Roberto Mantovani an Italian defender of the continental drift and planetary expansion

Roberto Mantovani, violinist and scientist,born in Parma on March 25, 1854. He was part of an
orches-tral team reaching the volcanic Réunion Island in 1878.
During his stay on the island, Mantovani had the occasion of
observing the huge volcanic fractures on the Indian ocean shore
near the town of Saint Denis. He argued that, on a global scale, all
the continents might have undergone the same disjunction processes
as the volcanic flanks. The global fractures are today the
oceans. After several years from his observations, Mantovani
published his idea in 1889 in the Bulletin of the Societé des
Sciences et des Arts of Saint Denis, where the Italian established
his family and became Consul of Italy. After an economic crisis
and an epidemic plague in the Réunion Island, Roberto Mantovani
left his post as Consul to go and live in San Servan, near the port
of Saint Malo, in northern France, where he continued his activity
as violinist, managing a school of music. As a scientist, he gave
public conferences on the idea of planetary expansion.
Mantovani was not a mere precursor of the continental drift idea:
instead, Mantovani’s ideas on Earth expansion were more general
compared to those of Wegener who was not taking into account
the possibility of variation of the Earth’s radius.
Roberto Mantovani, violinist and scientist, was part of an
orches-tral team reaching the volcanic Réunion Island in 1878.
During his stay on the island, Mantovani had the occasion of
observing the huge volcanic fractures on the Indian ocean shore
near the town of Saint Denis. He argued that, on a global scale, all
the continents might have undergone the same disjunction processes
as the volcanic flanks. The global fractures are today the
oceans. After several years from his observations, Mantovani
published his idea in 1889 in the Bulletin of the Societé des
Sciences et des Arts of Saint Denis, where the Italian established
his family and became Consul of Italy. After an economic crisis
and an epidemic plague in the Réunion Island, Roberto Mantovani
left his post as Consul to go and live in San Servan, near the port
of Saint Malo, in northern France, where he continued his activity
as violinist, managing a school of music. As a scientist, he gave
public conferences on the idea of planetary expansion.
His more famous paper, quoted later by Wegener, was published
in 1909, in a popular magazine 'Je m’instruis'. The paper
contains the first suggestive mapping of the breakup of the
Pangea continent based on geological arguments.
The great novelty in the 1909 paper was the mapping of
the Pacific view: dotted lines were drown between pairs of
geographical points which once were in contact while today are
separated by the huge extension of the Pacific basin. The idea
was that the corresponding points were in contact before the
expansion of the Earth. The enlarging of the huge fractures formed all
oceans. We had to wait the sixties to find the same kind of lines in
the Indian and Atlantic oceans in plate tectonics. According to
plate tectonics this is not true for the Pacific Ocean, because in this
case the plate movement is inverse and the ocean tends towards
closing. The 1909 Pacific map was forgotten, and only Mantovani’s
Pangea representation is reproduced today in some books dealing
with the history of science.