Purpose

This report focuses on the life of Volta, details his inventions, and illuminates Volta's influence in electrochemistry. In a day before computers, Internet, or hosted exchange, Volta's work with
electricity is crucial to the technological advances of today.

Electrochemistry is that branch of science which deals with the inter-conversion of chemical and electrical energies, i.e., with chemical changes produced by electricity as in the production of electricity by chemical action as in electric cells or batteries.2

Originating at the turn of the eighteenth century, the field of electrochemistry really did not open up until the start of the 1800's when an Italian physicist, Alessandro Volta, made significant advances.

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born in Como, Lombardy, on February 18, 1745. Volta was born to nobility that had moved down in social station. Unlike his siblings, young Alessandro did not enter the church.

His young childhood did not show the makings of a prodigy. It was not until the age of four that he talked, and his family was convinced that he was retarded. However, at the age of seven when his father died, he was at the level of other children and then began to march ahead. By the age of fourteen, he made up his mind to be a physicist.

Volta became fascinated with the phenomenon of the age, electricity. He became so enamored with it that he wrote an excellent Latin poem on the subject. In 1774, he was appointed professor of physics in the Como high school and the next year he invented electrophorous, a charge- accumulating machine.

Volta's fame spread as result. In 1778, Volta was the first to isolate the compound methane, a major constituent of natural gas.

Further, in 1779, he received a professorial appointment at the University of Pavia, where he continued his work with electricity. He invented other gadgets involving static electricity and received the Copley medal of the Royal Society, where he was elected to membership, in 1791.

The major feat of his life involved not static electricity, but dynamic electricity- the electric current. Following the experiments of Galvani, who was a friend of his and sent copies of his papers on the subject, Volta attacked the question of whether the electric current resulting when muscle was in contact with two different metals arose from the tissue or from the metals.

To check this he decided in 1794 to make use of the metals alone, without the tissue. He found at once that an electric current resulted and maintained that it therefore had nothing to do with life or tissue. This sparked a controversy between the two Italians with the German Humboldt, the chief of Galvani's supporters, and the Frenchman Coulomb, the chief of Volta's. The weight of the evidence leaned more and more heavily toward Volta, and Galvani died embittered.

In 1800 Volta virtually clinched the victory by constructing a device that would produce a large flow of electricity. Volta's device was an "electric battery"- the first in history. The invention of the battery lifted Volta's fame to its pinnacle. He was called to France by Napoleon in 1801 for a kind of "command performance"of his experiments. He received many medals and decorations, including the Legion of Honor, and was even made a count and, in 1810, a senator of the kingdom of Lombardy.

Throughout his life, though, Volta was able to shift with the changing politics of the time and to remain in good graces with whatever government was in power. After Napoleon fell and Austria became dominant in Italy once more, Volta continued to excel and to receive posts of high honor. Volta received his greatest honor, however, at the hands of no ruler, but of his fellow scientists. The unit of electromotive force- the driving force that moves the electric current- is now called the "volt."

The energy of moving charged particles produced by modern atom-smashing machines is measured in electron-volts. A billion electron-volts is abbreviated "bev," and when we speak of the particular atom-smasher called the bevatron, the "v" in the name stands for Volta.

Of Volta's numerous inventions, his two most influential are: the electrophorous and the Voltaic pile.

The electrophorous was a device based on static electricity. It consisted of one metal plate covered with ebonite and a second metal plate with an insulated handle. The ebonite-covered plate is rubbed and given a negative electric charge. If the plate with a handle is placed over it, a positive electric charge is attracted to the lower surface, a negative charge repelled to the upper.

The upper negative charge is built up in the plate with the handle. This sort of charge-accumulating machine replaced the Leyden Jar and is the basis of the electrical condensers still used today.1

The Voltaic pile was Volta's life accomplishment. Initially, he used bowls of salt solution that were connected by means of arcs of metal dipping from one bowl into the next, one end of the arc being copper and the other tin or zinc. Volta made matters more compact and less watery by using small round plates of copper and zinc, plus discs of cardboard moistened in salt solution. Starting with copper at the bottom, the discs, reading upward, were in the pattern copper, zinc, cardboard. If a wire was attached to the top and bottom of this "Voltaic pile: an electric current would pass through it if the circuit was closed.

The voltaic pile was the first electric battery, and it shortly led to its practical application by William Nicholson and the work of Davy, as well as, being the progenitor of modern day batteries."1

1. Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982.
2. "Battery" and "Electrochemistry." Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. 1983 ed.
3. "Electrochemistry." Random House Encyclopedia. 1990 ed.