United States or Tokelau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The first practicable secondary battery of Gaston Plante was made of sheet lead plates or electrodes, kept apart by linen cloth soaked in dilute sulphuric acid, after the manner of Volta's pile. When the charging current was cut off the peroxide plate became the positive and the spongy plate the negative pole of the secondary cell.
It begins thus: "Sir: The first experimenters in animal electricity remarked the property that well calcined carbon has of conducting ordinary galvanic action. I have found that this substance possesses the same properties as metallic bodies for the production of the spark, when it is used for establishing a communication between the extremities of Signor Volta's pile."
Within a few weeks after Volta's announcement, batteries made according to his plan were being experimented with in every important laboratory in Europe.
Finally, before each screen there was a pith-ball electrometer. A lever handle, J, interposed into the circuit a Volta's pistol, F, that served as a call. When one of the operators desired to send a dispatch to the other he connected the conductor with the machine, and, setting the latter in operation, discharged his correspondent's pistol as a signal.
Our next task will be to examine the galvanic form of generating electricity, in order to gain further light on our picture of the electrical polarity. Galvanism, as it became established through Volta's work, rests on certain properties of the metallic substances of the earth.
Whilst Volta's success was based on avoiding Galvani's error, his apparatus nevertheless turned out inadvertently to be a close counterpart of precisely that animal organ which Galvani had in mind when misinterpreting his own discoveries!
The invention, however, had all the effects of a mechanism which turned electricity to practical account. But with the advent of the new kind of electricity the age of practical application began. Volta's announcement of his pile was scarcely two months old when two Englishmen, Messrs.
These two pieces of metal form the basic principle of the modern galvanic battery, and led directly to Alessandro Volta's invention of his "voltaic pile," the immediate ancestor of the modern galvanic battery. Volta's experiments were carried on at the same time as those of Galvani, and his invention of his pile followed close upon Galvani's discovery of the new form of electricity.
Volta's theory of metallic contact was so clear, so beautiful, and apparently so complete, that the best intellects of Europe accepted it as the expression of natural law.
Becoming interested in a book on Volta's experiments with electricity, he saved up his coppers until he could purchase it. It was in French, and he found the technical descriptions rather too difficult for his comprehension, so that he was forced to save again to buy a French-English dictionary. With the aid of this he mastered the volume.
Word Of The Day