Transcription of the Notes on Electricity from the Accademia del cimento

 I've been working late nights this week, practicing my transcribing. The reason is, I'd like to transcribe the handwritten notes used by the Accademia del cimento (ca. 1657-1667), an early modern learned academy comprising a dozen or so members that published one of the first "lab manual"s for physics. Their publication, the Saggi (Italian for essays) was originally written in Italian, then translated to Latin and English. It was popular then, and it draws a fair amount of scholarly attention even today. 

The manuscripts are available from the Museo Galileo archives, and they're pretty voluminous. Fortunately, the electrical experiments are fairly brief (as you'd expect around 1660), especially compared to the experiments in hydraulics and pneumatics, which is what the Saggi are probably best remembered for. 

The notes that I've located so far come under the title Gal. 263 - V, Posteriori. 4, Accademia del Cimento. Fisica sperimentale. fol. 84r - 106r. For those unfamiliar with manuscript terminology, fol.= folio (Latin for leaf) meaning a page, and pages are labeled r and v for front (recto) and back (verso) resp. Some of the important bits were already transcribed by Giovannia Tagioni Tozzetti, and you can find them either in his Notizie degli aggrandimenti (book II, part 2) (1780) or in his Atti e memorie inedite dell'Accademia del cimento (1780), both available online. The transcriptions can be found in the first reference on pp. 546-556. 

Using Tozzetti's transcriptions, I was able to make a side-by-side version of the manuscript with transcription. Unfortunately, I don't know Italian, and this being the 1600s, there are a fair number of alternate spellings and archaisms. This makes it really difficult for me to transcribe the otherwise very readable and consistent handwriting in those manuscripts. So for now, it's just a partial transcription. I started on the lengthier parts, but it's too difficult to guess at words that are probably obvious to someone familiar with Italian. 

If you have corrections, please leave me a comment!


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