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Updated: May 16, 2025
It was proved, however, by Alessanjra Volta, professor of physics in the University of Pavia, that the electricity was not in the animal but generated by the contact of the two dissimilar metals and the moisture of the flesh. Going a step further, in the year 1800 he invented a new source of electricity on this principle, which is known as "Volta's pile."
ROBERTSON, I understand, is the first who has made these experiments in Paris, and has succeeded in discharging VOLTA's pistol by the galvanic spark. FITZJAMES, a famous ventriloquist, entertains and astonishes the company by a display of his powers, which are truly surprising.
Men were recording, accumulating, trying to interpret a host of odd and futile phenomena, toying with Ramsden's machine, with Leyden jars, with Volta's rough battery.
We are told that Alessandro Volta's wife was ill with fever, and that he, in accordance with the practise of his day, was preparing the usual febrifuge, a broth of skinned frogs; it was a rainy day, and when he hung up the dead frogs on the iron bar of the window, he noticed that their legs contracted. "If dead muscles contract, it must mean that some external force has penetrated them."
Along this way we shall arrive at a picture of the magnetic force which corresponds to the one already obtained of electricity. This will then lead us to a joint study of the nature of electric polarity and magnetic polarity. The discovery of the phenomena we call electromagnetic depended on the possibility of producing continuous electrical processes. This arose with Volta's invention.
With the first year of the new century came Volta's invention of the chemical battery as a means of producing electricity. A well-known Italian picture represents Volta exhibiting his apparatus before the young conqueror Napoleon, then ravishing from the Peninsula its treasure of ancient art and founding an ephemeral empire.
But Bonaparte remained deaf, and Alexandre persisted in his silence, and died at Angers, in 1832, in great poverty, without having revealed his secret. As, in 1802, Volta's pile was already invented, several authors have supposed an application of it in Alexandre's apparatus. "Is it not allowable to believe," exclaims one of these, "that the electric telegraph was at that time discovered?"
Volta's great invention of the pile in 1800 furnished a new source of electricity, better adapted for the telegraph, and Salva was apparently the first to recognise this, for, in the same year, he proposed to use it and interpret the signals by the twitching of a frog's limb, or the decomposition of water.
In a still more indirect way, he was helped by Morse's invention of the telegraph; by Faraday's discovery of the phenomena of magnetic induction; by Sturgeon's first electro-magnet; and by Volta's electric battery. All that scientists had achieved, from Galileo and Newton to Franklin and Simon Newcomb, helped Bell in a general way, by creating a scientific atmosphere and habit of thought.
Three methods of generating electricity are in general use: static or frictional electricity is generated by "plate" or "static" machines; galvanic, generated by batteries based on Volta's discovery; and induced, or faradic, generated either by chemical or mechanical action. There is still another kind, thermo-electricity, that may be generated in a most simple manner.
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