Trends in Neurosciences
Volume 23, Issue 4, 1 April 2000, Pages 147-151
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Perspective
The bicentennial of the Voltaic battery (1800–2000): the artificial electric organ

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Abstract

Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery at the end of 1799 and communicated his invention to the Royal Society of London in 1800. The studies that led him to develop this revolutionary device began in 1792, after Volta read the work of Luigi Galvani on the existence of an intrinsic electricity in living organisms. During these studies, Volta obtained a series of results of great physiological relevance, which led him to anticipate some important ideas that marked the inception of modern neuroscience. These results have been obscured by a cultural tradition that has seen Volta exclusively as a physicist, lacking interest for biological problems and opposed in an irreversible way to the physiologist, Luigi Galvani.

Section snippets

Volta–Galvani: physics versus physiology

Volta’s interest in the medical and physiological problems connected to the study of electricity has been obscured by a historical tradition that tends to view him as a champion of physics who was opposed to the champion of physiology and medicine, Luigi Galvani. The well-known controversy between these two scientists concerned the origin of the electricity involved in the muscle contractions brought about by metallic conductors in frog preparations: Volta the physicist asserting that this

Natural and artificial electric organs

Volta started his experimental studies on the effects of electricity in muscle contraction in 1792, after reading the recently published account of Galvani’s experiments4. However, his interest in the involvement of electricity in ‘animal economy’ (that is, ‘physiology’ in a broad sense) pre-dated the publication of Galvani’s work, as documented by a letter he addressed ten years earlier to Mme de Nanteuil5.

In this letter, Volta discussed the possibility of the existence of a genuine ‘animal

Volta’s electro–physiological experiments

In the work of Volta, ‘electrical-physiological’ does not only allude to the possibility of reproducing in a physical device the electric phenomena of living organisms. In the course of the studies that led to the invention of electric battery, Volta made a series of important observations of proper physiological relevance that have been largely ignored by the scientific tradition. This is perhaps also the consequence of the artificial limits that exists between physics and physiology, erected

Concluding remarks

It is interesting to note that the communication to the Royal Society in 1800 on the invention of the battery is to a large extent concerned with results and discussions of physiological relevance. In the final pages, after discussing at length the effects of the electricity of the battery in promoting sensations and movements, Volta wrote1,

All the facts which I have related in this long paper in regard to the action which the electric fluid, when excited and when moved by my apparatus,

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Lucia Galli-Resta and Lionel Lovitch for critically reading the manuscript, Liramalala Rakotobe for collaboration, and Livia Iannucci, Carlo Alberto Segnini and Monica Tortora for help in accessing old scientific literature.

References (14)

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