Olinto de Pretto

Olinto De Pretto (1857–1921) was an Italian industrialist and geologist from Schio, Vicenza. There are claims – most prominent by the Italian mathematician Umberto Bartocci – that De Pretto may have been the first person to derive the Energy-Mass-Equivalence, generally attributed to Albert Einstein. He suggested that radioactive decay of uranium and thorium was an example of mass transforming into energy.