How it began
Josip Belušić was born in 1847 in Županići, a small settlement in the Labin region of Istria, in present-day Croatia. He studied in Vienna and worked as a professor of physics and mathematics in Koper and later as director of a maritime school. Wikipedia states that he came back to Istria, where he built the device. In 1887 he experimented in public with an electric speedometer, and in 1888 he applied to the patent office in Vienna. The patent in Austria-Hungary called it a velocimeter.
How it works
The device used electrical energy. It measured the speed of the vehicle and also recorded the duration of the ride, the time the vehicle stood still, the number of passengers carried, and the times at which passengers got in and out. Because it did more than measure speed, Belušić filed it under the Italian name Controllore automatico per vetture, an automatic controller for carriages.
How it spread
Belušić showed the device at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In the same year the Municipality of Paris announced a public competition in which more than 120 patents were entered. His design won as the most precise and reliable and was accepted in June 1890. Within a year about a hundred of the devices were installed on Parisian carriages.
What lasted
The velocimeter is described as a forerunner of the monitoring devices used today in trucks, buses and taxis, since it combined the functions later split between the speedometer, the tachograph and the taximeter. The patent documentation is preserved in Vienna, and a copy is shown at the Police Museum in Zagreb. Belušić is thought to have died in 1905, and sources say little is known about his later life.
