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Stanislao Cannizzaro
was born in Palermo on 13th July 1826. Cannizzaro enlisted to the Faculty of Medicine when he was 15. He remained at the University up to 1845, but without getting his degree.
Cannizzaro was interested in chemistry and in Naples he participated to the VII Meeting of the Italian Scientists (20th September-5th October 1845), where he knew the physicist M. Melloni, who addressed him to Pisa school of Piria, who was the most famous Italian chemist of the time.
Piria engaged Cannizzaro as an extraordinary presetter of his lessons in Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, then sharing with him his researches on the chemistry of natural matters.
Cannizzaro was already designing some independent researches, when on July 1847, when he was on holidays in Sicily, he stopped there to prepare the rebellion against the Borbons.
Failed the attempt of rebellion, he was enlisted into lists of banishment and compelled to exile, he went to France (1848).
In Paris, Cannizzaro frequented some chemical laboratories (Gay-Lussac, Dumas) gaining experience. In November 1951 he accepted the appointment to professor of Physics, Chemistry and Mechanics at the National Board of Alxandria. He had remained here for four years until when in 1855 he was appointed as professor of Chemistry at the University of Genoa, where he was entrusted also to teach Chemistry Applied to Constructions (1857-1860).
In summer of 1860, after the arrival of Garibaldi to Palermo, Cannizzaro returned to his natal town aimed at offering his works for a possible consolidation of the Revolution. In October 1861 he achieved the chair of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry at the University of Palermo. He was also director for some years. The National Academy of Lincei appointed him as national member (1873).
Cannizzaro died in Rome on 10th May 1910.
We owe to Cannizzaro the first formal and stern promulgation of an atomic theory (Cannizzaro's Law) based on the principle of Amedeo Avogadro, who made possible to periodically classify elements, as can be seen in his famous book Sunto di un corso di filosofia chimica (1858) (Summary of a course in chemical philosophy). The Summary is classical work of worldly chemical literature.
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