Lungarno Antonio Pacinotti

This guide to Lungarno Antonio Pacinotti in Pisa opens in eighteen sixty, when a teenage student named Antonio Pacinotti built a small ring-and-coil machine that produced a steady electric current instead of the jolting pulses of earlier generators, then published it in an obscure physics journal in eighteen sixty-five to almost no readers. Ten years later in Paris, Belgian instrument maker Zenobe Gramme built a strikingly similar ring, one that reached the Academy of Sciences, powered arc lights in department stores, and made him famous. Walk the embankment where Pacinotti was born and later taught, and listen for how he reacted on seeing his own machine return from France under someone else's name.