Antonio Pacinotti

Antonio Pacinotti (1841 to 1912) was an Italian physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of Pisa, born and died in Pisa. He took part in the second war of Italian independence as a volunteer sergeant, studied under Carlo Matteucci and graduated in mathematics at Pisa under Riccardo Felici. He was assistant to the astronomer Giovanni Battista Donati in 1862, professor at the technological institute of Bologna in 1864 and professor of physics at the University of Cagliari in 1873, and in 1881 he succeeded his father in the chair of technological physics at Pisa. He is best known for inventing an improved direct-current dynamo, which he built in 1860 and described in Il Nuovo Cimento in 1865; it used a ring armature wrapped with a coil of wire to give a smoother current, and he found that it could also be used as an electric motor. In July 1862 he was one of several independent discoverers of comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, and Augusto Righi was among his students.