Fabbroni (or Erroneously Fabroni), Giovanni Valentino Mattia

(b. Florence, Italy, 13 February 1752; d. Florence, 17 December 1822)

economics, physics.

The son of Orazio Fabbroni, who came from a noble family, and of Rosalind Werner, from Heidelberg, Fabbroni showed his ability so early that in 1768 he was made assistant to Felice Fontana in the Museum of Physics and Natural Sciences in Florence, where he became assistant director in 1780 and director (for a year) in 1805. From 1776 to 1778 he lived in Paris, and then in London. He frequented the enlightened and radical circls of the two capitals, meeting Benjamin Franklin and corresponding with Thomas Jefferson.

Upon his return to Florence in 1782, Fabbroni married the patrcian Teresa Ciamingnani, from Gros seto continued his economic studies defending free trade, entered politics, and published many works on agriculture, botany, chemistery, physics, archaeology, and philology. In 1798 he participated in the work of the Commission on Weights and Measures in Paris; in 1802 he was named an honorary professor at the University of Pisa and in 1803, director of the mint. Fabbroni was a member of the Accademia dei Gerogofili, of the Society Italiana delle Scienze del l’Accademia dei XL, and of thirty or more other academies, both Italian and foreign.

In a memoir read in 1792 to the Accademia dei Georgofili of Florence (Published in 1801) and reworked in a new memoir published in 1799 in the Journal de physique, Fabbroni maintained that the phenomena discovered by Galvani (1791) were not due to the action of an electric fluid, but to the reciprocal action of dissimilar metals upon contact, in the presence of moisture. Because of these writings he is often considered the originator of the chemical theory of the battery, even though at the galvanic phenomena were independent of the production of electricity. Nonetheless, his ideas certainly influenced the emergence in the first years of the nineteenth century of the chemical theory of the battery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A collection of Fabbroni’s writings is Scritti di Pubblica economia, 2 vols. (Florence, 1847–1848). See also “Sur l’action chimique des différens metaux,” in Journal de physique..., 49 (1799), 348–357; and “Dell’azione dei metail nuovamente avvertita,” in Attidella R. Societàa economica di Firenze osica de’ Georgofili, 4 (1801), 349–370. Letters and documents cdoncerning Fabbroni are in the Italian State Archives, the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, and the BibliothÉque Nationale in Paris.

II. Secondary Literature. On Fabbroni and his work, see Mario Gliozzi, “Giovanni Fabbroni e la teoria chimica della pila,” in Archeion, 18 (1936), 160–165; Andrea Mustoxidi, “Giovanni Fabbroni,” in Emilio de Tipaldo, ed., Biografia degli italiani illustri, I (Venice, 1834), 337–345, with list of published and unpublished works; Poggendorff, I, cols. 709–710; Ugo Schiff, “Il museo di storia naturale,” in Archeion, 9 (1928), 296–297, 318–320; and Franco Venturi, “Giovanni Fabbroni,” in Illuministi italiani, III (Milan, 1958), 1081–1134, with selections from his works.

Mario Gliozzi