There are really only two things to see at Pisa: one is the Leaning Tower, from which Galileo with his line and plummet made some of his most interesting experiments; and the other is the Cathedral where the visitor beholds the great bronze lamp that is suspended from the vaulted ceiling. When he was about twenty-one, sitting in the silence of this church (which the passing years have only made more beautiful), he noticed that there was a slight swinging motion to this lamp—it was never still. Galileo set to work timing and measuring these oscillations, and he found that they were always done in exact measure and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to perfecting an astronomical clock for measuring movements of the stars. And from this was originated the pendulum-clock, where before we had depended on sundials.
The endeavor of Galileo's parents had been to keep him ignorant of mathematics and practical life, that he might blossom forth as a saint who would sing and play and make pictures like those of Leonardo, and carve statues like Michelangelo, only better.
But parents plan, and Fate disposes.
In Fifteen Hundred Eighty-three, Ostilio Ricci, the famous mathematician, chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and gave a lecture at the Court, on Geometry.
Galileo was not interested in the theme, but he was in the speaker, and so he attended the lecture.
This action proved one of the pivotal points in his life.
"Whether other people really teach us anything, is a question," says Stanley Hall; "but they do sometimes give us impulses, and make us find out for ourselves."
Ricci made Galileo find out for himself.
He turned to Archimedes from Plato. Geometry became a passion, and a very wise man has told us that we never accomplish anything, either good or bad, without passion. Passion means one hundred pounds of steam on the boiler, with love sitting on the safety-valve, when the blow-off is set for fifty.
It surely is risky business, I will admit; accidents will occur occasionally and explosions sometimes happen, but everything is risky, even life, since few get out of it alive.