Galileo Ferraris - electrical engineer

Pioneer of alternating current (AC) systems

The engineer Galileo Ferraris saw himself
as a scientist rather than an entrepreneur

The physicist and electrical engineer Galileo Ferraris, who was one of the pioneers of the alternating current (AC) system for transmitting electricity and invented the first alternators and induction motors, was born on this day in 1847 in Piedmont.

The AC system was a vital element in the development of electricity as a readily-available source of power in that it made it possible to transport electricity economically and efficiently over long distances.

Ferraris did not benefit financially from his invention, which is still the basis of induction motors in use today. Another scientist, the Serbian-born Nikola Tesla, patented the device after moving to the United States to work for the Edison Corporation.

Tesla had been working simultaneously on creating an induction motor but there is evidence that Ferraris probably developed his first and as such is regarded by many as the unsung hero in his field.

He saw himself as a scientist rather than an entrepreneur and, although there is no suggestion that his ideas were stolen, openly invited visitors to come in and see his lab.  Unlike Tesla, he never intended to start a company to manufacture the motor and even had doubts whether it would work.

One of Ferraris's early motors, currently
in a museum in Sardinia

Born in Livorno Vercellese, a small town in the Vercelli province of Piedmont now known as Livorno Ferraris, Galileo Ferraris was the son of a pharmacist and the nephew of a physician in Turin, to whom he was sent at the age of 10 to obtain an education in the classics and the sciences.

Ferraris was was a graduate of the University of Turin and the Scuola d’Applicazione of Turin, emerging with a master's degree in engineering. He remained in the academic world and independently researched the rotary magnetic field.

He experimented with different types of motors and his research and his studies resulted in the development of an alternator, which converted mechanical (rotating) power into electric power as alternating current.

While Tesla sought to patent his device, Ferraris published his research in a paper to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin and the alternator as a source of polyphase power became key in the history of electrification, along with the power transformer.

These inventions enabled power to be transmitted by wires economically over considerable distances and electricity to be generated by harnessing the natural power of water, thus enabling power to be available in remote places.

The city of Turin marked the contributions made to science by Ferraris, who also researched in the field of optical instruments, with the creation of a permanent monument at the Royal Italian Industrial Museum of Turin (now the Royal Turin Polytechnic).  From 1934 to 2006, the "Galileo Ferraris" Electrotechnical Institute could be found in Corso Massimo d'Azeglio.

The Palazzo Chiablese di Castell'Apertole, the former
Savoy hunting lodge near Livorno Ferraris

Travel tip:

Known at different times as Livorno Piemonte as well as Livorno Vercellese, Livorno Ferraris occupies a wide area of countryside in the province of Vercelli in the plain of the Po river, bisected by the Depretis, Cavour and Ivrea canals. Located about 40km (25 miles) northeast of Turin and about 25km (16 miles) west of the city of Vercelli, it  hosted the conclave for the election of the antipope Benedict XIII in 1384. Nearby is the 18th century Palazzo Chiablese di Castell'Apertole, a former hunting lodge of the Savoy royal family.

The modern Politecnico di Torino of today

Travel tip:

The Royal Turin Polytechnic can be found in Corso Duca degli Abruzzi in the centre of Turin, about 2.5km (1.5 miles) from the Royal Palace. It evolved from the Royal Italian Industrial Museum, which was established in 1862 by Royal Decree as an Italian equivalent of the South Kensington Museum of London and of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers of Paris, to promote industrial education and the progress of industry and trade. Parallel with Corso Duca degli Abruzzi is the Corso Galileo Ferraris, a long, straight road that links the Giardino Andrea Guglielminetti with the Stadio Olimpico Grande Torino, the home of Torino football club, a distance of 4.1km (2.5 miles).

More reading:

How Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery

Antonio Meucci - the 'true' inventor of the telephone

The physicist who tried to bring corpses back to life

Also on this day:

1929: The birth of swimmer-turned-actor Bud Spencer

1984: The death of Neapolitan dramatist Eduardo De Filippo


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Poggio Bracciolini – scholar and humanist

Calligrapher who could read Latin changed the course of history

The linguist and scholar Poggio Bracciolini was
born in a village near Arezzo in Tuscany

Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, who rediscovered many forgotten Latin manuscripts including the only surviving work by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius, died on this day in 1459 in Florence.

For his services to literature he was commemorated after his death with a statue by Donatello and a portrait by Antonio del Pollaiuolo.

Bracciolini was born in 1380 at Terranuova near Arezzo in Tuscany. In 1862 his home village was renamed Terranuova Bracciolini in his honour.

He studied Latin as a young boy under a friend of the poet, Petrarch, and his linguistic ability and talent for copying manuscripts neatly was soon noted by scholars in Florence.

He later studied notarial law and was received into the notaries guild in Florence at the age of 21.

After becoming secretary to the Bishop of Bari, Bracciolini was invited to join the Chancery of Apostolic Briefs in the Roman Curia of Pope Boniface IX.

