Vito Volterra by Angelo Guerraggio & Giovanni Paoloni

Author:Angelo Guerraggio & Giovanni Paoloni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

5.3 The Office for Inventions and Research

The very day before war was proclaimed, Volterra renewed at the Ministry of War his ‘request already made this past April’ to be enlisted ‘in technical or laboratory service or in another service of any form or nature whatsoever’. At the same time, he accepted inscription in that list of ‘persons with technical competence’ called for by a decree of 29 April. His request for voluntary enlistment was accepted within 2 months: while he carried on his activities on the front of propaganda, Volterra was named a lieutenant in the corps of engineers, and assigned to service in the Central Institute of Aeronautics, under the direction of Major Gaetano Arturo Crocco (1877–1968).

Volterra had been interested in aeronautics since 1905, and Crocco had been in contact with him since 1906, when he had begun to work as a designer of hydroplanes and dirigibles at the airfield of Vigna di Valle (near Rome). At the beginning of World War I, the Central Institute of Aeronautics was the most important organisation in the field of aeronautic research applied to the military, and would remain so until the creation in 1935 of the research centre for aeronautical construction in Guidonia (also near Rome). After having founded it and assumed its directorship in 1908, Crocco – a true pioneer in Italian aeronautics, and following the war, a professor of aeronautic engineering at the University of Rome – had set up a program to study the effects of the wind on the motion of dirigibles and airplanes, and calculate the trajectories of projectiles fired from them (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2At work on the dirigibles in the airfield at Campi Bisenzio (Near Florence)

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