John Mišković

Some people are simply genetically destined to be inventors and change the world with their inventions. One of them is John Arthur Mišković, whose father Petar Mišković was also a world-renowned inventor.

John was born on March 7, 1918 in Alaska, but there is no doubt that he is a Croat, and not an American of Croatian origin, considering the fact that his parents, Petar and Stana, were born and raised in Croatia and that in their house spoke Croatian. Also, John remained connected to his homeland throughout his life, which will be seen in his professional work.

John Miskovic was a miner in a gold mine in Alaska and an inventor who applied for more than 300 patents during his career, many of which are closely related to the facilitation of the jobs he did while working as a miner.

His family, headed by his father Petar (who invented the steam washing machine and improved the steam bath) had a family mine where they employed and provided their employees with a very good wage for the time (they were paid $7 a day, which is almost double a daily wage of an average of $4 which was common for a mining job). They hired without special racial or other conditions, the only condition was that they work hard and diligently for the company.

John and his brothers helped their father and employees in the Mišković family’s gold mine since childhood. Through the years of working and growing up with his visionary father, John acquired numerous mining skills, he learned to repair various machines, he learned to weld, manage resources efficiently, but most importantly, he acquired quality work habits and learned how to relate to work and to to their employees.

He earned a lot by working in a gold mine and began his work with inventions, although he was self-taught and did not have a university degree, but for himself, due to his great experience in working with people, he often said that he graduated people. As an inventor, he was a supporter of the introduction of hydraulics in mining. He thus perfected a hydraulic elevator that greatly facilitated the unloading of cargo, and he discovered his most famous invention quite by accident.

His most famous invention is called “Intelligiant”. It is a water cannon that is still used today in various applications around the world. The smart and innovative design of the cannon enables various applications, so thanks to the invention of this Croat, the development of hydraulic gold mining was accelerated, it is also used in firefighting as an effective means of extinguishing fires, but it also has over 150 other applications, from riot control to tank cleaning or excavation.

John Mišković himself described the path to the discovery of this widely accepted invention as follows: “As a young man in Flat, I stood for 10 hours holding a water hose, in the rain and cold, fighting mosquitoes, thinking that there must be a better way.” Indeed, he found a better way.

This invention was initially intended for miners, but it gained the widest application and the greatest popularity among firefighters. Unlike the old water hoses, the Intelligiant could throw out just under 60,000 liters of water per minute, even 15 times more than previous hoses. Due to practicality and improved efficiency, this technology began to be used on fire engines around the world, and Intelligiant was among the first to use it on fire engines in New York and San Francisco.

The interesting thing about John Mišković is that on one occasion he wanted to donate huge quantities of tungsten that was unnecessary to him, but important to them, to the Zagreb light bulb factory (TEŽ). Tungsten was key in the production of light bulbs with a tungsten filament (also invented by a Croat, Franjo Hanaman), and Mišković wanted to help his homeland in this way.

He sent Đuro Mišković to Zagreb to present the idea to the factory management. The only requirement for the factory was that every light bulb made with its tungsten should be written John Mišković, which the factory refused, probably because Yugoslavia at the time avoided any connection with Croatian emigration, and thus they lost significant amounts of free tungsten.