Biography
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 alternating-current motor. On the 11th of 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 motors operating by systems of alternating currents displaced from one another in phase by definite amounts and producing what is known as the rotating magnetic field. This invention seems destined to be one of the most important that has been made in the history of electricity. The result of the introduction of polyphase systems has been the ability to transmit power economically for considerable distances, and, as this directly operated to make possible the utilization of water-power in remote places and the distribution of power over large areas, the immediate outcome of the polyphase system was power transmission; and the outcome of power transmission almost surely will be the gradual supersession of coal and the harnessing of the waste forces of Nature to do useful work.
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 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, so the one in which the fundamental points were missing. 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.
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