From his
earliest childhood Galileo, the eldest of the family, was remarkable for intellectual aptitude as well as for mechanical
invention. His favorite pastime was the construction of
original and ingenioustoy-machines; but his application to
literary studies
was equally conspicuous. In the monastery of Vallombrosa, near Florence, where his education was
principally conducted, he not only made himself acquainted
with the best Latin authors, but acquired a fair command of
the Greek tongue, thus laying the foundation of his brilliant
and elegant style. From one of the monks he also received
instruction in logic; but the subtleties of the scholastic
science were thoroughly distasteful to him. A document
published by F. Selmi in 1864 proves that be was at this time
so far attracted towards a religious life as to have joined
the novitiate; but his father, who had other designs for him,
seized the opportunity of an attack of ophtharmia to withdraw
him permanently from the care of the monks. Having had
personal experience with both of music and of mathematics, he
desired that his son should apply himself to the cultivation
of medicine, and, not without some straining of his slender
resources, placed him, before he had completed his eighteenth
year, at the university of Pisa. He accordingly matriculated
there on the 5th of November 1581, and immediately entered
upon attendance at the lectures of the celebrated physician
and botanist, Andrea Cesalpino.
The natural
gifts of the young student seemed at this time equally ready
to develop in any direction towards which choice or hazard
might incline them. In musical skill and invention he already
vied with the best professors of the art in Italy; his
personal taste would have led him to choose painting as his
profession, and one of the most eminent artists of his day,
Lodovico Cigoli, owned that to his judgment and counsel he was
mainly indebted for the success
of his works. In 1581, while watching a lamp set swinging in
the cathedral of Pisa, he observed that, whatever the range of
its oscillations, they were invariably executed in equal
times. The experimental verification of this fact led him to
the important discovery of the isochronisms of the pendulum.
He at first applied the new principle to pulse measurement,
and more than fifty years later turned it to account in the
construction of an astronomical clock. Up to this time he was
entirely ignorant of mathematics, his father having carefully
held him aloof from a study which he rightly apprehended would
lead to his total alienation from that of medicine. Accident,
however, frustrated this purpose.
A lesson in
geometry, given by Ostilio Ricci to the pages of the
grand-ducal court, chanced, tradition avers, to have Galileo
for an unseen listener; his attention was riveted, his dormant
genius was roused, and he threw all his energies into the new
pursuit thus unexpectedly presented to him. With Ricci’s
assistance, he rapidly mastered the elements of the science,
and eventually extorted his father’s reluctant permission to
exchange Hippocrates and Galen for Euclid and Archimedes. In
1585 he was withdrawn from the university, through lack of
means, before he had taken a degree, and returned to Florence,
where his family habitually resided. We next hear of him as
lecturing before the Florentine Academy on the site and
dimensions of Dante’s Inferno; and he shortly afterwards
published an essay descriptive of his invention of the
hydrostatic balance, which rapidly made his name known
throughout Italy.
His first
patron. was the Marchese Guidubaldo del Monte of Pesaro, a man
equally eminent in science, and influential through family
connections. At the Marchese’s request he wrote, in 1588, a
treatise on the center of gravity in solids, which obtained
for him, together with the title of “ the Archimedes of his
time,” the honorable though not lucrative post of
mathematical lecturer at the Pisan university. During the
ensuing two years (1589—1591) he carried on that remarkable
series of experiments by which he established the first
principles of dynamics and earned the undying hostility of
bigoted Aristotelians. From the leaning tower of Pisa he
afforded to all the professors and students of the university
ocular demonstration, of the falsehood of the Peripatetic
dictum that heavy bodies fall with velocities proportional to
their weights, and with unanswerable logic demolished all the
time-honored maxims of the schools regarding the motion of
projectiles, and elemental weight or levity.
But while
he convinced, he failed to conciliate his adversaries. The
keen sarcasm of his polished rhetoric was not calculated to
soothe the susceptibilities of men already smarting under the
deprivation of their most cherished illusions. He seems, in
addition, to have compromised his position with the grandducal
family by the imprudent candor with which he condemned a
machine for clearing the port of Leghorn, invented by
Giovanni’ de’ Medici, an illegitimate son of Cosmo I.
Princely favor being withdrawn, private rancor was free to
show itself. He was publicly hissed at his lecture, and found
it prudent to resign his professorship and withdraw to
Florence in 1591. Through the death of his father in July of
that year family cares and responsibilities devolved upon him,
and thus his nomination to the chair of mathematics at the
university of Padua, secured by the influence of the Marchese
Guidubaldo with ‘the Venetian senate, was welcome both as
affording a relief from pecuniary embarrassment and as opening
a field for scientific distinction.