Italians Natta (the inventor of the first catalyst for the production of isotactic propylene and among the fathers of macromolecular chemistry, for which he won the Nobel prize for chemistry along with Karl Ziegler), Evangelista Torricelli (inventor of the barometer), Alessandro Volta (inventor of the electric battery), Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of radio), Antonio Meucci (known for developing a voice-communication apparatus, often credited as the inventor of the first telephone before even Alexander Graham Bell), Galileo Ferraris (one of the pioneers of AC power system, invented the first induction motor), Ettore Majorana (who discovered the Majorana fermions), and Carlo Rubbia (1984 Nobel
Alessandro Volta between 1776 and 1778, Volta studied the chemistry of gases. He researched and discovered methane after reading a paper by Benjamin Franklin of the United States on "flammable air". In November 1776, he found methane at Lake Maggiore, and by 1778 he managed to isolate methane. He devised experiments such as the ignition of methane by an electric spark in a closed vessel. Volta also studied what we now call electrical capacitance, developing separate means to study both electrical potential ("V" ) and charge ("Q" ), and discovering that for a given object, they are proportional. This is called Volta's