PARTE V (ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS)

WITH AN

ESSAY

GIVEN IN

OPENING

ROME, PAVIA AND COMO, ON THE GALVANI-VOLTA CONTROVERSY

ADDRESSES

ADDRESSES AND LECTURES

MARCH 19 1999, ROME, OPENING

TH

LUIGI DADDA, P. 307 EDOARDO VESENTINI, PP. 308-309

ALBERTO GIGLI BERZOLARI, ALESSANDRO VOLTA 1799, PP. 310-319 SIRO LOMBARDINI, ALESSANDRO VOLTA: FROM AN ACADEMIC DISPUTE TO A GREAT TRANSFORMATION OF ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, PP. 320-329

MARCH 19TH 1999, ROME, LECTURES

CARLO RUBBIA, FROM

MARCH 20TH 1999, PAVIA-COMO, LECTURE

THE

VOLTAIC PILE

TO THE FUEL CELL, PP.

330-339

G. FRANCO

AS A

GIULIANO PANCALDI, ALESSANDRO VOLTA NATURAL PHILOSOPHER AND A SCIENTIST, PP. 340-347 BASSANI, THE RELEVANCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF PHYSICISTS IN 1927 IN COMO, PP 348-352

MARCH 20TH 1999, COMO, LECTURES

GIANNI BONERA, FROM

TO THE INVENTION OF THE

THE CONTROVERSY WITH

ESSAY

BATTERY,

PP.

GALVANI 353-364

ON THE

ENGLISH

CONCERNING THE INVENTION OF THE

TRANSLATION OF

A NOTE

ALESSANDRO VOLTAS PILE

WRITINGS

A fronte (dallalto): Copertina del numero speciale (1993) del Rapporto del Centro di Cultura Scientifica A. Volta(Centro Volta) con il saggio di Lucio Fregonese su Volta e Boscovich (cfr. p. 303); Salone donore di Villa Olmo, principale sede dei Convegni organizzati dal Centro Volta; Statua in bronzo di Giuseppe Grandi (1843-1894) raffigurante Alessandro Volta, propriet del Centro Volta; la sede del Centro Volta Villa Olmo a Como vista dal lago. 305

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OPENING
PRESIDENT

OF

OF THE

CELEBRATIONS FOR THE BICENTENARY VOLTAS INVENTION OF THE PILE LUIGI DADDA

r President of the Republic, distinguished authorities, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of all the members of the National Committee for the Celebrations of Alessandro Voltas invention of the Pile which I have the honour to chair I wish to express my sincere thanks for honouring with your presence this ceremony with which the celebrations for the bicentenary of the invention of the electric battery (the Pile) by Alessandro Volta start. This invention has been, in the two last centuries, the basis for the knowledge of a new and mostly unknown aspect of nature and the source of innumerable applications that have deeply changed the life of the whole mankind. The two illustrious lecturers at this meeting, Professor Alberto Gigli Berzolari of the same University of Pavia where Alessandro Volta was professor, and Professor Lombardini of the Accademia dei Lincei will evoke his personality, his work as scientist and the impact of the invention of the battery on the economic and social life.

ACCADEMIA NAZIONALE

OF

OF THE

NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR THE CELEBRATIONS ALESSANDRO VOLTAS INVENTION OF THE PILE
DEI

LINCEI, ROME, MARCH 19TH, 1999

The seat of the Accademia dei Lincei, where we are now, pushes me to underline how much Alessandro Volta can teach to professors and scientists of today since he came to invention of the battery certainly for an exceptional capability of intuition, but also for a capability that has been fostered by a long and patient experimental work along with a consistent dialogue with colleagues from other countries as well.

Concerning this, we shouldnt forget how stimulating the controversy with Galvani was; maybe if the dispute on galvanism had not taken place, we wouldnt be here today to celebrate Volta. The objective of Voltas celebrations is to remind us how much Volta has done and how much interest his discovery has aroused. Yet, apart form remembering, we cannot avoid thinking of the future of research, not only as expression of the everlasting aspiration of man for knowledge, but also for the impact it generates on the way of living, on human relations and on culture in general.

