CORBINO, ORSO MARIO

(b. Augusta, Sicily, 30 April 1876; d. Rome, Italy, 23 January 1937)

experimental physics.

Corbino was the second son of seven children of Vincenzo Corbino, owner of a small pasta-making business, and Rosaria Imprescia. His father had been taught by the Franciscans, receiving an unusually good classical humanistic education: his mother, though unschooled, had a lively native intelligence. Their youngest son, Epicarmo, did not take a university degree yet became a university professor of economics and held cabinet posts in three governments after the fall of Mussolini in 1943, In 1901 Mario (as he was known) married Francesca Camilleri; they had a daughter and a son. Among Corbino’s many honors were the Royal Prize for Physics for 1912 of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Mussolini Prize of the Accademia d’Italia (1933), and appointment as senator of the kingdom (1920).

Corbino’s intellectual abilities were recognized early. While still in secondary school (liceo), he began to assist Adolfo Bartoli, professor of physics at the University of Catania. Corbino enrolled there in 1892 but transferred to Palermo when Bartoli accepted a post at Pavia in 1893. With a laurea in physics (1896), he began to teach in a liceo at Palermo while an assistant at the university. In 1902 Corbino was declared qualified to hold university professorships in both experimental physics and electrical engineering. In January 1906 he was appointed, after winning a national competition, to teach experimental physics at the University of Messina. In 1907 he won the competition for full professor. In 1909 he was moved to Rome by the minister of public instruction to teach a special physics course that the professor of experimental physics, Pietro Blaserna, had fostered to complement the laboratory work of advanced students. Corbino remained in that post at Rome until 1918, when, following the death of Blaserna, he was named professor of experimental physics and director of the physics institute, positions he held until his death.

Corbino’s research may be divided into three major categories: magneto-optics; variable currents in inductive circuits, sound recording, and its radio transmission; and the electron theory of metals and the Corbino effect. Other research included the properties of nitroglycerine; the specific heats of metals at very high temperatures, which indicated large deviations from the Dulong-Petit law of constant atomic heats; and elastic deformations in solids by means of the accidental double refraction of transparent models under specific stresses, verifying the theory of Vito Volterra. Similar photoelastic studies have become widespread in engineering through the work of Ernest G. Coker and L. N. G. Filon.

The researches in magneto-optics were begun at Palermo, where, with Blaserna’s early student. Professor Damiano Macaluso, Corbino published studies of what came to be called the Macaluso-Corbino effect. Related to the Faraday effect and the inverse Zeeman effect, it involves the anomalous rotatory power of sodium vapor in the vicinity of its absorption lines when placed in a magnetic field. A report presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences excited discussion abroad, and further research by Corbino yielded results in conflict with Woldemar Voigt, s theory. In 1902 Pieter Zeeman undertook experiments that yielded Corbino’s results under conditions not foreseen by Voigt. Corbino thus won an international reputation while in his twenties.

From 1899 on, Corbino undertook extensive research on oscillatory and otherwise variable currents in inductive circuits. Duddell’s musical arc, the Wehnelt electrolytic interrupter, the Rühmkorff coil, magnetic hysteresis, and generators and motors, making early use of the Braun tube as an oscilloscope. His electrical investigations eventually encompassed high-voltage power supplies for X-ray tubes, triodes, and high-fidelity sound recording and its radio transmission. At his initiative the Istituto Nazionale di Elettroacustica was established in 1936; it was named for him after his death.

In 1911 Corbino began to publish on magnetoresistance in metals, especially bismuth, and revealed a phenomenon related to the Hall effect. The Corbino effect occurs when a circular metal disk with inner and outer concentric ring contacts is placed in a magnetic field along its axis; the current through the disk no longer moves radially but spirals around it, changing the resistance in the circuit. The 1972 proposal of G. P. Carver to use the Corbino disk arrangement in direct measurement of Hall mobilities in amorphous semiconductors has been broadly applied.

