A Forgotten Italian Physicist at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The Sicilian Giovanni Silio Borremans ()
ABSTRACT
We are presenting the
scientific work of Giovanni Silio Borremans (1756-1830),
a physicist almost unknown to Science historians, who worked in the city of
Caltagirone (Sicily) from 1775 until his death, in 1830. An intense archival
work has been carried out on this interesting scientist; it has allowed us to discover many unpublished and
unknown documents that have shed a new light on Silio’s life and on his
scientific activity. As visual evidence, a good number of archive images have
been inserted in the text. We owe to Silio the origins of experimental physics
in Caltagirone, whose good results will be appreciated after his death by his
most illustrious scholar, the physicist and naturalist Emmanuello Taranto
Rosso. Silio’s work started in
Caltagirone in 1775 when a teaching chair in experimental physics was
established at the ancient R. Academy Ferdinando IV; he held it for more than fifty years. Some manuscripts, scientific works
and the dictated lessons of this learned and erudite man were found and transcribed
by his most famous student, the already mentioned Taranto Rosso, who later
will, become his “natural” successor in the teaching of experimental Physic at
the Academy.
Share and Cite:
Mantovani, R. and Bartolotta, D. (2019) A Forgotten Italian Physicist at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The Sicilian Giovanni Silio Borremans.
Advances in Historical Studies,
8, 148-174. doi:
10.4236/ahs.2019.84012.
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