Cavallo, Tiberius (McKechnie Section 1)

See also Section Two and James Lind in this Section

This entry is confined to an account of Cavallo's life. His work as a profilist is so closely linked with that of James Lind, with whom he worked in collaboration, that I have thought it best to discuss it jointly with that of Lind in the entry on the latter in this section. I refer there also to a contrivance invented by Cavallo for first reducing and then taking profiles.

For most of the information given here about Cavallo, as far as his work as a profilist is concerned, I am indebted to Mr F. Gordon Roe, who published his findings in an article: 'A forgotten group of profilists', Apollo, November. 1935. Other details of Cavallo's life and work have been taken from the Dictionary of National Biography.

Tiberius Cavallo was born in Naples in 1749, the son of a physician practising in that city. At an early age he left Italy and settled in England. A natural philosopher, in October 1775 he published a notice of 'Extraordinary Electricity of the Atmosphere observed at Islington'. Cavallo was the inventor of several ingenious pieces of apparatus for electrical and chemical experiments. He was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society on 9 December 1779.

He was the author of many publications. In 1786 A Complete Treatise on Electricity was issued; it reached a third edition in 1795. In 1787 he published A Treatise on Magnetism in Theory and Practice. Ten years later he contributed to Nicholson's Journal a paper 'On the Multiplier of Electricity'. He also paid some attention to aerostation (ballooning), on the history and practice of which he published a treatise in 1785.

At about this time he became interested in meteoric phenomena, and during the latter part of his life he devoted much time to the use of electricity as a curative agent. In 1780 he published On Medical Electricity and, in 1798, Medical Properties of Factitious Air. His last work appears to have been The Elements of Natural and Experimental Philosophy (four volumes, 1803). He contributed an article on meteors to Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica. He was much interested in the experiments of his fellow countryman, Volta (Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio, the Italian physicist and pioneer of electrical science after whom the 'Volt' was named).

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