I wish therefore that the celebrations that were inaugurating today will remind Italy and the whole world of Alessandro Voltas work but will also provide suggestions to make research one of the first priorities in the life of our country.

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OPENING

OF

OF THE

CELEBRATIONS FOR THE BICENTENARY VOLTAS INVENTION OF THE PILE

OF THE

ACCADEMIA NAZIONALE

PRESIDENT

EDOARDO VESENTINI
DEI

ACCADEMIA NAZIONALE

LINCEI, ROME, MARCH 19 , 1999

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DEI

LINCEI

The first conference, chaired in 1931 by Guglielmo Marconi and Orso Mario Corbino and co-ordinated by Enrico Fermi, with the participation of famous scientists like Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Bruno Rossi, Arnold Sommerfeld, was on nuclear physics, an avant-garde subject at that time, that seen from an historical perspective, can be considered as typically Voltian. As a matter of fact, it was a purely speculative subject, at that time far from everyday reality, that in little more than ten years would completely change our life and the very structure of our society.

Mr President, I would like to express my gratitude to honour with His presence this solemn opening ceremony for Voltas celebrations. The organisation of this opening ceremony, together with the National Committee for Alessandro Voltas invention of the Pile has been for the Accademia dei Lincei an act consistent with the presence, in the Academy, of the Alessandro Volta Foundation. Founded by a Royal Decree in 1930, from an initiative of the Edison, Italian General Society of Electricity, the Foundation has carried out, up to the seventies, an intense activity. In a series of top-level international scientific conferences, the Foundation has tackled beforehand issues that have had a growing importance in the years to come, such as Europe, the history of East-West relations, problems of immunology and nutrition, astrophysics and mathematics.

r President of the Republic, Mr President of the Constitutional Court, Honourable Minister of University and Scientific and Technological Research, Honourable Representatives of the Senate of the Republic and of the Chamber of Deputies, distinguished guests, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.

As Vito Volterra pointed out, whereas to develop steam-engines at least in the heroic period of the invention of the fire machine, the source of the most ingenious and famous findings was the workshop itself, and only later on science, by observing how industrial machines worked, built that wonderful monument that includes all
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Voltas intellectual curiosity was never satisfied. This together with a strong independence, almost a solitude of thought, puts him in a detached position in the history of science, because of his idea that a possible practical application of a scientific discovery is not a successive and separate operation, but is intimately integrated in the creative process.

Scientific research is an intellectual adventure to which in Voltas words everyone who in the study of the marvellous works of Nature has as his goal nothing else but getting to know the truth takes part. Or in Galileos words the one who aims higher by turning to the great book of nature that is the real object of philosophy.

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Volta is a peculiar character also in his lifes course. As Giovanni Polvani says in his biography published by the Domus Galilaeana in 1942 (and re-printed on the occasion of the celebrations starting today by the Accademia dei Lincei, the National Academy of Sciences called of the XL and the National Committee for the Voltas celebrations) which I take the liberty to present you, Mr President : Tradition says that Volta as a small child had had a very slow and late mental development, that it was feared he could be dumb. And worries didnt disappear completely when at the age of four he pronounced his first word a straight no seeing that it was only three years after that he could eventually speak fluently. A few years later, when he was a teen-ager, his uncle, who was a priest, took him away from the Jesuits school. He then found himself in the middle of those deep religious quarrels that characterised at that time very Catholic families, like the Voltas, in which as underlined by Franco Venturi the number of members belonging to the clergy was incredibly high also for that age where there was a great number of friars, priests and nuns. Yet that first no pronounced at the age of four can be considered as the premanifestation of that intellectual independence to which Alessandro Volta remained faithful, in spite of his success and the prestigious acknowledgements he received, being able to live his long life on this earth with great dignity in that hard historic moment. It was a difficult undertaking, not only at that time.

natural phenomena and dominates them according to the principles of thermodynamics, the opposite occurred with electricity. The battery Volterra continues ready for its various applications came directly from the laboratory of physics of the University of Pavia. Yet this is true not only for the battery but also for the results obtained by Volta in chemistry and in the physical chemistry of gases.

