Alessandro Volta
A gentleman-inventor with a sense of curiosity of a cat left alone in a physics lab, he invented the electric battery. He didn’t shout about his discoveries but politely submitted them to the Royal Society, lectured to Napoleon Bonaparte and let him name a unit after the inventor.
#about
Volta was also a bit of a prankster, and he was known to enjoy playing tricks on his friends and colleagues, but as a serious scientist he claimed electricity can be get from chemical reactions and to prove it, created a battery.
#quotes
"Rather than a life full of vain glory, I prefer the sweet tranquility of domestic life."
Is there any electricity in a frog’s body?
If any, what happens to it when the frog has lived its best life, breathed its last, and can only become a part of lunch for some other creatures?
Back in the 18th century, these were kind of things people were trying to understand about the surrounding world. Sometimes, knowledge (or what was thought as knowledge) came from accidental observations rather than from tedious research.
Following the legend, that’s what happened to Luigi Galvani’s assistant. They were working on some studies which involved frogs’ legs, and the assistant touched the sciatic nerve with a metal scalpel. The frog was dead, but its legs moved. Galvani became curious about the effect and was playing with it until he could repeat the process under control. He explained the phenomenon by a specific vital force which gives life to a body and for some reason, reacts to metal instruments after the body’s death.
What did Alessandro Volta have to do with that all?
