Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born on February 18, and the world knows him best for creating the voltaic pile, considered the first electrochemical battery, which he built in the late 18th century. However, not everyone knows that Volta arrived at that design because of a "professional disagreement" with another Italian giant of electricity, Luigi Galvani. While Galvani championed the concept of "animal electricity" he had previously discovered, Volta was convinced he could reproduce the same effect without living beings involved.
The Frog Experiment
The story goes that Luigi Galvani was in the middle of dissecting a frog on a table where he and his wife, the scientist Lucia Galeazzi Galvani, had been performing experiments with static electricity. Depending on the account, it was Galvani himself, his wife, or an assistant who touched the sciatic nerve of the frog's leg with a charged scalpel, causing the leg to move on its own. Faced with such a discovery, the scientist repeated the procedure with other animals and concluded that muscle activation was due to the presence of an electric fluid carried by the nerves to the muscles. Thus the idea of "animal electricity" was born.
Volta's Doubts
At that time, Alessandro Volta was already a professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia, a position he held for decades. Volta was one of the first scientists to repeat and verify Galvani's results. Initially, he fully accepted Galvani's hypothesis, but over time and with further investigations, Volta began to doubt the "animal factor" The frog leg was nothing more than a conductor and detector of electricity, and the generation of "electric current" was the responsibility of the metals.
By replacing the frog leg with a piece of paper soaked in saltwater, Volta had proven that electricity was not exclusive to living beings. The conflict between Volta and Galvani was inevitable, and from this point there are different versions. One is that both maintained an intense but respectful scientific disagreement, while another suggests an extension of the conflict to their universities and the international communityPersonally, I lean toward the first, since it was Volta who suggested the term "galvanism" to describe the production of electricity through a chemical action.
The differences were resolved in the late 18th century with the creation of the voltaic pile, made of copper and zinc discs with cardboard separators saturated with saltwater (or a solution of sulfuric acid and water) acting as an electrolyte. In the end, Volta proved he was right (though he ignored several chemical details about his pile); however, Galvani did not live to see it, as he had died a year earlier due to a general deterioration in his health (which many link to the death of his wife). In contrast, Volta was decorated on several occasions, especially by Napoleon Bonaparte, but despite his success, he never abandoned his preference for a quieter, "domestic" life. Volta and Galvani were two titans who collided, and from that impact, they revolutionized the entire world.