MARCH 19 1999, ROME, OPENING ADDRESSES

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* See p. 19

that virtue which blindly passes through wet parts from the base tin to the rich silver and moves from this to that making a perpetual turn (Lorenzo Mascheroni 1793)

ALESSANDRO VOLTA 1799*

ALBERTO GIGLI BERZOLARI

any things can be said about Volta and about his important contributions to the enrichment of scientific knowledge. Everything can be said in different ways but everything will bring us to talk about this new way of thinking about electrical phenomena that had its full expression in the invention of the Voltaic pile in 1799. It is not also easy to say new things since everything or almost everything has been said about him and his work. Few scientists have left such a rich documentation, such as publications and manuscripts, and few have had as many connoisseurs as he had. The almost complete and very rich collection of his works is kept at the Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. Maybe the shortest way, an easy and at the same time elegant way to speak about the Battery and about how it works, is not the one followed by scientists but the one expressed by poets. It is the one contained in the four verses of the quotation that are the subtitle of the report Im reading.

The poet is the abbot Lorenzo Mascheroni, whom Vincenzo Monti remembered as an eminent mathematician, graceful poet and excellent citizen. Colleague and friend of Volta in the University of Pavia, he left, among his most significant works as a poet the Invitation to Lesbia Cidonia and as a mathematician, the Geometry of the Compasses. With his poetry Invitation to Lesbia Cidonia, he reminds the beautiful and cultivated poetess Paolina Secco-Suardo Grismondi, who had the Arcadian name of Lesbia Cidonia, that she had promised to cheer up by paying a visit to the City on the Ticino (Pavia) and its Athenaeum. This piece of poetry consists of 529 elegant and unrhymed verses. In these verses the poet imagines to be leading the precious visitor along a track that foresees meetings with masters, visits to museums, to lectures rooms, to scientific rooms, to libraries, to botanical gardens, which had given the University of Pavia a strong reputation and had ranked it among the greatest in Europe. The poetess would meet Volta and be present to the first phases of the experimentation that would bring him to the invention of the Battery.

I will here give some general information on Volta and on the environment in which he worked and then I will try to evoke with simple words what these four lines of the Invitation mean. I will mention the arguments that would make Volta think that two different metals like the base tin and the rich silver put in contact with wet parts could give life to that virtue which blindly can be moved from this to that making a perpetual turn. This is to describe by a happy intuition and poetic synthesis that closed chain of three different conductors in contact with each other that makes the so-called single Voltaic element of the eighteenth century battery.
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olta was born in Como on February 18th, 1745. He was trained in a familiar and school environment that was closeminded and conservative. After the primary school he was sent to the Jesuits school and then to the seminary. All the premises were there for him to become a priest but he didnt feel any vocation for it. The pioneer age of the so-called elettrizzanti physicists was passing by. At that time the electric fire (or electric virtue) was considered by physicists and naturalists, as well as by second-rate actors, quacks and charlatans, a fluid to which one could attribute the most different natural phenomena, that was also capable of great and wonderful games. The fluid delighted and conquered in elegant salons and in popular arenas, knights, ladies, gallants and poor people, above all, once it had been discovered that ladies usually get excited in an easier and better way than men and young ladies better than old ladies. That fire was then considered by serious and less serious doctors as a fluid of life, a possible source of new and extraordinary therapeutic methods almost as if it were a sort of universal panacea. These picturesque and amusing amateurs and their marvellous games would have then found a greater space in Academies, in big Schools and in Universities. In this way they gained again that scientific dignity they once had in the past, that was then partially lost, and absorbed the spirit and the new method of the Galilean natural philosophy that would have deeply influenced, in spite of its different principles, the scientific thought of the end of the eighteenth century. Since his childhood he showed a great interest for natural sciences and in particular for electric phenomena.

As a boy, Volta had read important scientific works, largely spread in Europe. When he was only eighteen, he already proved to possess a solid preparation and a great spirit of observation, as well as particular experimental abilities. His early poetic works were valuable. He worked in private, for a long time outside of public bodies and in particular universities. In his scientific training he was a self-taught man without any other lead than that of his investigating talent.

