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Alessandro Volta built his pile in the winter of 1799 in his country house with no lab and no technical staff because, due to the war against Napoleon, the Austrians had closed the University of Pavia and fired the professors. Volta sent the article on the pile to the Royal Society in March 1800, and through the long process of publication in the journal Philosophical Transactions (September 1800), the news spread through the London scientific community. The physician Anthony Carlisle and the chemist and editor William Nicholson were the first to build a battery and used it to decompose water. The great news that electricity could be generated by a simple and easily constructed device was also printed in the daily newspapers, which helped to spread the word throughout Europe and inspired scientists and practitioners to build their own pile and carry out the electrical decomposition of various electrolytes, thus creating the basis for the new discipline of electrochemistry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

In the late 18th century, several European scientists started describing the clinical effects of different types of electrical stimulation and tried to find new treatments for medical conditions, but only in the very early years of the 19th century, first attempts to cure deafness began. The letter written between 2 famous Italian scientists in the second half of 1802, by Professor A. Volta to Professor L.V. Brugnatelli, "Above the application of electricity to deaf-mutes from birth," is one of the most detailed examples of how the experiments were conducted applying the voltaic pile as a cure for deafness. In order to gain a better understanding of the context in which the scientists of the time experimented with "medical electricity" on the ear, some of the experiments conducted by European scientists will be described in this study, including those conducted by J.J.A. Sprenger, F.L. Augustin, C.H. Wolke, C.J.C. Grapengiesser, and E.A. Eschke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

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