The Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) invented the electric battery, or 'voltaic pile,' thus providing for the first time a sustained source of current electricity.
Alessandro Volta was born on Feb. 18, 1745, in Como. He resisted pressure from his family to enter the priesthood and developed instead an intense curiosity about natural phenomena, in particular, electricity. In 1769 he published his first paper on electricity. It contained no new discoveries but is of some interest as the most speculative of all Volta's papers, his subsequent ones being devoted almost exclusively to the presentation of specific experimental discoveries.
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (Italian: alesˈsandro ˈvɔlta; 18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian physicist, chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power, who is credited as the inventor of the electrical battery and the discoverer of methane.He invented the Voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the. Volta, on the other hand, maintained that current electricity was metallic electricity, the source of wh ich was the dissimilar metal probes attached to the frogs' legs. Both men were right. There is an animal electricity, and Galvani became famous as a founder of nerve physiology. Volta's great invention, however, revolutionized the use of.
Early Investigations and Inventions
In 1774 Volta was appointed professor of physics at the gymnasium in Como, and that same year he made his first important contribution to the science of electricity, the invention of the electrophorus, a device which provided a source of electric potential utilizing the principle of electrostatic induction. Unlike earlier...