Part of one of Cicero's Catiline Orations copied by Bracciolini
 in a style of writing that became the basis for Roman fonts

He was to spend the next 50 years serving seven popes, first as a writer of official documents and then working his way up to becoming a papal secretary.

Bracciolini was well thought of because of his excellent Latin, beautiful handwriting and the diplomatic work he was able to carry out with Florence.

He was never attracted to the ecclesiastical life and its potential riches and, despite his poor salary, remained a layman to the end of his life.

He invented the style of writing that, after generations of polishing by other scribes, served the new art of printing as the prototype for Roman fonts.

In 1415 while working for the Pope at a monastery in Cluny, Bracciolini brought to light two previously unknown orations of the Roman statesman Cicero.

At another monastery in 1416 he found the first complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, three books and part of a fourth of Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica and the commentaries of Asconius Pedianus on Cicero’s orations.

A statue said to be of Bracciolini in the Duomo
in Florence, attributed to Donatello

While visiting other monasteries in 1417 he discovered a number of Latin manuscripts, including De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius.

It is believed he subsequently discovered seven other orations of Cicero in a monastery in Cologne.

He made copies of the works he found in his elegant script, some of which have survived.

Bracciolini also collected classical inscriptions and sculptures, with which he adorned the garden of the villa he eventually bought near Florence.

At the age of 56 he left his long-term mistress and married a girl of 17, who produced five sons and a daughter for him.

He spent his last years having intellectual arguments with Lorenzo Valla, an expert at philological analysis of ancient texts, and writing a history of Florence.

Bracciolini died in 1459 before he had put the final touches to this work and was buried at the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.

The 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, tells the story of Bracciolini’s discovery of the ancient manuscript written by Lucretius. Greenblatt analyses the poem’s subsequent influence on the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern science.

The facade of the beautiful Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence,
 where Bracciolini was buried in illustrious company

Travel tip:

The Basilica of Santa Croce, consecrated in 1442, is the main Franciscan church in Florence and the burial place among others of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, the poet Ugo Foscolo, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile and the composer Gioachino Rossini.  It houses works by some of the most illustrious names in the history of art, including Canova, Cimabue, Donatello, Giotto and Vasari.  The Basilica, with 16 chapels, many of them decorated with frescoes by Giotto and his pupils, is the largest Franciscan church in the world and the present building dates back to the 13th century.

The village of Terranuova Bracciolini, near Arezzo, where
Bracciolini was born and which was renamed in 1862

Travel tip:

Terranuova Bracciolini is a town in the province of Arezzo in Tuscany, located about 35km (22 miles) southeast of Florence and about 25m (16 miles) northwest of Arezzo.  Originally called Castel Santa Maria, the town was part of Florence’s massive 14th-century project to build new areas to populate in the countryside. It was renamed after Poggio Bracciolini in 1862.  Terranuova Bracciolini still conserves its medieval walls and some perimeter towers.

More reading:

The politically astute poet who ruled an Italian state

The death of Hadrian

The artistic brilliance of Donatello

Also on this day:

1893: The birth of bodybuilder Angelo Siciliano, also known as Charles Atlas

1896: The birth of conductor Antonio Votto


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Fabiola Gianotti - particle physicist

First woman to be director-general of CERN

Fabiola Gianotti - the would-be concert pianist
who instead became a brilliant physicist

The particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti, who in 2016 became the first woman to be made director-general in the 64-year history of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, was born on this day in 1960 in Rome.

She led one of the two teams of physicists working for the organisation - general known as CERN after its title in French - whose experiments in 2012 resulted in the discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that explains why some other elementary particles have mass.

The discovery was regarded as so significant in the advancement of scientific knowledge that it was nicknamed the “God particle.”

As the project leader and spokesperson of the ATLAS project at CERN, which involved a collaboration of around 3,000 physicists from 38 countries, Dr. Gianotti announced the discovery of the particle.

Their work involved the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle collider and the largest machine of any kind on the planet, which lies in a tunnel 27km (17 miles) in circumference, 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

Fabiola Gianotti at the Large Hadron Collider site deep
underground on the France-Switzerland border

Her team were awarded science’s most lucrative award, a special Fundamental Physics Prize worth $3 million. Time magazine named her among its people of the year; Forbes placed her in its top 100 influential women list.

Brought up in Milan the daughter of a geologist from Piedmont who taught her to love nature, and a mother from Sicily who was passionate about music and art, Dr. Gianotti had ambitions to become a prima ballerina as a child, when she dreamt of becoming a dancer with the Bolshoi at Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

She also considered becoming a classical pianist, such was her talent for music. She spent two years at the Milan Conservatory, but after earning a PhD in physics at the University of Milan, she began her career at CERN with a graduate fellowship in 1994.

Fabiola Gianotti was inspired to break the traditional male
domination of particle science by a biography of Marie Curie

Dr. Gianotti was inspired to devote herself to scientific research after reading a biography of Marie Curie, who developed the theory of radioactivity, techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and discovered the elements polonium and radium as well as being the mother of two children.