Of all Corbino’s research, that close to electrical engineering paved the way for his public career. In 1916 he was an organizer of the national scientifictechnical committee designed to promote links between the sciences and their related industries. Beginning in 1911. Corbino became a board member of electric utility companies, and afterward also of banks and telephone companies: eventually he became chairman of several boards and moved easily in the highest Italian industrial and banking circles. In 1921 and 1922 he served for seven months as minister of public instruction, the first experimental scientist to do so since Carlo Matteucci in 1862. In 1923 he became minister of the economy in a coalition cabinet led by Mussolini, although he was never a Fascist party member and had voted against Mussolini’s first government in 1922. Corbino strongly favored the use of foreign technology and capital in Italian energy development, but an agreement he worked out with the Sinclair Oil Company aroused such vigorous opposition in both industrial and government circles, and was so tainted with rumors of collusion between Fascist bigwigs and Sinclair, that he resigned in June 1924.

Corbino’s ambitious vision for the revival of Italian physics was unique among his contemporaries. From 1909 on, he propagandized for a new research tradition based on a close collaboration between theorists and experimenters, encouraged ties between science and national technical and economic planning in order to concentrate intellectual and financial resources, and worked to overcome endemic provincialism and backwardness. His great success was Enrico Fermi’s group, whose quantum mechanical “experiments in theoretical physics” and prowess in nuclear physics were the local manifestation of what was intended to be a program for a national renaissance. The postwar international successes of Italian nuclear and particle physics are the legacy of both Fermi’s achievements and Corbino’s vision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Some of Corbino’s public lectures and Senate speeches were collected in Conferenze e discorsi di O. M. Corbino (Rome.[1938]), which also contains a nearly complete list of his scientific and popular scientific writings. A few additional items, especially political and economic speeches, may be gleaned from the Catalogo generale delta libreria italiana, compiled by Attilio pagliaini and later by Arrigo Plinio Pagliaini; from Catalogo cumulativo 1886–1957 del Bollettino delle pubblicazioni italiane: and from the Dizionario biografico delgiitaliani article noted below. From 1908 to 1910 he published a physics text for secondary schools that went through eight editions by 1924. His 1929 speech asserting the exhaustion of traditional researches except for applications, claiming that no new forces or significant new phenomena would be found outside the atomic nucleus, and announcing the move of the Rome group into nuclear physics, has been translated by Fausta Segré as “The New Goals of Experimental Physics,” in Minerva, 9 (1971). 528–537, with an introductory note by Emilio Segré

Letters written by Corbino are in the Vito Volterra Papers and the Tullio Levi-Civita Papers, both at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, and the Augusto Righi Papers, at the Accademia Nazionale dei Quaranta. Rome.

II. Secondary Literature. The most recent com prehensive treatment of Corbino’s life and multiple careers is Edoardo Amaldi and Luciano Segreto, “Corbino, Orso Mario,” in Dizionario biografico degliitaliani, XXVIII, 760–766; it contains extensive references not available elsewhere for particular aspects of his political career. An elaborate treatment of his program for the revival of Italian physics is given by Carlo Tarsitani. “La fisica italiana tra vecchioenuovo: Orso Mario Corbinoelanascita del gruppo Fermi,” in Giovanni Battimelli, Michelangelo De Maria, and Arcangelo Rossi, eds., La ristrutturazione delle scienze trale due guerre mondiali, 1 (Rome, 1984). 323–346.

Indispensable for his childhood and family life is the autobiography of Epicarmo Corbino, Racconto diunavita (Naples, 1972), Obituaries may be traced through extracts reprinted in Conferenzee discorsi and the list in Poggendorff. VIIb. Other useful sources include Gerald Holton. “Striking Gold in Science; Fermi’s Group and the Recapture of Italy’s Place in Physics,’ in Minerva, 12 (1974), 159–198, reprinted as “Fermi’s Group and the Recapture of Italy’s Place in Physics,” in Gerald Holton, The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies (Cambridge, 1978), 155–198; and Emilio Segré, Enrico Fermi, Physicist (Chicago, 1970).

See also G. P. Carver, “A Corbino Disk Apparatus to Measure Hall Mobilities in Amorphous Semiconductors,” in Review of Scientific Instruments, 43 (1972), 1257–1263; and D. A. Kleinman and A. L, Schawlow.’ Corbino Disk,’ in Journal of Applied Physics, 31 (1960), 2176–2187.

Barbara J. Reeves