ŽIVIC, Valentin Matija (SHIVITZ)

Ž. studied polytechnics in Vienna and participated as a member of the Academic Legion in the 1848 March Revolution. After his graduation in 1850, he was employed as a drafter in Bolzano and Graz, then returned to Skopo where he designed and supervised the construction of buildings, roads, water wells, etc. He also participated in some of the projects of the Trieste-based Righetti company. In 1859 he passed the civil engineers examination at Trieste Building Office, which allowed him to complete some building contracts. In addition, he performed surveying work on the Trieste-Ajdovščina railway, he was the asset valuer in the construction of the Rijeka-Zagreb railway and insurance loss-adjuster following the 1881 fire in a Split theatre and a fire on Corfu.
In 1873 he established the company Shivitz & Comp. which traded in technical products and materials, as well as designed and constructed plants, mills, waterworks etc. The major accomplishment of the company was the construction of a water supply at Cetinje (Montenegro) between 1890-91. Ž. was also an inventor who filed eleven patents: for an open-front fireplace stove for burning coke (1868), a water turbine able to adapt to various quantities of water (1870), an iron stove (1871), a pump for wine with rubber hose (1878), a coke crushing machine (1888), a sulphur sprinkler (1892), a mouthpeace for a back-pack sprayer (1892), a hand sprayer against peronospora (1892), an improved mouthpiece for the back-pack sprayer (1895, commercially, his most successful invention), a plough for inaccessible terrains (1903) and low-level lavatory cistern valve (1906).
In 1898, he retired at the age of 70 and left the company to his partner Schoeffmann. Occasionally he was still active, in particular as a consultant and in the public life of his fellow countrymen in Trieste. Aged about 90, he appeared in public again with the invention of a flying machine. He became fan of aviation in the 1860s when he worked in Lokavec near Ajdovščina where the blacksmith family of Bavčar (unsuccessfully) tested the first known aircraft in the Slovenian territory. Ž. started to construct models and developed a helicopter-like flying machine for vertical liftoff and landing, that would also hover. When in 1893 the Czech pioneer Jiri Wellner published a concept for a similar machine in an Austrian engineering gazette, Ž. considered it a realisation of his own idea. Wellner soon abandoned the idea but Ž. became enthusiastic about it, improving and upgrading the design until his death.
The flying machine that he called the »aeropter« was based on the lifting power generated by two paddle wheels on a horizontal axis spinning against each other; during the upward movement the paddles would shut and during the downward movement they would open and thus compress the air below. In 1910 a joint-stock company for the development and construction of Ž's helicopters was established. After the unsuccessful test flight with a larger model and the rejection of the patent by the Vienna office, the shareholders' support rapidly dwindled. Ž. tried to continue the work alone, but old age and WWI stopped him.