Even though particle physics has traditionally been a male-dominated domain - even now only 12 percent of the 2,500 physicists and engineers at CERN are women and only 20 per cent of the team that worked on the ATLAS project were women - Dr. Gianotti claims that she has never had a sense that she was discriminated against for being female.

However, she has argued that women in particle physics should be given more support when having children, claiming that a lack of support made it difficult for her to marry and start a family, a decision for which she has expressed regret.

Gianotti on the cover of Time magazine

The author or co-author of more than 500 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, Dr. Gianotti is is a promoter of the “Open Science” movement, in particular the publication of scientific works in open access journals and the development of open access hardware and software in order to spread scientific knowledge to less-privileged countries.

Brought up a Catholic, Gianotti insists that religion and science are not in competition with each other, saying that while science cannot demonstrate or disprove the existence of God, religion has to respect science, and they should co-exist in a climate of tolerance.

She lives in in Switzerland in an apartment with a view of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc, plays music by her favourite composers on a Yamaha upright piano, has a passion for cooking and Italian culture.

The Milan Conservatory, Italy's largest music college, has
a star-studded list of alumni

Travel tip:

The Milan Conservatory - also known as Conservatorio di musica “Giuseppe Verdi” di Milano - was established by a royal decree of 1807 in Milan, capital of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. It opened the following year with premises in the cloisters of the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Passione in Via Conservatorio. The largest institute of musical education in Italy, its alumni include Giacomo Puccini, Amilcare Ponchielli, Arrigo Boito, Pietro Mascagni, Riccardo Muti and Ludovico Einaudi.

Da Vinci's The Last Supper is one of the many
reasons to visit Milan

Travel tip:

Milan, where Gianotti grew up, is a global capital of fashion and design but also a financial hub, the home of the Italian stock exchange. Its historical monuments include the Gothic Duomo di Milano, the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent, which houses Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper,  the Sforza Castle, the Teatro alla Scala and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

More reading:

The scientist from Rome who created the world's first nuclear reactor

How Laura Bassi broke new ground for women in science - 240 years ago

Margherita Hack - astrophysicist who helped make science popular

Also on this day:

1922: Mussolini is appointed Prime Minister

2003: The death of tenor Franco Corelli


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Stefano Landi – composer

Musician whose works influenced development of opera

Stefano Landi had an early influence
on the evolution of opera

Stefano Landi, an influential early composer of opera, died on this day in 1639 in Rome.

He wrote his most famous opera, Sant’Alessio, in 1632, which was the earliest to be about a historical subject, describing the life of the fourth-century monastic, Saint Alexis.

It was also notable for Landi interspersing comic scenes drawn from the contemporary life of Rome in the 17th century.

Born in Rome, Landi had joined the Collegio Germanico as a boy soprano in 1595.

He took minor orders in 1599 and began studying at the Seminario Romano in 1602. He is mentioned in the Seminary’s records as being an organist and singer in 1611.

By 1618 he had moved to northern Italy and he published a book of five-voice madrigals in Venice. He wrote his first opera while in Padua, La morte d’Orfeo, which was probably for part of the festivities for a wedding.

An illustration depicting a scene from Sant'Alessio

In 1620 he returned to Rome, where his patrons included the Borghese family, Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, and the Barberini family, who were to be his major employers throughout the late 1620s and 1630s.

It was for the Barberini family that he wrote the work for which he is most famous, Sant’Alessio. It was used to open the Teatro delle Quattro Fontane in 1632.

After a period of ill health, Landi died in Rome in 1639 and was buried at the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella.

The Palazzo Barberini was completed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Travel tip:

The Barbarini family’s most famous Roman residence was the Palazzo Barberini, a 17th-century palace which faces the Piazza Barberini in the Trevi district.  The site was purchased in 1625 by Maffeo Barberini - later Pope Urban VIII - from Cardinal Alessandro Sforza.  Three great architects worked to create the Palazzo, starting with Carlo Maderno, who gave the building its air of princely power and created a garden front that had the nature of a suburban villa. When Maderno died in 1629, it was expected the project would be passed to his nephew, Francesco Borromini, who had been assisting his uncle. Instead, the the commission was awarded to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a young prodigy then better known as a sculptor, with Borromini at first working alongside him.

The Teatro delle Quattro Fontane is now a cinema complex

Travel tip:

The Teatro delle Quattro Fontane - Theatre of the Four Fountains - was also designed, in part, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and built in 1632 by the Barberini family. It was located in Via delle Quattro Fontane, near the Piazza Barberini and the Quattro Fontane or Four Fountains.  The theatre closedin 1642 at the height of the Barberini Wars of Castro against with the Farnese Dukes of Parma and remained so for more than 10 years then passed before it was reopened and performances recommenced. In 1632, the theatre was rebuilt and remained active until after the Second World War. It was converted into a modern cinema in the 1960s and now houses a multiplex called Multisala Barberini.

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