A Gentleman Scientist

Abstract

With these words Orso Mario Corbino , who had replaced him in the post of director of the Physics Institute in Rome, concluded the commemoration of Pietro Blaserna written for the Società degli Spettroscopisti (Society of Spectroscopists) and published in 1918, the year of his death.

Few men managed to create around themselves an atmosphere of fond and affectionate respect comparable to that which surrounded Pietro Blaserna in his long life. He had no enemies, despite having reached the highest positions in academic life and in the category of eminent men. His open, jovial, exquisitely gentlemanly character, his respectful temperament towards merit, generous and charitable when judging failings, and above all his manifest honesty and absolute integrity when carrying out the highest and most delicate tasks necessarily suggested the most respectful devotion even from those, rich in qualities no less than his, who had not met with the same fortune in their careers.¹

With these words Orso Mario Corbino , who had replaced him in the post of director of the Physics Institute in Rome, concluded the commemoration of Pietro Blaserna written for the Società degli Spettroscopisti (Society of Spectroscopists) and published in 1918, the year of his death.

This is just an example of the affection and respect Pietro Blaserna enjoyed not only among his students, assistants or simple helpers, but also within the scientific community, as also in the political and cultural world in general.

What emerges from a reading of numerous commemorations and memoirs, and also from the most varied correspondence and testimony, is his personality: a personality that perfectly embodies a “gentleman” between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultured and dedicated, but also a lover of social life, benevolent and a little paternalistic towards his young colleagues, protective of his female students and researchers, honest and fair towards men and institutions; gifted with a great capacity for communication and entertainment, but at the same time a little sly and crafty!

He dedicated his life to science. That is why he is cited not only for some important discoveries, but also as a great teacher; he launched a new “school” to which he sacrificed his ambitions for personal research and also perhaps some more private choices.

Indeed, ever since 1867, at the beginning of his career, when he began to wonder about the state of physics studies in Italy, «the path was signposted along which he moved constantly in his multiple activities as a scientist, teacher and citizen. Corbino continued in his speech—The main characteristic of his quality as a scientist is founded on the clarity of his ideas and on the scrupulousness of his experiments, never separated from the sense of refinement and of elegance that characterised him in all aspects of his life. […]».²

First let me recall his research on real gases, his study of the development and the duration of induced currents, this latter research recognised as his main work,

which occupied him for a long time and in which he drew on the great experimental ability acquired first at Ettingshausen’s school and then at Regnault’s […] Those who, like me, have had cause to make use of his admirable differential circuit breaker, which he constructed for that work with the most ingenious attention to the smallest details, can only be struck by the perfect balance between the design of the device and the extremely delicate skill that ensures that it works efficiently; it would still be difficult now to find, in the vast field of new devices that the technology of the past few years has succeeded in producing, an instrument to rival the circuit breaker, given the combination of difficulties so expertly overcome. […] It is to his great credit that he was one of the first to begin the study of a fundamental problem of Electrology, and that he boldly set forth in a field that would then provide Science with the successes of Electrodynamics, culminating in Hertz’s experiments.³

Corbino concluded by recalling the master’s enquiries in the field of meteorology and earth physics, as well as those in acoustics and musical physics. Yet according to him the best known part of Blaserna’s work, universally appreciated by everyone, began in 1871 when, after being appointed to the chair in Experimental Physics in Rome, he felt

that he needed to sacrifice his own activity as a scientist in order to create a great school of physical studies, that would be productive for Science perpetually, beyond the period in which he could have reaped honours for himself alone. For this disinterestedness the Country will never be grateful enough to him, since the admirable Physics Institute in Rome, which was his main creation, was followed by others in Italy and everywhere the need was felt to follow in its fruitful path.⁴

Proof of the appreciation of Blaserna’s work at an international level is offered by the issue dated 13 June 1918 of «Nature», one of the most renowned international journals of the time, in which the professor was remembered. In the journal his life and work were illustrated, both with regard to his experimental activity and to the research policy that he drove forward, above all as president of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, from 1904 to 1916.⁵

In actual fact this was not the first time that «Nature» concerned itself with Blaserna’s various roles in the institutional field: see the report of 19 May 1910 about the Messina earthquake in which it cited the royal commission led by him to study the lines to be followed in the reconstruction of the city. Its results were defined as being of «more than local value»⁶; again, in a previous issue many years before, in 1879 to be exact, reference is made to the II International Meteorology Conference held in Rome which «will remain in the memory of all who took part in it as one of the pleasantest and most successful opportunities of international scientific intercourse which has ever been organised».

