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As might well be expected from what they accomplished for music in other ways the inventions of Italians in musical instruments are many and various and most important. The violin in the form in which we have it comes entirely from their hands and it is besides to Italian makers that we owe the perfection of these instruments. The violins of Guarnieri and above all of Stradivari have never been excelled. Indeed a Stradivarius remains a most precious treasure at the present day, two and a half centuries after its manufacture, not because of its antiquity, but for its marvelous perfection of tone. In the piano the most important mechanical device is the hammer action which changed the old spinet into the modern piano.

Father Beccaria was the first to invent a series of electrical instruments that demonstrated how well the energy might be applied. Priestley, the English discoverer of oxygen, in his History of Electricity has praised Beccaria’s ingenuity and has described some of these rather striking instruments. Galvani demonstrated Galvanism and opened up a whole new vista in science. Volta invented the Voltaic pile, the first continuous source of electricity that men ever had and for that reason some times spoken of as a greater invention than the steam engine. In the light of modern developments in electricity in the mechanical world, this expression now seems to have much more truth than when it was originally uttered. Volta also invented the gold leaf electroscope and a number of very ingenious instruments for the demonstration of certain physical phenomena. Nobili invented the thermopile and the thermo-electroscope, while at the end of the nineteenth century the Italian Marconi had the practical inventive genius to bring together a series of discoveries that had been made by others and combine them in such a way as to make wireless telegraphy with its wonders possible.