Niccolò Cabeo

Niccolò Cabeo, also known as Nicolaus Cabeus, born in Ferrara on 26 February 1586 and dead in Genoa on 30 June 1650, was an Italian Jesuit philosopher, theologian, engineer and mathematician. Educated at the Jesuit college in Parma from 1602, he studied in Padua, Piacenza and Parma and then taught theology and mathematics at Parma before becoming a preacher in 1622. He had the patronage of the dukes of Mantua and the Este in Ferrara, was involved in hydraulics projects, and later taught mathematics in Genoa. He is noted for physics experiments and observations: he observed Giovanni Battista Baliani's experiments on falling objects and noted that two different objects fall in the same time regardless of the medium, and he experimented with pendulums and observed that an electrically charged body can attract non-electrified objects and that two charged objects repel each other. His observations appeared in the Philosophia magnetica of 1629.