Ayanz was a veritable Genius Bruiser, renowned for both his incredible feats in the battlefield and his prodigious inventions, some of which honestly sound like some sort of Steampunk Alternate History Wank: 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 Thirty Years' War. Despite his obscurity, he was remembered by several authors of the Spanish Golden Age, chiefly Lope de Vega, who celebrates him as a charismatic man who was an One-Man Army and a Gadgeteer Genius 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.
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.
Being the second son of a Navarran aristocrat, Ayanz had the chance to serve as a page to Philip II and to study sciences and engineering under the best teachers in El Escorial, including Pedro Juan de Lastanosa and the legendary Gianello della Torre, purported creator of Clock Punk automatons. Far from being all brains, 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 John of Austria, in Italy under Alexander Farnese and in Flanders under Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 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 Noodle Incident where he helped frustrate a French assassin's attempt on Philip's life, he participated in the 1582 Portuguse Crisis campaign under Álvaro de Bazán, Marquis of Santa Cruz.
In a curious example of Odd Friendship 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 electronic and communications center 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 army 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 Big Damn Heroes against Sir Francis Drake'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 even 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 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. In 2016 Spanish divers recreated his suit and successfully dove in the same river.
- 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 water-powered fan to cool down the crew. As those ships would have been able to operate mostly 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 have 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", and an innovative method to purify silver. There is also a primitive air conditioner, and curious machine named ingenio de vaivén created for a kind of calculus that would not be discovered until the 18th century by John Smeaton and Gaspard de Prony.
In fiction
Literature- He appears in Baltasar Gracián's El Criticón.
- Lope de Vega included him in his comedy Lo que pasa en una tarde.
- He's the protagonist of Rafael Romero's 2014 Historical Fiction novel Ayanz, la increíble vida del Leonardo español.
- Luis Torrecilla's 2020 novel El maquinista del mar, about the career of another Spanish inventor of the time, Blasco de Garay, includes a posterior historical scene with a young Ayanz.
- Cuarto Milenio put the focus on him a few times when talking about forgotten Spanish geniuses, the first time in 2018.
