Nello Carrara
Nello Carrara was born in Florence, Italy, on February 19, 1900 and has been a notable Italian Physicist of the XX century. He got his high school diploma in 1917 and immediately after fought in the last battles of World War I. He joined the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the worldwide-known public higher learning institution in Pisa created in 1810, during the Napoleonic era.
Nello Carrara was the fellow of other students that will acquire world-level fame: Enrico Fermi and Franco Rasetti. After working for the University of Pisa, he became, only 24-year-old, professor at the Navy Academy of Livorno, where he worked until 1954 both teaching Navy officers and carrying out researches. Carrara never lost touch with Fermi and Rasetti, and the three enjoyed mountain climbing and talks in Florence.
Researches were carried out by Carrara at the RIEC (Regio Istituto Elettrotecnico e delle Comunicazioni [Royal Institute for Electrical Techniques and Communications]) of the Italian Navy, within the Academy. The Institute, founded by Giancarlo Vallauri in 1916, housed the first Italian group of researchers in the fields of microwave engineering and radar techniques. The RIEC maintained a prominent position in this field for many years.
Institute of Physics at Arcetri, Florence, 1926.From the left, Franco Rasetti, Nello Carrara and Enrico Fermi; in the back Rita Brunetti.
at the RIEC, Nello Carrara published a paper[1] in the first issue of the Italian journal Alta Frequenza, a technical journal founded by Vallauri himself. In such a paper Carrara stated that “un triodo, ad elettrodi cilindrici, con tensione di placca nulla o negative e con tensione di griglia fortemente positiva, puo emettere onde elettromagnetiche di frequenza elevatissima (microonde) [a triode with cylindrical electrodes, with a low anode potential and a highly positive grid potential, is capable of generating electromagnetic waves of a very high frequency (microwaves)]” and explicitly related the term microwaves to electromagnetic waves with frequencies around 109 Hz. He then published a second paper in English of similar content[2].
The Philips ‘E’ type triode, in production from 1922 to 1926, with which Nello Carrara generated for the first time “microwaves”. It is due to Carrara the introduction of the term in the technical scientific literature [courtesy of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Florence].
The term microwave was universally accepted and is now so widespread as to be in the common lexicon of every people[3]. The original triode used by Carrara in his 1932 experiments is now preserved in a showcase at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Florence.
After World War II he also taught physics at the University of Bari between 1945 and 1946 and at the University of Pisa from 1947 to 1950. In 1954 he became a professor of “theory and technique of electromagnetic waves” at the Naval University Institute of Naples, and then moved to the University of Florence in 1956, where in 1975 he became professor emeritus. Among his many Academic merits, there is his contribution to the foundation of the Faculty of Engineering in Florence (1972). While at the University of Naples he published a book Teoria e Tecnica delle Onde Elettromagnetiche [Theory and Technique of Electromagnetic Waves] and while at the University of Florence he collected his lectures in a book Onde Elettromagnetiche [Electromagnetic Waves]. Both these books are so clear and well-structured that will soon be united in a single volume, renewed in notation and with enhanced or added images, figures and graphs to be used by the students of the Bachelor degree in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Florence[4].
Left: the original building of the IROE, built in 1958. When founded by Carrara, it was the largest center of the Italian National Research Council. Right: current building of the Istituto di Fisica Applicata “Nello Carrara” (IFAC), the current name of the IROE.
In applied research he attained outstanding results: In 1946 he founded in Florence the Centro Microonde [Microwave Center] of the National Research Council (CNR), which was constituted within the University, and which later acquired a building specifically built for it (1958). The Centro was later named Istituto di Ricerca sulle Onde Elettromagnetiche (IROE) [Research Institute on Electromagnetic Waves](1968) and is now known as Istituto di Fisica Applicata “Nello Carrara” [Istitute for Applied Physics “Nello Carrara”](2002), and occupies a new, much larger, buiding. When it was founded by Carrara, the Centro Microonde was the largest center of the Italian National Research Council.
In industrial applications, in 1953 he co-founded, SMA (Segnalamento Marittimo e Aereo [Sea and Airborne Signaling]) a leading radar and telecommunication company in Florence, of which he was the first president. He was also president of Selesmar, a company specialized in commercial radar navigation and vice president of ISC, a company specialized in the supply of communication equipment for the aerospace industry.
The SMA (Segnalamento Marittimo e Aereo [Sea and Airborne Signaling]) logo and its buildings, beautifully integrating an historical villa and a modern, mostly below ground level so as to be almost invisible from otside, building. SMA was a leading radar and telecommunication company in Florence.
He was author of over 100 papers in referred technical journals, he awarded various prizes and honors, including the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and that of Cavaliere of the Order of Saints Maurizio and Lazzaro.
Nello Carrara died in Florence on June 5, 1993.
[1] N. Carrara, “La rivelazione delle microonde [The detection of microwaves],” Alta Frequenza, vol. 1, no. l, Mar. 1932, pp. 7-11.
[2] N. Carrara, “The detection of microwaves,” Proc. IRE, vol. 20, no. 10, Oct. 1932, pp. 1615-1925.