Who was Alessandro Volta? [The Man Behind The Volt and the First Battery]

Hey everybody, so most of you are probably familiar with this little guy right here. It's a V. A capital V. But for a lot of engineers and other brands of nerds out there, it's an abbreviation for voltage. It's a unit that describes electric potential, which may be a concept a little beyond the scope of this video, so I won't go into it. But I do think you are interested in how it got its name. If you aren't, well, uh, wrong video. Anyway, back to the name thing. Nope, the Volt wasn't named for Voltaire, but an Italian guy named Count Volta. Let's begin at the beginning. Alessandro Chiuseppi Antonio Anastasia Volta was a dumb child. At least his parents thought so. Volta didn't speak his first words until he was 4 years old, and couldn't speak fluently until he was 7. Yeah, I was talking about the mute kind of dumb, not like the dumb dumb. Anyway, until he was 16, Volta would receive his formal education from both the local church and his uncle. To the disappointment of both, when he ended his formal education, he decided not to pursue a career in law or with the church, but studying natural phenomena. While being a physicist guy sounds cool to your parents who are paying for college tuition today, it really wasn't that cool in the 18th century. Volta was especially interested in electricity at the time, so he read up on as many books as he could and started writing letters to two of the leading physicists of the day. I'm sure to his utter astonishment, they actually wrote back. They encouraged him to follow up his questions by conducting experiments. Now, keep in mind that in this time, no one really had any idea of what electricity actually was, and theories varied from it being a single fluid, to being a pair of fluids, or being another element entirely. Unfunded and undeterred, the very amateur Volta worked in a lab one of his wealthier family friends had just built. So he wasn't even working out of his own garage, but his friend's garage. And would so for the next decade. Yeah, parents aren't really too happy with these life decisions. To his credit, Volta would publish his first paper when he was 22, and he would go on to make several discoveries to the field while working as an amateur, though he would later find that most of his discoveries had already been discovered by other scientists years or decades earlier. Fortunately for him, his work was enough to land him a teaching position at the local college in his town, and then eventually the very prestigious University of Pavia, where he would work for over 40 years. Nice job Volta! After 15 years in the academic big leagues at Pavia, Volta was inducted into the Royal Society of London, a very prestigious organization that sought to recognize only the most distinguished intellectuals of the day. This was a big milestone in Volta's career and really established him as an authority figure in the field of electricity. You could say that the whole scientific community was abuzz with Volta's electrical research. I'm sorry guys, everything was falling into place for Volta and he would live happily ever after. And that's the end. That's not exciting? A homemade amateur turned world-renowned scientist? Let me check my notes. Oh yeah, zombies. It turns out that in the same year that Volta was inducted into the Society of London, another academic dude had just published a paper that said he could raise the dead. Enter Luigi Galvani. You see, Galvani was an anatomy professor whose topic of interest had just been stolen by another guy, so he was in a little bit of a jam and had to publish a paper fast. So he turns to the booming new field of electricity, and whether by accident or on purpose, the accounts aren't very clear. He finds that if you touch a dead frog with two wires, copper and iron, it would twitch. Since this is the 18th century still, no one really knows how a nervous system works, and so Galvani thinks he is beginning to reanimate the frog by stimulating the energy inside of it. Galvani's macabre experiments went viral across Europe due to his hopes of raising the dead, and of course, the exciting twitching animals. The experiments were especially popular at dinner parties, as they offered a novel source of wonder and amazement. I mean, come on, they were electrocuting dead animals, what's not fun about that? Volta probably didn't like that some anatomy guy just stepped into his field of expertise and totally sideswiped most of his work. After all, who was just inducted into the Royal Society of London for his contributions to the field of electricity? Was it Galvani? So Volta performed some of Galvani's experiments, and noticed that Galvani was completely incorrect. I mean, that is why we aren't raising people from the dead with electricity today. Just ignore defibrillator paddles for a minute, I don't really know how to reconcile that right now. Well, too little too late, Volta. Galvani's theories had already dug their roots into nearly the entire populace of Europe. He'd need a little more punch to dig that out. So Volta got to work, and would spend almost an entire decade developing his theory of metallic electricity. At the end of it all, he invented the first chemical battery, which he got to show off to the newly established Emperor of Italy in 1801. While maybe not that impressive to most ordinary people, after all, what were you even supposed to do with electricity in 1801? But the battery was an extremely big hit with other scientists, because it enabled consistent experimentation with electricity. The invention of the battery marked the high point of Volta's career, and he would eventually retire, living out the last years of his life quietly in his Italian estate. Volta's work formed the foundation for the electrical revolution, and everything we know about generating electricity started with him. If you enjoyed the video, please like and subscribe, as it helps out the channel quite a bit. Also, please let me know in the comments below if you would like to hear about Tycho Bray, Copernicus, or Michael Faraday in my next video, which I hope to upload in about two weeks.