In 1841 Cannizzaro entered the University of Palermo as a medical student. Later in his life, he worked here as professor of inorganic and organic chemistry from 1861 until 1871.
Career
Gallery of Stanislao Cannizzaro
Piazza Marina, 61, 90133 Palermo PA, Italy
In 1841 Cannizzaro entered the University of Palermo as a medical student. Later in his life, he worked here as professor of inorganic and organic chemistry from 1861 until 1871.
Gallery of Stanislao Cannizzaro
Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5, 00185 Roma RM, Italy
Cannizzaro worked at the University of Rome from 1871 until one year before his death.
Gallery of Stanislao Cannizzaro
Via Balbi, 5, 16126 Genova GE, Italy
From 1855 to 1861 Cannizzaro was professor of chemistry at the University of Genoa.
In 1841 Cannizzaro entered the University of Palermo as a medical student. Later in his life, he worked here as professor of inorganic and organic chemistry from 1861 until 1871.
Stanislao Cannizzaro was an Italian chemist. He was closely associated with a crucial reform movement in science.
Background
Cannizzaro was born on July 13, 1826, in Palermo, Italy. He was the youngest of the ten children of Mariano Cannizzaro, a magistrate and minister of police in Palermo, and Anna di Benedetto, who came from a family of Sicilian noblemen.
Sicily was under the rule of the Bourbon kings of Naples, and the Cannizzaro family supported the regime. One of Stanislao’s sisters became a lady-in-waiting to the queen. On his mother’s side, however, there were a number of political liberals. Three of Cannizzaro’s maternal uncles were later killed in the campaigns of Garibaldi, and he himself became a strong antimonarchist.
Education
Cannizzaro’s early education in the schools of Palermo was essentially classical, although it included some mathematics. In 1841 he entered the University of Palermo as a medical student. Here he met the physiologist Michele Fodera, who introduced him to biological research. With Fodera he attempted to work out a distinction between centrifugal and centripetal nerves. In the course of this work Cannizzaro realized his need for more understanding of chemistry, which was very poorly taught at the university.
In 1845, at the Congress of Italian Scientists in Naples, Cannizzaro reported the results of his physiological studies and met the physicist Macedonio Melloni, in whose laboratory he worked for a short time. He confided his lack of chemical training to Melloni and as a result was introduced to Ralfaele Piria, professor of chemistry at the University of Pisa and the leading Italian chemist of the day. He took Cannizzaro as his laboratory assistant, not only teaching him chemistry but also allowing him to take part in investigations of natural substances. It was at Pisa, between 1845 and 1847, that Cannizzaro decided to devote himself to chemistry. Here also he became a close friend of Cesare Bertagnini, a very promising pupil of Piria’s. Although Bertagnini died at thirty, he and Cannizzaro, along with Piria, were influential in founding an Italian school of chemistry during the early 1850’s.
In the summer of 1847 Cannizzaro returned to Palermo, intending to resume his studies at Pisa in the autumn. He soon found that a revolution against the Bourbons was in preparation; and in spite of the conservatism of his family, he joined the revolutionaries. When the rebellion finally failed in April 1849, he was forced to flee to Marseilles. From Marseilles he made his way to Paris, where, through the influence of Piria, he met Cahours, who introduced him into Chevreul’s laboratory in the Jardin des Plantes. Here he resumed his chemical studies, working with Stanislaus Cloez on cyanamide and its derivatives.
In 1851 Cannizzaro was able to return to Italy as professor of physics, chemistry, and mechanics at the Collegio Nazionale in Alessandria. Although the facilities were poor, Piria urged him to accept the position because it could - and indeed did - lead to better appointments. Cannizzaro built up the research laboratory and carried out some of his best work in organic chemistry there. As a result of his work at Alessandria, he was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Genoa in 1855. There was no laboratory at the university; and Cannizzaro, an excellent teacher, was able for a time to devote much thought to his course in theoretical chemistry. It was from Genoa that in 1858 he sent the letter describing the course on which his fame chiefly rests. In September 1860 he attended the Karlsruhe Congress, at which he made known his ideas to the chemical world.
Political events again changed the course of Cannizzaro’s career. Garibaldi’s Sicilian revolt in 1860 was successful, and Cannizzaro returned to his native Palermo to take part in the new government. This time he did not participate in the actual fighting, but he became a member of the Extraordinary Council of the state of Sicily. In 1861 he was appointed professor of inorganic and organic chemistry at the University of Palermo. Once more he had to organize and build a laboratory, since the only facility for chemical research was the same small room that had been available in his student days. Cannizzaro was so successful in his efforts that Palermo became the center of chemical education in Italy. At the same time he was active in establishing schools of various types in Palermo, and during an epidemic of cholera he served as commissioner of public health.
With the unification of Italy, Cannizzaro made his last move, to the University of Rome in 1871. As before, he found that laboratory facilities had been neglected. He therefore founded the Italian Institute of Chemistry in the old Convent of San Lorenzo. In the functioning laboratory that he established he was able to continue the work on the constitution of natural substances that he had begun with Piria. His efforts during the latter part of his life were devoted to determining the structure of santonin, which he showed to be one of the few natural compounds derived from naphthalene.
Cannizzaro continued to give his lectures with great enthusiasm and success until nearly the end of his life. discontinuing them only the year before his death at eighty-three, on May 10, 1910. On the centenary of his birth in 1926, during the Second National Italian Congress of Pure and Applied Chemistry, his body was transferred to the Pantheon at Palermo.
In addition to his scientific work, Cannizzaro also took an essential part in military and political affairs. When a revolution broke out in 1847, Cannizzaro returned from his studies in Pisa to his native Sicily, where he took an active role in fighting on the side of the republicans, who were seeking to break the domination of the Italian states by Austria and the House of Bourbon (rulers of the kingdom of Naples). Following the failure of the revolt in 1849, Cannizzaro fled to Paris. Eleven years later, he took part in another Sicilian revolt. Led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, this revolt was successful and led to the unification of Italy under Victor Emmanuel II. Cannizzaro moved to Rome and was made a senator. As a moderate liberal, he played a role in shaping the new constitution and establishing political reforms.
Views
Cannizzaro carried out all of his experimental work in the field of organic chemistry. Whenever he had a laboratory available, he continued the work on natural substances that he had begun at Pisa. He also devoted much time to the study of aromatic alcohols, a class of compounds little known before his work. In 1853, while studying the behavior of benzaldehyde, he discovered its reaction with potassium hydroxide, in which an oxidation-reduction produces both benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol. This is still known to organic chemists as the “Cannizzaro reaction.” He was also the first to propose the name “hydroxyl” for the OH radical.
Personality
Cannizzaro was well-read in the history of chemistry and was therefore able to develop his course historically. He not only gave credit to the work of well-known figures but also devoted time to such little-known authors as Gaudin. His first four lectures were purely historical, to give his students the background for understanding the current situation of chemistry.
Connections
In 1856 Cannizzaro married an Englishwoman, Henrietta Withers, with whom he had one son.