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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]

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]

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Galvani descobriu que ocorriam contrações musculares em rãs em contato com metais e interpretou o fenômeno como causado por um fluido invisível, a ‘eletricidade animal’. Volta convenceu-se de que esses fenômenos aconteceriam devido à eletricidade comum produzida pelo contato entre dois metais diferentes. Apresentou a evidência de que um par de metais produzia uma eletricidade muito fraca, que podia ser amplificada por um aparelho chamado “condensador”, permitindo a sua detecção em eletrômetros. No entanto, esses aparelhos não levaram à aceitação geral de suas idéias, pois apenas proporcionavam evidências indiretas. A invenção da pilha permitiu produzir efeitos muito mais fortes do que antes. Mesmo assim, subsistiam dúvidas bem fundadas sobre a identidade entre a eletricidade produzida por atrito e os efeitos produzidos pelas pilhas. Este trabalho apresenta uma descrição desse episódio histórico e discute a questão metodológica de como se pode fundamentar a identidade ou diversidade de causas de dois fenômenos semelhantes.

The immense popularity as well as comparatively quick acquisitions of early Volta's inventions in Ljubljana, Idrija and Graz is attributed to the impact ofVolta's relative Count Franz Johann Inzaghi who headed the Idrija Mine between 1764 and 1791. The interesting fact was put in the limelight: already the great-grandfather of Francis Johann Inzaghi and Volta, Abondio Maria Inzaghi, was a head of Idrija mine for a decade. Franz Johann Inzaghi paid the printing of Ljubljana exam theses on the chemical and related sciences tied in a book of the Volta's favorite researcher of those ti-mes, the Turin professor Beccaria. The theses were written in style of Boškovi}'s chemical beliefs which Volta endorsed throughout his life. Inzaghi introduced Volta's early research of gases in Habsburg schools in Como and Pavia to im-prove safety in an otherwise stale Idrija shafts. Volta's chemical ideas were used for the purification of the Idrija mercury and for the production of secondary products, especially cinnabar red color vermilion in a new factory of cinnabar on the right bank of the Idrijca River in 1785. Volta's inventions of the electrophorus for multiple electrical charging and Volta's pistol - eudiometer for measuring the quality of air were implemented extremely fast in a collection of Ljubljana higher school physics-chemical cabinet. Inzaghi was still in touch with Volta after his return to Graz, especially during Volta's wedding in the year 1794. This is the first publication of family relations of Inzaghi and Volta. Inzaghi's apothecary was the first class Bohemian expert Ernest Freyer who worked in Ljubljana from 1751 to 1753 and established the Pharmacy in Idrija between 1754 and 1795. Freyer used local mercury for his remedies and amalgamations long before John Frederic Daniell (*1790; †l845) introduced his Voltaic Cell which produced about 1.1 Volts as one of the first to incorporate the mercury by amalgamating it with the zinc anode to reduce corrosion when the batte-ries were not in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circumstances which caused the suppression of Ljubljana High Philosophical Studies including chemistry between the years 1785 and 1788 are put into the limelight. The chemistry equipment in High Philosophical Studies' physicsmathematics cabinet is described. Bartholomew Schaller lectured on chemistry as a part of physics' teachings and he managed the laboratory equipment with the help of mathematician Anton Gruber, a younger brother of the famous Gabrijel Gruber. Extraordinarily quick acquisitions of Volta's novelties are put in the limelight and explained by the fact that Volta's working places Como and Pavia were the part of the same Habsburg Monarchy as Ljubljana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After extensive experimentation during the 1790s, Alexander von Humboldt remained skeptical about “animal electricity” (and metallic electricity), writing instead about an ill-defined galvanic force. With his worldview and wishing to learn more, he studied electric eels in South America just as the new century began, again using his body as a scientific instrument in many of his experiments. As had been the case in the past and for many of the same reasons, some of his findings with the electric eel (and soon after, Italian torpedoes) seemed to argue against biological electricity. But he no longer used galvanic terminology when describing his electric fish experiments. The fact that he now wrote about animal electricity rather than a different “galvanic” force owed much to Alessandro Volta, who had come forth with his “pile” (battery) for multipling the physical and perceptable effects of otherwise weak electricity in 1800, while Humboldt was deep in South America. Humboldt probably read about and saw voltaic batteries in the United States in 1804, but the time he spent with Volta in 1805 was probably more significant in his conversion from a galvanic to an electrical framework for understanding nerve and muscle physiology. Although