Antonio Pacinotti

Antonio Pacinotti was an Italian physicist who built one of the first practical direct current dynamos capable of generating a continuous electric current, developed in 1860 while he was a university student and published in 1865. His ring armature design, wound so that current could be drawn continuously rather than in the pulsing bursts earlier machines produced, anticipated the commercially successful Gramme dynamo built independently by the Belgian engineer Zenobe Gramme a decade later. Pacinotti's machine could also run in reverse as an electric motor, one of the earliest demonstrations that the same device could convert electricity to mechanical motion or mechanical motion to electricity.