Blaserna was one of the Italian delegates and, it is worth remembering, in the same year he had become president of the newly founded Ufficio Centrale di Meteorologia (Central Meteorology Office), while it was actually during the Rome conference that he promoted and supported the project for governments to encourage coordinated geodynamic and seismological studies. Although the idea of an international meteorology met with little support on that occasion an international commission was established however, made up of nine members. Cantoni represented Italy and, while he had no executive power, thanks to the collaboration between the several institutes or single researchers he was entrusted with the task of resolving various meteorological questions.⁷

A further reference to Blaserna’s active presence in the international scientific field was reported long before, again in «Nature», with reference to the observations of the Italian commission on the occasion of the total eclipse of the sun on 22 December 1870, observed at Augusta in Sicily. At the time the young physicist was professor at the University of Palermo and his name was only added to the list of participants later. On that occasion he set out to examine whether the solar corona contained polarised light and, thanks to his observations, it was possible for the phenomenon to be clarified in its essential details.⁸ He was cited again in some pages of the journal dating to 1872, regarding the status of Italian spectroscopy,⁹ and again in 1876, when the review appeared of his The Theory of Sound in its Relation to Music in which, as we shall see, he aimed to create a bridge between the physical, medical sciences and the arts through the study of the propagation of sound, of the physiology of the ear and of musical art.

So Blaserna was a person well known and renowned not only in Italy, thanks to the numerous institutional appointments held during his career, as well as his frequent journeys abroad which began, as is well known, at a very young age, when he enrolled at the University of Vienna. This was an obvious choice for those who, like young Pietro, lived on Austria’s borders and were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

His familiarity with international culture and science, is also to be found in the always friendly relationships that he maintained with foreign colleagues and personages; amongst them, to name a few, Hermann von Helmholtz , William Thomson —Lord Kelvin, Emil Picard or Prince von Bülow, the German ambassador in Rome.

Regarding this latter friendship, we still have the account of Lodovico Zanchi , Blaserna’s friend and collaborator.¹⁰ The German diplomat had married Maria Beccadelli , the daughter of Laura Minghetti , wife of the prime minister Marco Minghetti, by her first husband. Minghetti was a great friend of Blaserna’s «to the point that the two of them, through their daily confidences, each also seemed to have the responsibilities of the other»¹¹; and it was because of this that Maria, thanks to a special permit from the Director, began to attend the Institute’s laboratories. When von Bülow was recalled home it was to Blaserna that he entrusted three crates containing letters, registers of correspondence and documents closed with diplomatic seals, asking him to keep them safe. When he was sent back to Italy in 1914 as ambassador extraordinary, probably with the objective of preventing those who wished Italy to intervene in the war from proceeding,¹² the prince and his wife began to pay Blaserna frequent visits. Then the 23 May 1915 arrived and there was a general mobilisation: the prince was anxious and did not calm down, again according to Zanchi’s account, until he received a telephone call from Blaserna reassuring him that the contents of all the crates entrusted to him long before, crates that had been hidden in the Institute’s cellars, had been burned.

Neither the physicist Pietro Blaserna , nor the bookkeeper Lodovico Zanchi , ever new what was contained in the documents that they had so carefully kept hidden and had then equally carefully reduced to ashes. The simplicity of their actions and their adherence to their given word had not allowed them to behave differently.¹³

This was the “time of gentlemen” referred to by Zanchi , who had been the first to benefit from the honesty and gratitude of that gentleman scientist. His grandfather, Lodovico Meda , had been Blaserna’s right hand man. Blaserna brought him with him from Sicily to Rome after he had been discharged from the carabinieri.¹⁴ And in the Institute he was employed as caretaker and custodian. His father Augusto too was a laboratory technician. As Edoardo Amaldi recounts, he was «of uncommon competence and ability in preparing experiments, his authority was recognised not only within the Institutes in via Panisperna, but also more widely in the scientific institutes inside and outside the university in Rome».¹⁵ So young Lodovico grew in Blaserna’s fatherly shadow and in the Institute carried out pretty much every task: he kept the keys to the laboratories and the library; he was called on by the physics professors for preparations and experiments in the laboratory. «He did what there was to be done but he was nothing»: this was a real problem, in terms of pay and pension, that the Director was well aware of. And so when the post of bookkeeper in the Institute became available Blaserna arranged for it to be given to Lodovico, who by now was irreplaceable, also demanding that the salary should not be lowered on the pretext that Zanchi did not have a degree since, as he declared directly to the Minister of Education:

Lodovico, my dear Excellency, does not have a degree, I admit; but what he is paid must not be reduced by a cent. For me competence is more important, and Lodovico, without that piece of paper, is worth more than the others¹⁶;

And so it was: Zanchi was appointed with a salary of 600 lire, like his predecessor professor Giuseppe Folgheraiter .

