Tito Livio Burattini

Tito Livio Burattini (; 8 March 1617 – 17 November 1681) was an inventor, architect, Egyptologist, scientist, instrument-maker, traveller, engineer and nobleman. He spent his working life in Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He was born in Agordo, Republic of Venice, and studied in Padua and Venice. In 1639, he explored the Great Pyramid of Giza with English mathematician John Greaves; both Burattini and Sir Isaac Newton used measurements made by Greaves in an attempt to accurately determine the circumference of the earth.

From the Holy Roman Empire in 1641, the court of King Ladislaus IV invited him to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In Warsaw, Burattini built a model aircraft with four fixed glider wings in 1647. According to Clive Hart's The Prehistory of Flight, he promised that "only the most minor injuries" would result from landing the craft.

He later developed an early system of measurement based on time, similar to today's International System of Units; he published it in his book in 1675 at Vilnius. He is considered the first to recommend the name metre for a unit of length.

Along with two others he met at Kraków, Burattini "performed optical experiments and contributed to the discovery of irregularities on the surface of Venus, comparable to those on the Moon". He made lenses for microscopes and telescopes, and gave some of them to Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici. He died in Kraków, aged 64.