In a display case on the lower level of the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution in London, there’s an unassuming stack of gray metal discs and blotting paper. It’s not at all obvious that this humble object is the starting point of today’s multibillion-dollar global battery industry. The object’s invention in 1799 grew out of a disagreement that Alessandro Volta—the Italian physicist for whom the unit of measurement for electrical potential is named—had with his friend Luigi Galvani over a dead frog.
The Debate Over Animal Electricity
Galvani was a well-respected Italian physician. In the 1770s, he began investigating the use of electricity to stimulate the muscles of dissected frogs. Armed with an electrostatic generator and an early type of capacitor called a Leyden jar, he was able to create a charge, store it, and then zap his animal specimens at will. He was intrigued when the frog legs twitched as if they were still alive. He spent the last three decades of the 18th century studying the phenomenon, and in 1791, he published De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius (Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion).
Luigi Galvani spent decades investigating what he believed to be a natural electric force emanating from animals. Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Galvani saw the frog as embodying an “animal electricity,” an innate vital force that activated nerves and muscles, similar to what had been observed in (living) electric eels and torpedo rays. For Galvani, the frog was an electrical machine analogous to a Leyden jar. The brain was the source of the electrical charge; the nerves conducted the electrical fluid; and the muscles stored opposite charges. The illustrations in his 1791 book are fabulous—frog legs spread all over his laboratory table!
Galvani was wrong in thinking that his frogs were electrical machines, but he was right that the muscle contractions were caused by electric signals.SSPL/Getty Images
At first, Volta, chair of physics at the University of Pavia, concurred with his friend. But after beginning his own experiments, he concluded that Galvani was wrong and that the frog generated no electricity at all. He thought of the frog as nothing more than an electroscope, an instrument to indicate the presence of an electrical charge. Volta posited that the source of the charge Galvani observed came from two different metals in contact with the frog. He termed this “metallic electricity.”
Alessandro Volta came to disagree with Galvani’s theory of animal electricity.Apic/Getty Images
To prove his point, Volta created an “artificial electric organ.” He stacked alternating discs of copper and zinc, separated by cardboard, blotting paper, or cloth soaked in brine or acid. When the top and bottom plates were connected, an electric current flowed through the stack. As opposed to a Leyden jar, which is essentially a capacitor that can store an electric charge and release it in a brief powerful discharge, his stack of discs generated its own electricity through a chemical reaction and delivered a sustained low-current output.
Volta didn’t publicly demonstrate or announce his artificial electric organ until after Galvani died in 1798. But when he finally did, in 1799, it immediately began upending science. Just six weeks after Volta wrote to the Royal Society about his invention, the English scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used a voltaic pile to run a current through water to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. They had discovered chemical electrolysis. Humphry Davy later used a large voltaic pile to isolate a number of elements, including potassium, sodium, calcium, strontium, and barium. Early piles petered out after a few hours. Users who stacked up more metal discs to make more powerful piles found the weight of the discs squeezed out the moisture in the paper or cloth.
Invented in 1799, Volta’s “artificial electric organ” (later known as the voltaic pile) was the first battery. Volta presented this one to Michael Faraday in 1814.Royal Institution of Great Britain/Science Source
One of the most enthusiastic users of the voltaic pile was Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who spent much of his career defending his uncle’s ideas. Aldini created spectacles across Europe in which he used voltaic piles to shock the carcasses of livestock and, occasionally, the bodies of recently executed convicts. Vivid descriptions in the popular press, as well as Aldini’s own writings, raised the question of whether electricity could bring the dead back to life. Mary Shelley provided her answer in her 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In an introduction to an 1831 edition, Shelley cites galvanism as one of her inspirations for the monster’s reanimation process.
Beyond Winners and Losers in Scientific Debates
Scientists and historians share a common trait: They like stories with clear winners and losers. The narrative of competition helps drive a narrative of progress that makes it look like humanity is always moving forward. In the case of Galvani and Volta, Volta is usually depicted as the clear winner in the debate over animal versus metallic electricity. The Encyclopedia Britannica goes as far as to write that “with his announcement of the first electric battery in 1800, victory was assured for Volta.”
But both science and history are more nuanced than that. In fact, Galvani and Volta were both partially right and partially wrong. There was no universal force of animal electricity, but Galvani was correct that electrical signals caused muscle contractions, which he discussed in his anonymous 1794 publication Dell’uso e dell’attività dell’arco conduttore nella contrazione dei muscoli (On the Use and Activity of the Conductive Arch in the Contraction of Muscles). Volta was right to push back on Galvani’s animal electricity theory, but he was wrong that electrophysiological effects require two different types of metal, or any metal at all; the circuit in the voltaic pile was closed by the wet paper or cloth.
It seems a little presumptuous for the Encyclopedia Britannica to declare Volta the winner and Galvani the loser. Volta definitely thought his friend was wrong, but he waited until after Galvani’s death to make his views public. It’s closer to the truth to say they were both genuinely curious to understand the nature of electricity. In the process, they unknowingly helped develop different fields of inquiry: electrophysiology for Galvani and electrochemistry and battery science for Volta.
Such an outcome is actually quite common in scientific disagreements. For example, Isaac Newton’s dispute with Christiaan Huygens over the nature of light—did light consist of particles, or corpuscles, as Newton termed them, or waves, as Huygens contested—breaks down today into quantum optics and classical optics. Similarly, Louis Pasteur’s and Justus von Liebig’s debate over fermentation (microorganisms versus chemical decomposition) led to two complementary fields: microbiology and biochemistry.
Maybe instead of looking for winners and losers, we would be better off expanding our horizons and considering the multiple paths of inquiry and discovery. Writing in 1816, toward the end of his career, Volta graciously acknowledged Galvani’s pioneering work, saying “it contains one of the most beautiful and surprising discoveries and the germ of many others.” What new revelations are waiting to develop out of today’s scientific debates?
Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.
An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2026 print issue as “The First Battery.”
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