How Volta Invented the First Battery Because He Was Jealous of Galvani's Frog

How could jealousy lead to an invention and why would anyone be jealous of a frog in the first place? Well I'll tell you and along the way I'll talk about academic dishonesty, tingly metals, reanimating corpses, scientific rivalries, and napoleonic politics. I'll also show you how to light up an LED light bulb with pennies and vinegar and how to make oxygen and hydrogen out of water. Ready? Let's go! In 1791 an Italian anatomy professor named Luigi Galvani accidentally discovered that a dead frog leg could jump if it was touched with a probe that was electrified with a static electricity machine. He then found that the leg could also move if it was touched with two different metals without any static or atmospheric electricity in sight. In other words the two metals with a frog somehow created electricity. Galvani correctly decided that electricity was connected to life itself. Not unexpectedly this paper took the world by storm. One person who was particularly interested in this paper was Italy's leading expert in electricity, a man named Alessandro Volta. Volta was a loud boisterous man, a world traveler who spoke many languages and was known by contemporaries as quote a genius who swore and cackled over his experiments, guzzled and disputed over his dinner, electrified the ladies, and understood more of electricity than anyone else in Europe. Volta first came to fame by basically stealing another person's invention, an object that he called the electrophoresis. In the following years Volta made several discoveries that are not attributed to other people, like discovering methane, but most of his fame came from the electrophoresis and from his oversized persona. Volta recreated Galvani's experiments and found it unbelievable and miraculous. Volta then got a live frog to jump with two different metals attached to each other and to the frog's leg and back. Volta decided that Galvani wasn't reanimating the frog as even a live frog would move with dissimilar metals. He decided that the electricity came from the different metals and the frog was merely responding to the electricity produced by the just as it jumped from the electricity from machines and from lightning clouds. Soon it became a big debate. Was the frog jumping because it had once been alive or was it jumping because the two different metals made electricity? Soon all of Europe split between the Voltas and the Galvanists. By the way both sides were partially correct and partially incorrect. Galvani was correct that all living things use and produce electricity to make their muscles move and their nerves transmit signals, which is why if you artificially add electricity even a dead animal will react. Volta was correct in that the two metals were creating electricity which had nothing to do with the frog previously being alive. The big thing the Voltamists was the acid in the frog's leg that reacted differently to different metals. In other words he didn't realize this was a chemical reaction and needed a chemical an acid or base in order to work. Galvani was not really a good debater for the Galvanists as in 1797 he lost his job and was restricted from publicly speaking due to his objection to Napoleon taking over Italy. Depressed and impoverished he died the next year from unknown causes. One of the biggest supporters of the Galvanist theory was Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini. Aldini despite being a professor of physics was much more of an entertainer than a scientist. For example he liked to do public demonstrations twitching the eyes or mouth of a cow's head and even a human head of a decapitated criminal. This for obvious reasons gained the public's attention and soon Galvanists throughout Europe were entertaining crowds with these gruesome shows. Years later a young woman had a scary dream about Galvanists and wrote it up as a horror story called Frankenstein. However despite their public appeal these dramatic displays did not help much in academia. Volt had won a prestigious British award for explaining Galvani's experiments however Volta was unhappy. He didn't want awards for explaining other people's work he won an award just for himself and he needed a decisive experiment but he was in a bit of a quandary. The only sensitive equipment to study electricity was a frog leg. He needed to make something very powerful with only inorganic materials. The first thing Volta did was to determine which metals worked the best on the poor frog. He found that silver and zinc seemed to work the best. If he put a piece of silver and zinc in his mouth on his tongue he could feel a slight tingle. However he put them together with wires connected to his tongue he felt nothing. He started to wonder if the metals had to be wet. Therefore he put a piece of silver and a piece of zinc in a cup of water. Suddenly there was enough voltage to be noticeable on his tongue. He then added cups of water in a row and got a stronger tingle. Volta then turned the experiment on its side. He put wet thin cardboard between a pair of silver and zinc