see it clearly
Galileo's Childhood
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 ingenious toy-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.