March 1613), remembered as ''El Nuevo Alcides'' ("The New Hercules") and ''El Caballero de las Prodigiosas Fuerzas'' ("The Knight of Prodigious Strengths"), was a [[RenaissanceMan soldier, engineer, painter, poet, musician, businessman and cosmographer]] of the Spanish Empire. His name shouldn't ring any bells in modern pop culture, which the reader will hopefully find downright criminal once he reads about Ayanz's career, but the guy himself could be best described as a sort of Spanish, badass version of Creator/LeonardoDaVinci.

Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to UsefulNotes/PhilipII and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in the Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of ClockPunk automatons. Far from being all brawns, however, he turned out to be a natural strongman too, being famously able to bend four horseshoes with a single arm and iron bars with the neck. With those assets, his subsequent military career would not be nothing short of outstanding: he deployed in Tunis under John of Austria, in Italy under UsefulNotes/AlexanderFarnese and in Flanders under UsefulNotes/FernandoAlvarezDeToledoYPimentel, the infamous Duke of Alba, for whom he protagonized an especially notorious assault in Zierkzee where Ayanz [[{{Determinator}} received multiple wounds and yet kept wasting enemy after enemy]] like a videogame character. He returned to Spain to heal, but it wouldn't take much time to return to service, and after a NoodleIncident where he helped frustrating a French attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz.

Ayanz's feats earned him a lordship of the Order of Calatrava at the comparatively young age of 29, although his services would still be required in the Iberian Peninsula before he could live off that and focus on what he liked most, inventing things and improving the Spanish infrastructure of the time. He spent five years managing the naval base of Cartagena, always necessary against Muslim pirates that attacked the Mediterrenanean shores in the search of plunder and slaves, and right after, he sprung into action against to gather a force of BigDamnHeroes against UsefulNotes/SirFrancisDrake's English Armada in Coruña, where he might have fought along María Pita. Only then, after having tasted almost every important conflict fought by the Spanish Empire at the time, he was appointed administrator of the Spanish mining system, which he worked tirelessly to perfect. Ayanz would die of illness in 1613, after adding a short but successful career as a businessman, but up to the point he had time to spare to invent a cavalcade of impressive and wildly anachronistic machines.

* Stirred by a mining accident in which he almost died in a mine tunnel, Ayanz debuted in the elysium of inventors with a steam-powered pump system to drain water and gas out of the mines, later patented in 1606 and successfully tested in Guadalcanal, which made Ayanz one of the first men history in employ steam power for industrial purposes centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Credit of this innovation is usually given to either Edward Somerset or Thomas Savery, who build identical machines 50 years later. More importantly, the theoretical basis on which Ayanz's machine was based is no other that Bernouille's principle - a whole century before Daniel Bernouilli was born.
* More famously, Ayanz designed a fully functional, air-pump closed diving suit, which he publicly demonstrated in the Pisuerga river in 1602, keeping a man under the water for an entire hour in front of a King Philip III [[SkewedPriorities who couldn't wait to return to his hunting trips and whores]]. This initial suit seems inspired from similar ideas by Vegetius and Giovanni Borelli, but Ayanz would further perfect it with designs that show autonomous snorkels with inner pumps powered by the diver's own arms, advanced diving bells that improved the earlier model of his contemporaneous Giuseppe Bono, and air containers almost two centuries before self-contained air supply equipment was even a thing. He got the approval to develop those things and initiated the proofs in Spain and the Indies, but apparently their production turned out too costly and were abandoned. His diving bell, however, ''might'' have been eventually used by pearl hunters in Isla Margarita, modern Venezuela.
* He even designed two [[CoolBoat primitive submarines]], a submersible load barge and a smaller bathyscaphe, both of them equipped with rows, gloves and portholes to manipulate things, floating snorkels to renovate the air from the inside via pumps, and even commodities, like an inner water-powered fan to cool down the crew. As those ships would have been able to operate fully unsupported, he even planned to use them to approach ships unseen and blow them up with clockwork explosive charges. Sadly, none of these things ever got out of the drawing board, but their detailed designs exceed anything conceived even centuries later; it would take 15 years for Cornelius Drebbel to build a functional submarine, a crude leather boat that didn't even had renovated air nor any of the capabilities listed, and more than two centuries for David Bushnell to have the same idea of using a submarine to set up timed charges against ships.

Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1553 - 23 March 1613), remembered as ''El Nuevo Alcides'' ("The New Hercules") and ''El Caballero de las Prodigiosas Fuerzas'' ("The Knight of Prodigious Strengths"), was a [[RenaissanceMan soldier, engineer, painter, poet, musician, businessman and cosmographer]] of the Spanish Empire. His name shouldn't ring any bells in modern pop culture, which the reader will hopefully find downright criminal once he reads about Ayanz's career, but the guy himself could be best described as a sort of Spanish, badass version of UsefulNotes/LeonardoDaVinci.

Ayanz was a veritable anomaly, renowned for both his incredible feats in the battlefield and his prodigious inventions, some of which honestly sound like some sort of {{Steampunk}} AlternateHistoryWank: among all the things he designed and built, which go up to 48 patents, there were steam-powered machines, diving suits and attack submarines that outperformed models from centuries later - all by a man that didn't live up to see the end of the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar. Despite his obscurity, he was remembered by several authors of the Spanish Golden Age, chiefly Creator/LopeDeVega, who celebrates him as a charismatic man who was an OneManArmy and a GadgeteerGenius at the same time. Nowadays, at least among those aware of the long list of forgotten Spanish inventors, he's considered a strong candidate for the title of the "Spanish Leonardo", although others prefer the punnier Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a 19th century engineer who pioneered radio control and automated calculation machines.

Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to UsefulNotes/PhilipII and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in the Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of ClockPunk automatons. Far from being all brawns, however, he turned out to be a [[GeniusBruiser natural strongman too]], being famously able to bend four horseshoes with a single arm and iron bars with the neck. With those assets, his subsequent military career would not be nothing short of outstanding: he deployed in Tunis under John of Austria, in Italy under UsefulNotes/AlexanderFarnese and in Flanders under UsefulNotes/FernandoAlvarezDeToledoYPimentel, the infamous Duke of Alba, for whom he protagonized an especially notorious assault in Zierkzee where Ayanz [[{{Determinator}} received multiple wounds and yet kept wasting enemy after enemy]] like a videogame character. He returned to Spain to heal, but it wouldn't take much time to return to service, and after a NoodleIncident where he helped frustrating a French attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz.

Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1553 - 23 March 1613), remembered as ''El Nuevo Alcides'' ("The New Hercules") and ''El Caballero de las Prodigiosas Fuerzas'' ("The Knight of Prodigious Strengths"), was a [[RenaissanceMan soldier, engineer, painter, poet, musician, businessman and cosmographer]] of the Spanish Empire. His name shouldn't ring any bells in modern pop culture, which the reader will hopefully find downright criminal once he reads Ayanz's career, but the guy himself could be best described as a sort of Spanish GeniusBruiser version of UsefulNotes/LeonardoDaVinci.

Ayanz was a veritable anomaly, renowned for both his incredible feats in the battlefield and his prodigious inventions, some of which honestly sound like some sort of {{Steampunk}} AlternateHistoryWank: among all the things he designed and built, which go up to 48 patents, there were steam-powered machines, diving suits and attack submarines that outperformed models from centuries later - all by a man that didn't live up to see the end of the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar. Despite his obscurity, he was remembered by several authors of the Spanish Golden Age, chiefly Creator/LopeDeVega, who celebrates him as a charismatic man who was an OneManArmy and a GadgeteerGenius at the same time. Nowadays, at least among those aware of the long list of forgotten Spanish inventors, he's considered a strong candidate for the title of "The Spanish Leonardo", although others prefer the punnier Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a 19th century engineer who pioneered the radio control and automated calculation machines.

Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to UsefulNotes/PhilipII and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in the Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of ClockPunk automatons. Far from being all brains, however, he also turned out to be a natural strongman, becoming famous to bend four horseshoes with a single arm and iron bars with the neck. With those assets, his subsequent military career would not be nothing short of outstanding: he deployed in Tunis under John of Austria, in Italy under UsefulNotes/AlexanderFarnese and in Flanders under UsefulNotes/FernandoAlvarezDeToledoYPimentel, the infamous Duke of Alba, for whom he protagonized an especially notorious assault in Zierkzee where Ayanz [[{{Determinator}} received multiple wounds and yet kept wasting enemy after enemy]] like a videogame character. He returned to Spain to heal, but it wouldn't take much time to return to service, and after a NoodleIncident where he helped frustrating a French attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz.

* Stirred by a mining accident in which he almost died in a mine tunnel, Ayanz debuted in the elysium of inventors with a steam-powered pump system to drain water and gas out of the mines, later patented in 1606 and successfully tested in Guadalcanal, which made Ayanz one of the first men history in employ steam power for industrial purposes centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Credit of this innovation is usually given to Edward Somerset or Thomas Savery, who build identical machines 50 years later. More importantly, the theoretical basis on which Ayanz's machine was based is no other that Bernouille's principle - a century before Daniel Bernouilli was born.
* More famously, Ayanz designed a fully functional, air-pump closed diving suit, which he publicly demonstrated in the Pisuerga river in 1602, keeping a man under the water for an entire hour in front of a King Philip III [[SkewedPriorities who couldn't wait to return to his hunts and whores]]. This initial suit seems inspired from similar ideas by Vegetius and Giovanni Borelli, but Ayanz would further perfect it with designs that show autonomous snorkels with inner pumps powered by the diver's own arms, advanced diving bells that improved the earlier model of his contemporaneous Giuseppe Bono, and air containers almost two centuries before self-contained air supply equipment was even a thing. He got the approval to develop those things and initiated the proofs in Spain and the Indies, but apparently their production turned out too costly and were abandoned. His diving bell, however, ''might'' have been eventually used by pearl hunters in Isla Margarita, modern Venezuela.
* He even designed two [[CoolBoat primitive submarines]], a submersible load barge and a smaller bathyscaphe, both of them equipped with rows, gloves and portholes to manipulate things, floating snorkels to renovate the air from the inside via pumps - and even commodities, like an inner water-powered fan to cool down the crew. As those ships would have been able to operate fully unsupported, he even planned to use them to approach ships unseen and blow them up with clockwork explosive charges. Sadly, none of these things ever got out of the drawing board, but their detailed designs exceed anything conceived even centuries later; it would take 15 years for Cornelius Drebbel to build a functional submarine, a crude leather boat that didn't even had renovated air nor any of the capabilities listed, and more than ''two centuries'' for David Bushnell to have the same idea of using a submarine to set up timed charges against ships.

Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1553 - 23 March 1613), remembered as el ''Nuevo Alcides'' ("The New Hercules") and ''El Caballero de las Prodigiosas Fuerzas'' ("The Knight of Prodigious Strengths"), was a 16th century soldier, engineer, painter, poet, musician, businessman and cosmographer of the Spanish Empire. His name shouldn't ring any bells in modern pop culture, which the reader will hopefully find downright criminal once he reads Ayanz's career, but the man could be best described as a sort of Spanish GeniusBruiser version of UsefulNotes/LeonardoDaVinci. Ayanz was a veritable Renaissance man, renowned for both his incredible feats in the battlefield and his prodigious inventions, some of which honestly sound like some sort of {{Steampunk}} AlternateHistoryWank: among all the things he designed and built, which go up to 48 patents, there were steam-powered machines, diving suits and attack submarines that outperformed models from centuries later - all by a man that didn't live up to see the end of the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar. Despite his obscurity, he was remembered by several authors of the Spanish Golden Age, chiefly UsefulNotes/LopeDeVega, who celebrates him as a charismatic man who was an OneManArmy and a GadgeeterGenius at the same time.

Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to UsefulNotes/PhilipII and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in the Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of automatons. Far from being all brains, however, he also turned out to be a natural strongman, becoming famous to bend four horseshoes with a single arm and iron bars with the neck. With those assets, his subsequent military career would not be any short of outstanding: he deployed in Tunis under John of Austria, in Italy under UsefulNotes/AlexanderFarnese and in Flanders under UsefulNotes/FernandoAlvarezDeToledoYPimentel, the infamous Duke of Alba, for whom he protagonized an especially notorious assault in Zierkzee where Ayanz received multiple wounds and yet kept wasting enemy after enemy like a videogame character. He returned to Spain to heal, but it wouldn't take much time to return to service, and after a NoodleIncident where he helped frustrating a French attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under UsefulNotes/AlvaroDeBazan.

Ayanz's feats earned him a lordship of the Order of Calatrava at the comparatively young age of 29, although his services would still be required in the Iberian Peninsula before he could live off that and focus on what he liked most, inventing things and improving the Spanish infrastructure of the time. He spent five years managing the naval base of Cartagena, always necessary against Muslim pirates that attacked the Mediterrenanean shores in the search of slaves, and right after, he sprung into action against to gather a force of BigDamnHeroes against UsefulNotes/SirFrancisDrake's English Armada in Coruña. Only then, after having tasted almost every important conflict fought by the Spanish Empire at the time, he was appointed administrator of the Spanish mining system, which he worked to perfect with a . Ayanz would die of illness in 1613, after a short but successful career as a businessman, but up to the point he had time to spare to invent a cavalcade of impressive . Blasco de Garay, Turriano

* Stirred by a mining accident in which he almost died in a mine tunnel, Ayanz debuted in the elysium of inventors with a steam-powered pump system to drain water and gas out of the mines, later patented in 1606 and successfully tested in Guadalcanal, which made Ayanz one of the first men history in employ steam power for industrial purposes centuries before the Industrial Revolution. This innovation is usually given to Thomas Savery, who build an identical apparatus 50 years later.
* More famously, Ayanz designed a fully functional, air-pump closed diving suit, which he publicly demonstrated in the Pisuerga river in 1602 in front of a King Philip III [[SkewedPriorities who couldn't wait to return to his hunts and whores]]. This initial suit seems inspired from similar ideas by Vegetius and Giovanni Borelli, but Ayanz would further perfect it with designs that show autonomous snorkels with inner pumps powered by the diver's own arms, advanced diving bells that improved the earlier model of his contemporaneous Giuseppe Bono, and air containers almost two centuries before self-contained air supply equipment was even a thing. He got approval to use those things and initiated the proofs in Spain and the Indies, but apparently their production turned out too costly and were abandoned.
* He even designed two primitive submarines, a submersible load barge and a smaller bathyscaphe, both of them equipped with rows, gloves and portholes to manipulate things, floating snorkels to renovate the air from the inside via pumps - and even commodities, like an inner watered-powered fan to cool down the crew. As those ships would have been able to operate fully unsupported, he even planned to use them to approach ships unseen and blow them up with clockwork explosive charges. Sadly, none of these things ever got out of the drawing board, but their detailed designs exceeds anything previously conceived by Da Vinci or anybody even centuries later; it would take 15 years for Cornelius Drebbel to build a functional submarine, a crude boat similar to William Bourne's design that didn't even had renovated air nor any of the capabilities listed, and more than ''two centuries'' for David Bushnell to have the same idea of using a submarine to set up timed charges against ships.
* Other inventions were a bilge pump for ships, irrigation systems, a special compass, a desalinator, improved windmills, designs for reservoirs, a system of scales "able to weight the leg of a fly".

* UsefulNotes/LopeDeVega included him in his comedy ''Lo que pasa en una tarde''.