discs and then stacked them together to get a pile. In this way he got a relatively strong tingle and you could get more tingling by just adding more discs and by using salt water instead of plain water in the cardboard. If you wet your hands you could even feel a shock through your whole body. Here was a non-organic object that would create continual electricity with no rubbing required. In fact Volta had just invented the battery. He published it in 1800 to tremendous acclaim. Of course he didn't actually call it a battery. A battery was a term already in use for a set of Leyden jars, the most powerful electrical device available at the time. Now Leyden jars stored and gave electricity in a jolt and the battery gives a continuous flow of electricity. So they are very different. However as Volta was trying to pump up his accomplishment he would often refer to his device as resembling an electric battery. So you can see how the name got co-opted. Volta's victory was complete. Napoleon was quite impressed with the device and made Volta account for his accomplishments. The potential of a battery is measured in volts named after him and often referred to as voltage, also in his honor. Volta won many awards and retired a wealthy man never to do anything else worthy of publishing. Interestingly in his famous paper of 1800 he still found the time to insult his old rival Galvani who had died two years earlier by writing that his research was initiated because quote I found myself obliged to combat the pretended animal electricity of Galvani. How did Volta's pile of metal and salt water compare to a modern battery? Well to answer that I need to talk about two things voltage and maximum current. Voltage is like the power in a pump that adds water pressure to your pipes. It is there even when no water is flowing. The battery in your cell phone has 3.7 volts of potential. Typical pile that Volta used would produce 5, 10, and even 20 volts. You can actually make your own pile quite easily with copper pennies, zinc washers, and paper soaked in vinegar. Just like Volta you can pile up the zinc, vinegar, soaked paper, and pennies to make a homemade battery. This pile of just 10 pennies creates an astonishing 8 volts of potential. So can I power my cell phone with a bunch of pennies? Unfortunately not. It has to do with something called current. Current is like the amount of water flow you get from the pipes. There are two numbers with the maximum current. One is the amount of current you can get for a second before the battery breaks down or even lights on fire. That is not really a useful number. The other number is a vague number. The amount you can safely get flowing steadily for a long period of time and that is what you need to run your phone. Your phone probably uses between 100 and 400 milliamps of current to talk and text and what have you. The most current you can get from a voltaic pile even for a second is around 15 milliamps. The maximum you can get to steadily flow is around a half a milliamp which is not very much and nowhere near enough for your phone. However it's more than enough to light up a little led light bulb. Pretty magical huh? So what did people do with Volta's battery before the invention of the led light bulb? Well they could give themselves shocks and they could animate dead animals and people. But the most useful thing they did with batteries in the early 1800s has to do with chemistry. See in the same week Volta published his work a pair of English friends accidentally put the leads from a battery into a container of water. Soon the leads started to make bubbles. One probe would get bubbles of hydrogen and one probe would get bubbles of oxygen. Plus you had about twice as much hydrogen as oxygen. They had proven that This experiment inspired a young and handsome chemist named Humphry Davy to make the world's strongest and largest battery with over 2,000 plates of copper and zinc in an acid bath. From 1807 to 1808 Davy managed to electrically isolate eight new elements and increase the total number of known elements by 20 percent. Humphry Davy's story is a story of how good looks, dramatic demonstration, and prolific drug use made him a scientific superstar. And that wild story is next time on the Secret History of Electricity. Thanks for watching my video. Please remember to give it a nice thumbs up. Also in the comments I included how to make your own voltaic pile as well as how to get hydrogen and oxygen out of water. Both are very simple experiments to do. Also if you're interested in learning more about Galvani and his frog, check out my video on Luigi Galvani made a dead frog jump. If you are interested in how a battery works, check out my video How a Battery Works, a fun and simple explanation for adults. And make sure to check out that video about Humphry Davy who's a very interesting person in his own right and he also ended up hiring Michael Faraday who really changed the world of electricity. Either way join my YouTube page Kathy Loves Physics, my Facebook page Kathy Loves Physics, or check out my web page www.kathylovesphysics.com. Okay have a nice day!