Voltaic pile

The voltaic pile was the first electrical battery that could continuously provide an electric current to a circuit. It was invented by Italian chemist Alessandro Volta, who published his experiments in 1799. Its invention can be traced back to an argument between Volta and Luigi Galvani, Volta’s fellow Italian scientist who had conducted experiments on frogs' legs. The voltaic pile then enabled a rapid series of other discoveries including the electrical decomposition (electrolysis) of water into oxygen and hydrogen by William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle (1800) and the discovery or isolation of the chemical elements sodium (1807), potassium (1807), calcium (1808), boron (1808), barium (1808), strontium (1808), and magnesium (1808) by Humphry Davy. The entire 19th-century electrical industry was powered by batteries related to Volta's (e.g. the Daniell cell and Grove cell) until the advent of the dynamo (the electrical generator) in the 1870s. Volta's invention was built on Luigi Galvani's 1780s discovery of how a circuit of two metals and a frog's leg can cause the frog's leg to respond. Volta demonstrated in 1794 that when two metals and brine-soaked cloth or cardboard are arranged in a circuit they produce an electric current. In 1800, Volta stacked several pairs of alternating copper (or silver) and zinc discs (electrodes) separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in brine to increase the total electromotive force. When the top and bottom contacts were connected by a wire, an electric current flowed through the voltaic pile and the connecting wire. The voltaic pile, together with many scientific instruments that belonged to Alessandro Volta, are preserved in the University History Museum of the University of Pavia, where Volta taught from 1778 to 1819. History of the battery#Invention On 20 March 1800, Alessandro Volta wrote to the London Royal Society to describe the technique for producing electric current using his device. On learning of the voltaic pile, William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used it to discover the electrolysis of water.