The philosopher who accidentally discovered the battery by tasting two different pieces of metal

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Johann Georg Sulzer was a Swiss polymath whose intellectual reach spanned from aesthetic theory to experimental physics. While he is remembered for his monumental encyclopedia of the arts, his most enduring legacy began with a strange, tingling sensation on his tongue that hinted at the future of electrical science.

Born in Winterthur in 1720, Sulzer was a prominent figure in the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He was deeply embedded in the intellectual currents of the German High Enlightenment, serving as a key translator of David Hume and a rigorous systematizer of philosophical thought. His career was defined by a desire to categorize human knowledge, culminating in his massive three-volume encyclopedia of aesthetics, the General Theory of the Fine Arts, published between 1771 and 1774.

This work, which contained around 900 articles, aimed to organize everything known about literature, music, and the visual arts. Sulzer expanded upon the psychological theories of his predecessors, arguing that aesthetic pleasure is fundamentally rooted in the state of the observer's own cognitive condition. He was a man of firm convictions, ranking the Ode as the pinnacle of poetic achievement and finding profound value in the serious works of playwrights like Molière and Plautus.

Yet, Sulzer is perhaps most famous for an accidental discovery in 1752. While experimenting with two different metals, he placed his tongue between them and felt a distinct sensation. He incorrectly hypothesized that the metals induced a vibratory motion in their particles, which then stimulated his nerves of taste. In reality, he had stumbled upon the mechanism of the battery, where saliva acts as an electrolyte to facilitate an electrical current between two electrodes. This physical curiosity stands in stark contrast to his metaphysical life, where he held onto hopes for proofs of God and the afterlife—hopes that Immanuel Kant famously dismissed as impossible to demonstrate through pure reason.

Sulzer’s life reflects the dual nature of Enlightenment inquiry, balancing the pursuit of empirical physical phenomena with the desire to codify the subjective experience of beauty. His work remains a vital record of the intellectual landscape of his time, bridging the gap between the rigid structures of eighteenth-century philosophy and the emerging, often unpredictable, world of modern science.

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