Sheila Younge, age 12, of Berkeley, Calif., for her question:
Who invented the electric battery?
His name was Alessandro Volta and he was born in Como, Italy four days after Valentines Day of 1745. He lectured and demonstrated his little battery to the scientists throughout Europe. He was greatly respected. He was made a Senator of Lombardy and Napoleon ordered a modal struck in his honor. The last of his full and happy 82 years were spent in his native Como. There they put up his statue. The whole world honored the busy inventor by giving his name to the volt, the unit of push which charges the wires with electricity.
Volta's work rests on the efforts of another Italian scientist, Luigi Galvanic In fact, many great brains were necessary to tame the force of electricity to its present usefulness. A bit of knowledge was gathered here and there through the centuries as this man arid that man applied his brains to the problem. The founding fathers of electric power are drawn from many nations ‑ Gilbert, Galvani, Volta, Oersted, Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, our own Edison and others.
Galvani discovered electricity in the muscles of dissected frogs. When the legs of a damp frog were touched with two different metals they twitchod. The metals stimulated a jolt of electricity in the muscles. Volta was vitally interested in this experiment and developed it further.
He produced a small current of electricity with two kinds of metal and brine‑soaked wads of cardboard. This was the first electric battery. Volta called it a crown of cups or pile. It was a tall pile of small plates. The two metals used were zinc and silver. The metal disks were arranged in pairs, one silver, one zinc. The pairs were sandwiched between disks of cardboard soaked in salty water. The sandwiches of metal and cardboard were piled one on top of the other.
This first battery is called a voltaic cell. It generates a little more than one volt of electricity. The current may be led off by a circuit of copper wire. The wire forms a long loop with both ends fixed to the battery.
In his lectures, Volta demonstrated the slight electric shock from his battery. He also cut the wire circuit and fixed the ids to separate bars of zinc and silver. The metal rods were placed in goblets of salt water. He was able to show electrical activity between the two rods or electrodes.
Volta's battery worked by chemical means. Such a small battery could never produce a great current of electricity. Before electricity could be put to much useful work, a better way had to be found to generate voltage ‑the pushing force which charges the wires with electric current.
It was known that electricity is related to magnetism. An electric current behaves like a magnet. Michael Faraday, a humble Scottish boy, discovered that voltage is generated when a copper disk rotates through a magnetic field. Volta's work was completed for everyday use when the dynamo was invented. The weak chemical battery showed the way and the dynamo produced a powerhouse of voltage