Volta · The battery
Can electricity be stored?
That time, that place
Galvani in Bologna had found something odd: a dead frog's leg twitched when metal instruments touched it. He concluded that electricity resides in animal bodies and called it animal electricity.
Why this question
Volta read it differently. What caught his attention was not the frog but the metal: every time a twitch occurred, two different metals had been involved.
If so, the frog was not the source. It was a detector, showing that something was flowing.
What was found
He removed the frog entirely. Between a disc of silver and a disc of zinc he set a cloth soaked in brine, and stacked the arrangement in a pile.
Current flowed — not a single discharge but a steady one.
This mattered because electricity until then meant charge stored in a jar and released all at once. A flash, and gone. Now there was a current that kept running.
Within months people were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with it, and Davy was isolating elements no one had ever separated.
Electricity came from inside living bodies
A steady current from a pile of silver and zinc, with no frog involved
The dispute ended with both partly right: bioelectricity is real too