DECEMBER SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS
By Matthew V. Grieco
As is reflected in the name of our organization, Italians are great explorers. However, the curiosity, ingenuity, and daring possessed by Christopher Columbus and others were not limited to geographic explorers. The month of December bears witness to a number of discoveries by scientific explorers.
On December 2, 1942, the Roman born Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) conducted the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, making possible not only the atomic bomb, which would help win World War II, but also sustainable nuclear energy. Fermi had already received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, the year he immigrated to the United States. He taught for several years at Columbia University, after which he moved to the University of Chicago, where he conducted his historic test in a converted basement squash court. A colleague opened a bottle of Chianti and relayed the successful results to others over the telephone with the message, “the Italian Navigator has just landed in the New World.” Incidentally, the telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci (1808-1889), who was born in Florence and immigrated to Staten Island. Alexander Graham Bell independently invented a telephone years later, but unlike Meucci, he was able to afford the patent application process. In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives enacted a Resolution, officially recognizing Meucci’s invention.
On December 12, 1901, the Bolognese Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, arranged the first transatlantic radio transmission, thereby disproving skeptics’ claims that the Earth’s curvature would render long-distance communications impossible. Marconi’s vision would pave the way for television and cellular phones.
Although a Dutchman was the first to build a telescope (in actuality a primitive “spyscope”), the Pisan Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the one who thought to build a powerful device to explore the heavens. Throughout the month of December 1609, he observed the moon, and found that, contrary to the then-accepted belief, that orb is not a perfectly smooth sphere, but rather possesses craters, mountains, and plains, like Earth.
One more breakthrough should be noted. On December 13, 1903, the Italian born, Hoboken immigrant, Italo Marcioni, patented the ice cream cone -- another form of sustainable energy!