The first battery grew out of an argument about frogs' legs
Luigi Galvani believed twitching frog legs revealed a special animal electricity. Alessandro Volta suspected the frog was merely a detector and the real source was the two different metals touching it. Swapping the leg for paper soaked in brine proved his point, and his rival view led in 1799 to the voltaic pile, the first battery.
Volta was born in Como, in northern Italy, on 18 February 1745, to a father of noble descent. His family expected him to become a priest; he never did, though he remained a committed Catholic and once wrote a long declaration defending his faith. By 1774 he was teaching physics in Como, and the following year he improved and promoted the electrophorus, a static electricity generator, so energetically that people credited him with inventing it, even though a Swede, Johan Wilcke, had described one in 1762.
He was a skilled chemist too. Prompted by a paper from Benjamin Franklin on flammable air, he found methane bubbling from the marshes of Angera on Lake Maggiore in November 1776, isolated it by 1778 and ignited it with electric sparks in sealed containers. He also showed that the charge an object holds is proportional to its electrical potential, work that explains why the unit of potential is called the volt.
His early cells were wine goblets of brine with two different metals dipped in; zinc and copper worked best. Stacking discs separated by brine-soaked cardboard gave a steady current, and he announced it in a letter to the Royal Society published in 1800. The discovery showed that chemistry, not living tissue, could generate electricity and launched electrochemistry. Its weakness was that hydrogen bubbles built up on the copper and choked the reaction.
Napoleon admired the invention, had him demonstrate it in Paris and made him a count in 1810. Volta's lectures at Pavia, where he held the experimental physics chair for almost 40 years, were so packed that Emperor Joseph II ordered a new lecture theatre, still known as the Aula Volta. He retired in 1819 to his estate at Camnago near Como and died there on 5 March 1827. In 2019 a newly described electric eel, the strongest known natural generator of electricity, was named in his honour.
Source: Alessandro Volta
