Alessandro Volta

Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was a physicist known especially for the development of the first electric cell in 1800.

Inventions and discoveries

In 1775, Volta improved and popularized the electrophorus, a device that produces a static electric charge.

he studied the chemistry of gases, discovered methane, and devised experiments such as the ignition of gases by an electric spark in a closed vessel.

Volta also studied what we now call capacitance, developing separate means to study both electrical potential V and charge Q, and discovering that for a given object they are proportional. This may be called Volta's Law of Capacitance, and likely for this work the unit of electrical potential has been named the volt.

In 1779 he became professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia, a chair he occupied for almost 25 years.

Around 1791 he began to study the "animal electricity" noted by Galvani when two different metals were connected in series with the frog's leg and to one another. He realized that the frog's leg served as both a conductor of electricity (we would now call it an electrolyte) and as a detector of electricity. He replaced the frog's leg by brine-soaked paper, and detected the flow of electricity by other means familiar to him from his previous studies of electricity.

In this way he discovered the electrochemical series, and the law that the electromotive force (emf) of a galvanic cell, consisting of a pair of metal electrodes separated by electrolyte, is the difference of their two electrode potentials.