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Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Volta
Early life and works
Volta was born in Como, a town in present-day northern Italy (near the Swiss border) on February 18, 1745. In 1794, Volta married an aristocratic lady also from Como, Teresa Peregrini, with whom he raised three sons: Giovanni, Flaminio and Zanino. His own father Filippo Volta was of noble lineage. His mother Donna Maddalena came from the family of the Inzaghis.[3]
In 1774, he became a professor of physics at the Royal School in Como. A year later, he improved and popularized the electrophorus, a device that produced static electricity. His promotion of it was so extensive that he is often credited with its invention, even though a machine operating on the same principle was described in 1762 by the Swedish experimenter Johan Wilcke.[4][5] In 1777, he travelled through Switzerland. There he befriended H. B. de Saussure.
In the years between 1776–78, Volta studied the chemistry of gases. He researched and discovered methane after reading a paper by Benjamin Franklin of United States on "flammable air". In November 1776, he found methane at Lake Maggiore,[6] and by 1778 he managed to isolate methane.[7] He devised experiments such as the ignition of methane by an electric spark in a closed vessel. Volta also studied what we now call electrical capacitance, developing separate means to study both electrical potential (V ) and charge (Q ), and discovering that for a given object, they are proportional. This may be called Volta’s Law of capacitance, and it was for this work the unit of electrical potential has been named the volt.
Alessandro Volta
In 1779 he became a professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia, a chair that he occupied for almost 40 years.[8]
Luigi Galvani discovered something he named "animal electricity" when two different ****ls were connected in series with the frog’s leg and to one another. Volta realized that the frog’s leg served as both a conductor of electricity (what we would now call an electrolyte) and as a detector of electricity. He replaced the frog’s leg with brine-soaked paper, and detected the flow of electricity by other means familiar to him from his previous studies.
In this way he discovered the electrochemical series, and the law that the electromotive force (emf) of a galvanic cell, consisting of a pair of ****l electrodes separated by electrolyte, is the difference between their two electrode potentials (thus, two identical electrodes and a common electrolyte give zero net emf). This may be called Volta’s Law of the electrochemical series.
In 1800 as the result of a professional disagreement over the galvanic response advocated by Galvani, Volta invented the voltaic pile, an early electric battery, which produced a steady electric current.[9] Volta had determined that the most effective pair of dissimilar ****ls to produce electricity was zinc and silver. Initially he experimented with individual cells in series, each cell being a wine goblet filled with brine into which the two dissimilar electrodes were dipped. The voltaic pil
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