Stanislao Cannizzaro

Stanislao Cannizzaro was an Italian chemist, born in Palermo in 1826, who entered the university there to study medicine and soon turned to chemistry. After the failed Sicilian revolution of 1848 he fled to Paris, and in 1851 he became professor of physical chemistry at the National College of Alessandria, where he found the Cannizzaro reaction, in which aromatic aldehydes split into an acid and an alcohol in alkaline solution. He later held chairs at Genoa, Pisa, Naples and Palermo and, from 1871, at Rome. His 1858 Sketch of a course of chemical philosophy revived Avogadro law and separated atomic from molecular weights, and he led the atomic weight debate at the Karlsruhe Congress of 1860. He won the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1891.