Galileo Ferraris

Galileo Ferraris (31 October 1847 – 7 February 1897) was an Italian physicist and electrical engineer, one of the pioneers of AC power system and the inventor of induction motor. Many newspapers published that Ferraris's work on the induction motor and power transmission systems was one of the greatest inventions of any age. He published an extensive and complete monograph on the experimental results obtained with open-circuit transformers of the type designed by the power engineers Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs.

Born at Livorno Vercellese (Kingdom of Sardinia), Ferraris gained a master's degree in engineering and became an assistant of technical physics near the Regal Italian Industrial Museum. Ferraris independently researched the rotary magnetic field in 1885. Ferraris experimented with different types of asynchronous electric motors. The research and his studies resulted in the development of an alternator, which may be thought of as an alternating-current motor operating in reverse, so as to convert mechanical (rotating) power into electric power (as alternating current).

On 11 March 1888, Ferraris published his research in a paper to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin (two months later Nikola Tesla gained U.S. Patent 381,968, application filed October 12, 1887. Serial Number 252,132). These alternators operated by creating systems of alternating currents displaced from one another in phase by definite amounts, and depended on rotating magnetic field for their operation. The resulting source of polyphase power soon found widespread acceptance. The invention of the polyphase alternator is key in the history of electrification, as is the power transformer. These inventions enabled power to be transmitted by wires economically over considerable distances. Polyphase power enabled the use of water-power (via hydroelectric generating plants in large dams) in remote places, thereby allowing the mechanical energy of the falling water to be converted to electricity, which then could be fed to an electric motor at any location where mechanical work needed to be done. This versatility sparked the growth of power-transmission network grids on continents around the globe.

In 1889, Ferraris worked at the Italian Industrial Institution, a school of electrical engineering (the first school of this kind in Italy, subsequently incorporated in the Politecnico di Torino). In 1896, Ferraris joined the Italian Electrotechnical Association and became the first national president of the organization.

Galileo Ferraris did not confine his research interests to electricity. He also researched the fundamental properties of dioptric instruments and made elementary representation of the theory and its applications. His work contains a detailed description of the geometric dioptrics for uncentered systems. He provided a greater generality as previously found in the telescopic system treatments, with less emphasis on applications.

In the second main sections, the results obtained are applied to optical instruments. This was dealt with in great detail the magnification, field of view, and the brightness of the instrument. The field denned as the author of that cone opening angle, the tip of the first main points of the lens, and its base formed by the parts of the object in view, will possess the same brightness. The eye is not treated.

The city of Turin honored the services that Ferraris rendered to science. A general committee proposed addition of a Royal Industrial Museum of Turin, a permanent monument commemorating his scientific and industrial achievements. The city of Turin named an avenue in honor of Ferraris.

• Sulle differenze di fase delle correnti e sulla dissipazione di energia nei trasformatori, by Prof. Galileo Ferraris (Turin, 1887).
• Le proprietà cardinali degli strumenti ottici. Roma: Loescher. 1877. 
• Wissenschaftliche Grundlagen der Elektrotechnik. Leipzig: Teubner. 1901, by G. Ferraris, trans. from the original Italian into German by Leo Finzi 
• Opere di Galileo Ferraris, pubblicate per cura della Associazione elettrotecnica italiana. 3 vols. Milano: Ulrico Hoepli. 1902–1904. 
  • Online texts (Italian): vol. 1 vol. 2 vol. 3

• Le proprietà cardinali degli strumenti ottici, www.worldcat.org See vol. 3 of Opere di Galileo Ferraris.
• Wilson, E. B. (1904). "Review: Wissenschaftliche Grundlagen der Elektrotechnik Von Galileo Ferraris. Deutsch herausgegeben von Leo Finzi" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 10 (5): 266–267. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1904-01108-8.