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 Borrema ns (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 An intense archival work has been carried out on this interesting scientist ; it has allowed us to discover many unpublished and unknown documents that have shed a new light on Silio’s life and on his scientific activity.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.