Giambattista Beccaria, or Giovanni Battista, an Italian electrician, born at Mondovi, Oct. 3, 1716, died in Turin, May 27, 1781. He entered the religious order of the Piarists in 1732, and always remained a member of it. He became professor of experimental physics at Palermo and afterward at Rome, and in 1748 at Turin. Subsequently he was tutor of the princes de Chablais and de Carignan, and spent the rest of his life in Turin. His fame rests upon his treatise Dell' elettricismo naturale e artificiele (Turin 1753), which was translated into English by Franklin (London, 1771). His most remarkable experiments and theories relate to the limited conducting power of water, to the electrification of the air and smoke, to the velocity of electricity, to its influence in reducing metals, and to various phenomena connected with storms and atmospherical magnetism. The "Philosophical Transactions" of the royal society of London, of which he was made a fellow in 1755, contain his letter to Franklin (1760) entitled "Experiments in Electricity," and other papers in Latin. At the suggestion of Boscovich, he was commissioned in 1759 to measure the length of a degree of the meridian in the immediate vicinity of Turin. This work, which was not regarded as very accurate, he completed in 1768, and published an account of it in 1774 (Gradus Taurinensis).