It was a filial friendship that lasted all his life, despite even fundamental disagreements, as for example with regard to Italy’s intervention in the First World War. It is due to Zanchi’s testimony that we know that Blaserna was in favour of abstention and close to Giolitti’s position, so much so that, on the day after the country entered the war, when the young man went to him to take his leave having enlisted as a volunteer, the old physicist said goodbye with the words: «You know what I think. All of you have won so the arguments are over. Go, do your duty and may you all return victorious».¹⁷

The professor also had a strong sense of humour together with a special fatherly solicitude, as we have said, towards his students. One morning for example, in the Institute, he met Senator Melodia who, together with him, Cannizzaro and Paternò were vice presidents of the Senate and, after his colleague told him that his son, who had already failed an exam with Cannizzaro several times, had to sit an exam with him, Blaserna replied:

Look colleague, usually I only ask my students three questions, but your son will be different: I will ask him a fourth one, to verify how prepared he is!

Honest, likeable and amiable, Blaserna was also a man of the world who especially appreciated the theatre: in particular, he was a great admirer of the actress Eleonora Duse , and he took his friend and colleague von Helmholtz when he was his guest in Rome to see her.

He was also on friendly terms with the Queen Mother, who loved to be kept up to date by him on the latest scientific discoveries, and if in the winter she attended the lectures organised by the celebrated physicist, even drawing members of the court there, in the summer she had him join her at Gressoney where together they organised scientific excursions. It seems that Giosuè Carducci was particularly “annoyed” by Queen Margherita’s predilection for Blaserna! ¹⁸

Again it is Amaldi who provides us with an unusual picture of the physicist:

Blaserna lived on the second floor of the Institute. He was a bachelor and a man of the world, he was on friendly terms with Queen Margherita and the Marchesa di Villamarina , her lady in waiting, with Marco and Laura Minghetti , with Quintino Sella , etc. Electric lighting was installed on the avenue that led from the Via Panisperna gate to the Istituto di Fisica only after 1892. Before it was installed an oil lamp was kept in the porter’s lodge at the entrance and Blaserna, when he came back late, took it and brought it with him to the Institute to light the way along the avenue. At night in the garden two large Saint Bernard dogs, a gift from Queen Margherita, were let loose. At 12 every day they ate lunch with Blaserna, who kept a large cage full of canaries in the dining room.¹⁹

Moreover, the gentleman physicist had always been attentive to the presence of women in scientific and cultural institutes, an attitude which at that time could certainly not be taken for granted. Such progressive consideration had already emerged on the occasion of the XII meeting of Italian scientists held in Palermo in 1875: not only was admission open to women but, urged on by Terenzio Mamiani , a member of the Consiglio Superiore della Pubblica Istruzione (High Council for Education), and by senators Cannizzaro and Blaserna , a special article was inserted in the statute of the fledgling Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze or SIPS (Italian Society for the Progress of Science), that envisaged female members with equal rights to those of the men.²⁰

Indeed, since 1891, at the Circolo Fisico (Physics Circle) in Rome, which supported the Scuola Pratica di Fisica (Practical School of Physics), he carried out educational activities regarding the most recent discoveries in the field in which he was assisted by Margarethe Traube Mengarini and Matilde Marchesini , his students, who had graduated in 1883 and 1896 respectively. For other students, Evangelina Bottero Pagano and Carolina Magistrelli Sprega , the first two women to obtain degrees in Natural Sciences in Rome in 1881, and who later became teachers in the capital’s Istituto Superiore di Magistero (teacher training college), he wrote the preface to a lively manual which was published by Loescher in 1883 on the acoustic and technical principles of an instrument that was still not widely known: the telephone.²¹

And yet the professor never had a family of his own, perhaps because he looked on the Institute itself as his family? Certainly the whole Institute rallied round him when he was ill or in difficulty, for example, as his student Michele Cantone told during the commemoration held at the Accademia dei Lincei,

in the days of forced rest due to a persistent affliction of gout he found distraction from his not inconsiderable suffering in reading books of the most varied literary production, scientific and political, and in the frequent visits of friends and students he found comfort as if the members of a great family were around him […] the most loving attention came from his intimates and the laboratory staff, not excluding the humblest in rank.²²

Or perhaps the professor had not found the right person? Amongst the papers kept in the Amaldi Archive there is a manuscript several pages long; it is in the professor’s unmistakable, neat, precise handwriting. The title of those loose pages is Don Pacifico: it is a draft, an attempt at a short story, which tells of a physics professor who, it so happens, is organising a trip to Germany for a few months. According to the suggestion of a refined German lady who had moved to Italy that could be the perfect occasion to look for a wife!

