As a youth in Bolagna, Italy, Luigi Galvani had contemplated a religious vocation, but his parents steered him into the study of medicine. He acquired degrees from the University of Bolagna in medicine and philosophy. Back then in the 1700s, medical education was based on the teachings of Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna, but Galvani took a more enlightened experimental approach. An accidental finding, regarding electrical energy and animal bodies, created enormous interest among his contemporaries and inspired Alessandro Volta to develop the world’s first storage battery.
The way it came about was that Galvani had been skinning a frog in a location were he had previously been rubbing frog skin for the purpose of generating static electricity. A lab assistant, wielding a metal scalpel that had acquired an electrical charge, touched the nerve of a dead frog’s leg, which instantly responded with a vigorous kick. Repeated experiments led Galvani to conclude that the observed event was generated by an electrical fluid conveyed to the muscle through nerves.
Alessandro Volta, based at the nearby University of Padua, duplicated and verified Galvani’s experiments. But he came to a different conclusion about the mechanism. More accurately, he concluded that the observed muscular contractions were caused not by electrical energy emanating from the body of the frog, but rather by the metal wire that connected nerves and muscles in Galvani’s experiments.
The two researchers engaged in an intense public disputation about the results. But despite their strong convictions, indications are they bore no great mutual animosity. What is important, aside from the biological implications, is that Volta succeeded in developing the Voltaic pile, the world’s first storage battery. (A galvanic cell is the same thing as a voltaic cell. The names are after Galvani and Volta respectively, though Galvani had no part in inventing this energy storage device. The electrochemical cell gets electrical energy from spontaneous redox reactions taking place within it.)
Rather than storing a charge like the Leden jar, which was actually a large capacitor, the Voltaic pile was a chemical battery that stored electrical energy and released it when connected to a load, the enclosed chemicals moving from a higher to a lower energy state. This device made possible the dc motor, suggested the dc generator, and made electrical power easily accessible in the years that followed. In this way, Galvani and Volta opened vast areas of human knowledge and endeavor which neither had anticipated.
Later in life, refusing to swear allegiance to a new Napoleanic regime imposed by military force on the Papal states, Galvani was deprived of his academic post. Without income, a home of his own, and the companionship of his wife who had died prematurely, Galvani expired in poverty and despair in 1798 at the home of his brother who had taken him in.
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