Serafino Serrati

Serafino Serrati was an eighteenth-century Italian Benedictine monk who practised or taught the physical sciences, apparently at the Badia Fiorentina, the Florentine abbey of the monks of Monte Cassino. Information about him is limited: he was born in Florence into a respectable family, seems to have studied physics and botany, and is thought to have been professor of experimental physics in his monastery. He studied how to steer hot-air balloons, and fellow monks Rabatta and Serrati are said to have been the first Florentines to rise in them. A biographer credits him as the first to apply the force of vapour to move a boat at sea, a fire-powered boat reported by Jouffroy d Ambrans. His nine published communications cover flammable air, a two-burner retort, balloon construction and guiding, a mercury pneumatic machine, an electrophore without resins and a baking oven. The bacterial genus Serratia was named after him in 1819 by Bartolomeo Bizio, who honoured him for his unrecognised steamboat.