For Rome, “the Italian proposal is part of a broader effort to promote the country’s scientific heritage and Italy’s role in major international technological innovation initiatives.”
The diplomatic push intensified on Thursday, with junior digital minister Alessio Butti discussing the proposal with Annette Koo, director general of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), a Paris-based international organization in charge of measurements.
“The Italian proposal goes well beyond the linguistic question and represents the desire to give important historical recognition to one of the fathers of modern science, whose work radically changed humanity’s relationship with electricity and technological progress,” Butti said in a statement.
In his meeting with Koo, Butti said that most units of measurements that are named after indivuals maintain the full family name, without abbreviations. This is the case with hertz, newton or watt, for example.
The Italian official was in the French capital also to attend a G7 meeting of digital ministers.
The change would need to first be implemented domestically and then pushed at the international level with the goal of adopting it with a formal vote at the General Conference of the BIPM in October this year.
Among other inventions, Italian physicist Volta invented the electric pile, the ancestor of the electric battery, between 1799 and 1800.