Niccolò Cabeo

Niccolò Cabeo (1586 to 1650), also known as Nicolaus Cabeus, was an Italian Jesuit philosopher, theologian, engineer and mathematician. Born in Ferrara, he studied at the Jesuit college in Parma, taught theology and mathematics there, became a preacher in 1622, worked on hydraulics projects under the patronage of the Dukes of Mantua and the Este, and later taught mathematics in Genoa, where he died. He is noted for physics experiments and observations. He watched the falling-body experiments of Giovanni Battista Baliani and wrote that two different objects fall in the same time regardless of the medium, experimented with pendulums, and observed that an electrically charged body can attract non-electrified objects and that two charged objects repel each other. His Philosophia magnetica (1629) studied the cause of the Earth's magnetism and the work of William Gilbert, though he held the Earth to be immobile, and his commentary on Aristotle's Meteorology (1646) examined ideas of Galileo, including the motion of the Earth and the law of falling bodies.