Speaker
Description
Since 2014 the Museum of the History of Physics of the University of Padua has been working on the study and valorisation of the collection of historical scientific instruments kept at the high school “Scipione Maffei” in Verona, one of the oldest high schools in Italy. The Cabinet of Physics of “Liceo Maffei”, founded in 1802, not only documents the evolution of physics teaching in an Italian high school in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it also highlights the fact that high schools in 19th-century Northern Italy were also research centers. This paper will mainly focus on this latter aspect and I will examine in particular the scientific contacts between Giuseppe Zamboni, professor of physics at the “Liceo” from 1804 to 1846 and inventor of the dry battery, and Salvatore Dal Negro (1768-1839), professor of experimental physics at Padua University from 1806 to 1839.
