Josip Belušić

Josip Belušić (Serbo-Croatian: [josip beluʃitɕ]; 12 March 1847 – 8 January 1905) was a Croatian inventor. He was born in the small settlement of Županići, in the region of Labin, Istria, and schooled in Pazin and Koper. Belušić continued his studies in Vienna, later resettling in Trieste before coming back to Istria, where he built his best known invention, the speedometer. After completing his studies, Belušić was employed as a professor of physics and mathematics at the Royal School of Koper. Later, he became director of the Maritime School of Castelnuovo, and was employed as an assistant professor in that institution.

In 1887 Belušić publicly experimented for the first time with his new invention, an electric speedometer. The invention was patented in Austria-Hungary under the name of Velocimeter.

Belušić exhibited his invention at the 1889 Exposition Universell in Paris, renaming it Controllore automatico per vetture. In the same year, the Municipality of Paris announced a public competition, and over 120 patents were registered to compete. His design won as the most precise and reliable and was accepted in June 1890. Within a year, a hundred devices were installed on Parisian carriages. In 1889, the Croatian newspaper Naša sloga predicted that "[Belušić's invention] will spread all over the world, and with it the name of our virtuous Istrian, friend and patriot."

Belušić's invention was also the first monitoring device in history, a forerunner of measuring monitoring devices used today in trucks, buses and taxis. Thus, Belušić is also credited as the father of monitoring and surveillance devices.