You are still a young man and you occupy an honourable position in science. You have a steady attitude, contrary to the adventures of youth. You therefore seem to me to be made for marriage. Whatever may be said to the contrary, a quiet family life is that most suitable for men’s happiness: thus they are freed from a series of private cares and they find in the sweet affections of home life the best conditions of contentment and repose. These are necessary conditions for one who aims high and feels imbued with a scientific mission. Now I would not wish to speak too ill of Italian women: […] they would not understand a man always buried in x plus y or who passes his nights over a microscope. You have been to Germany, you know our language well enough to understand and be understood, and you rightly appreciate the German spirit of investigation which inspires scientific research and has declared open war to all preconceived ideas, seeking liberty of thought. Believe me – and I tell you this because I am convinced – a German woman is much more suitable for a scientist; she would demand less and give more than any other. So take courage: make a journey to Germany, where you have many acquaintances, circles, and come back with a wife on your arm.

The story continues by describing the protagonist:

Don Pacifico – this is this character’s name – was born to a modest but prosperous family […] Tranquil but shrewd, quick and deep of understanding, he rapidly completed his secondary education. He studied hard and soon developed a decided fondness for the exact studies. He threw himself intensely into mathematics, he passed through the usual routine of trisecting the angle and squaring the circle and he learned, not without struggle and after many fruitless attempts, that first scientific madness. From then he strode swiftly on. The experimental sciences with their precise research methods adjusted his brain and exerted such an attraction for him that he decided to devote himself to them entirely. For three centuries past a struggle exists, ignored by many, but extraordinarily profound and of immense importance, for the discipline of the mind.

At this point in the manuscript we read:

It began when Galileo declared war on the Aristotelian sophisms and the whole scholastic tendency favoured by the Church, and when he taught with words and deeds a new way of carrying out research, the experimental method. The establishment of the Accademia del Cimento, however much opposed and short lived, and the publication of Bacon’s book, however much the British tend to exaggerate its worth, have had greater influence on human culture than the whole of the Middle Ages put together. But here began the struggle between the old and the new, between dialectics and experiment, and we might almost say between deduction and induction, a struggle that is still ongoing and is far from over. We must admit that the experimental sciences developed with wonderful speed, everywhere where the Church was unable to put its paws on them and force respect.²³

The portrait that emerges from these pages fits our gentleman scientist perfectly: he knew the German language and culture very well since he hailed from a small village in Friuli close to Gorizia and his mother, Caterina Dietrich , came from Germany; but what matches perfectly, apart from the light hearted joking whether an Italian or German bride would be better for a young scientist, is above all the sentiment of total belief in the new science that shines through these few lines. This was a common sentiment amongst scientists at the end of the Nineteenth Century and was felt deeply during those Conferences, which for Italians began in Pisa in 1839 and which the young Blaserna attended, and which, it so happened, followed in the footsteps of the meetings of the German naturalists. This beginning of a short story seems to tell of those sparkling days full of hope lived by young men of science, not only in Italy, who, after the various struggles and wars of independence, when Europe took on more defined outlines and borders, began to fully occupy prominent institutional roles. These men placed their own knowledge at the service of their country, with a continuous appeal to the experimental method and a constant exhortation to reason, and to which the scientific credo of the physicist from Gorizia indeed also belonged.

At least for now there are no explicit records concerning Blaserna’s position with regard to the Church; a convinced follower of Giolitti , an «aristocratic liberal with rigid (and therefore just) discipline», as the faithful Zanchi described, he had probably acknowledged that the divorce between State and Church at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was now a given after the loss of temporal power, the Law of Guarentigie (Guarantees), the suppression of many monasteries and convents and the secularisation of many State institutions.²⁴ Besides he acted personally as one of the protagonists of the new unitary, lay and modern State when, together with Cannizzaro and Emanuele Paternò , he identified the Panisperna hill as the ideal place for the creation of the Physics Institute. At that point, despite the protests of the nuns who lived in the convents located there,

the intellectual development of the new capital urged on the extreme decision and one morning, in the midst of the calls of trumpets and the ringing of bells, the bersaglieri climbed the hill driving out the pious sisters who were unable to understand the liberals’ polite manners.²⁵

Blaserna probably set himself a sole aim: to put forward a rational model where it was science that dictated the guidelines. Indeed he devoted himself to spreading and teaching scientific methods so that they could enter into everyday practice, becoming the spokesman for the new modernity for the newly reunited country and thus becoming part of that body of men of science such as, to name a few, Carlo Matteucci , Quintino Sella or Stanislao Cannizzaro, progressives and enlightened, who laid their own experience at the foundation of the growth and development of a united Italy. Scientists who, as Battimelli and Ianniello have stressed, offered a new model: the “political scientist”, «with consequences that were without doubt advantageous for the cause of science, measured in terms of the concession of special funding, spaces and facilities, new university chairs, in a word in the results of a good research policy, now inescapable in a modern growing Country».²⁶