he did not continue his animal electricity research program after this time, Humboldt retained his worldview of a unified nature and continued to believe in intrinsic animal electricity. He also served as a patron to some of the most important figures in the new field of electrophysiology (e.g., Hermann Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond), helping to take the research that he had participated in to the next level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1790s, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who showed an early interest in many facets of natural philosophy and natural history, delved into the controversial subject of galvanism and animal electricity, hoping to shed light on the basic nature of the nerve force. He was motivated by his broad worldview, the experiments of Luigi Galvani, who favored animal electricity in more than a few specialized fishes, and the thinking of Alessandro Volta, who accepted specialized fish electricity but was not willing to generalize to other animals, thinking Galvani's frog experiments flawed by his use of metals. Differing from many German Naturphilosophen, who shunned “violent” experiments, the newest instruments, and detailed measurement, Humboldt conducted thousands of galvanic experiments on animals and animal parts, as well as many on his own body, some of which caused him great pain. He interpreted his results as supporting some but not all of the claims made by both Galvani and Volta. Notably, because of certain negative findings and phenomenological differences, he remained skeptical about the intrinsic animal force being qualitatively identical to true electricity. Hence, he referred to a “galvanic force,” not animal electricity, in his letters and publications, a theoretical position he would abandon with Volta's help early in the new century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We provide a guide to Bologna, Italy, focusing particularly on sites of interest to physicists. Our first tour is in the city center; it begins in the Piazza Maggiore at the Palazzo d'Accursio, the Basilica di San Petronio, and the Archiginnasio (Old University) and then proceeds to the Two Towers and the Palazzo Poggi, which houses the Astronomical Observatory Museum and other important instrument and art collections; it concludes at the Physics Museum, Department of Physics and Astronomy. Our second tour again begins in the Piazza Maggiore but goes to sites beyond the city center where famous Bolognese physicists and other scientists were born, lived, and are buried. Finally, we point out important museums and other institutions on the outskirts of Bologna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta were the main protagonists of a lively debate on the role of electricity in animal organisms. Significant developments originated from this debate, leading to the foundation of two new disciplines, electrodynamics and electrophysiology, that were to play a crucial role in the scientific and technological progress of the last two centuries. The Galvani-Volta controversy has been repeatedly reconstructed, sometimes in an attempt to identify the merits and the errors of one or the other of the two protagonists, sometimes with the aim of demonstrating that the theories elaborated by the two Italian scholars were irreconcilable, reflecting completely different ways of looking at phenomena and conceiving of scientific research. In this article a different interpretation is offered, based on a discussion of the scientific issues that were central to Galvani's and Volta's research, and with reference to the context of science and society of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indicative of the fascinating unpredictability of scientific progress, the discovery path that in the last two centuries has brought about some fundamental developments in electrical science, was closely connected to studies leading to the demonstration of the physiological role of electricity in animal tissues. Both depended in an important way on the demonstration of the electrical nature of the shock of the torpedo fish provided by the English ‘natural philosopher’ John Walsh in the summer season of 1772. Until Walsh's time the painful shock produced by the torpedo and similar fish was considered to be the effect of a mechanical agency. This article briefly outlines some interesting aspects of the research path whereby the ‘mechanical’ torpedo turned out to be electrical in nature. It tries, moreover, to establish an ideal link that could relate the curious property of this singular fish with a major recent advance in the field of audiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alessandro Volta was Regius Professor of Experimental Physics at Pavia University from 1778, and retired in 1819. He made most of his theoretical contributions and carried out most of his research and experimental activities by the beginning of the 19th century, after the invention of the battery. During this period, he invented and used apparatus that can be seen today in the A. Volta Physics Cabinet in the University of Pavia's History Museum, where his worktable is also kept (Figure 1). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]