Ramón Silvestre Verea García (Pontevedra, 1833 – Buenos Aires, 1899), a Galician journalist and writer based in New York, patents on 10 September 1878 the Verea Direct Multiplier (patent US 207918). The machine performs direct multiplications in a single lever movement using two ten-sided metal prisms with variable-diameter holes that encode the multiplication tables — a mechanism similar to the Jacquard loom. It can operate with numbers of up to nine digits and six in the multiplier. Edmund D. Barbour had patented a similar principle in 1872 (US), making Verea the second patented inventor of direct multiplication; however, his implementation was independent and technically distinct. Verea explicitly documented that he did not invent the machine out of economic need but to demonstrate Spanish inventive capacity against the American; he refused to commercialize it. The original prototype is preserved at IBM's headquarters in White Plains, New York, in the collection founded by Thomas Watson in 1930.