He was working during the last thirty years of the century that had seen deep political, cultural and social transformations. That period was characterised by a new renaissance in Lombardy brought about by
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In his maturity he had the fortune to get involved in the great reforming plan of the Empress Maria Theresa Habsburg-Lorena and of his son Joseph II. After a few years of teaching at the Gymnasium in Como, in 1787 he became professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Pavia, because of his well-known reputation. The reputation he had achieved put him in that group of eminent personalities that the government in Vienna had wanted in that athenaeum, that had to become one of the most important in the Empire.

When he was still young he found in European scientific circles the most interesting interlocutors with whom he could share ideas and methods. Apart from some exceptions, these interlocutors were not to be found in Italy, where the scientific and educational environment was very poor and unresponsive to new ideas and methods and inert to the eighteenth century philosophic turmoil.

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He had met generous and powerful princes under all flags during the extraordinary and stimulating atmosphere of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. In science the Enlightenment movement recognized, with a Galilean spirit, not only a vehicle for the acquisition of frontier knowledge by a few scholars but also a very effective vehicle for the spiritual liberation of mankind. He had been for fifty-one years a subject of the Austrian Empire, where order and safety reigned, for eighteen years a citizen of the Cisalpine Republic and of Napoleons kingdom. There he felt first lost, later he was celebrated and received honours and finally again for thirteen years an Austrian subject, under the dreariness of the Restoration. In every case he was a cautious, devoted, faithful and law-abiding subject or citizen.

Austrian and French reforms, by Napoleons triumphs, by the arising of new Europe and of a new America and by the establishing of the method of research of the natural sciences in Academies and Universities, as well as of technological research in workshops.

Three dates are important in the experimental campaign that has brought to the invention of the Voltaic pile 200 years ago: 1792, its origins, 1796, its most meaningful developments, and 1799 its completion. That campaign shows on the whole the greatest uniquely Italian contribution to European science during an extraordinary moment for the fortune of the scientific and technological thought.

Yet these same dates remind of very difficult moments, moments of bewilderment for the majority of European subjects or citizens. They would leave such a deep and lasting sign that it has to be briefly mentioned. In 92 what was left of the ancient duchy of the Visconti-Sforza family was a peripheral Austrian province and the news that came from near France were for everybody a source of great anxiety. The Revolution celebrated the sovereignty of Reason and this idea was already penetrating, although very slowly, in the duchy. But for men of science and scholars, in particular, it was difficult to understand that in the name of that sovereignty it was said,knowledge was considered a horrible form of aristocracy and being a genius was a crime against equality and that the wonders of the revolutionary age had manifested themselves without scientists and in spite of scientists and from the genius with no education. Moreover when Antoine Lavoisier, the greatest among the founders of modern chemistry, was sent to the guillotine, it was declared, the revolution had no need of scientists.

In 1796 Napoleons army brought new ideas in Italy, ideas that were fortunately now moderate, no more a source of the excess and of the cruelties that were typical of the Terror. These ideas were accompanied by strange symbols, by violence and by vulgar and blasphemous intemperance that created bewilderment and confusion. Yet they also opened up new horizons and new aspirations proposing new and different life models, new ideals of freedom and equality that were not yet familiar and often almost unknown in the duchy after almost three hundred years of first Spanish then Austrian rule.

On April 1999 the Austro-Russian army occupied Lombardy, taking advantage of Napoleons interest for Egypt. Once back the Austrians would show their harsh resentment against the people from Lombardy that had quickly forgotten, after absorbing new ideas, the
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cultural, social and economic benefits that Viennas good government had brought about in less that half a century.

The University of Pavia was closed, professors dismissed. Professors and students that had gladly welcomed the French and the new ideas went to prison; others were exiled or fled somewhere else.

Volta was overwhelmed by those events. Fired and frightened he sought refuge in the quiet of his town, Como, where, in spite of the confusion, the lack of money and the general bewilderment, he carried out his research on the electrical properties of chains of conductors, inventing the Voltaic pile. He would start again his teaching activities after those unhappy thirteen months, once Napoleon took again control over Lombardy.

Without entering into scientific and technological details of a physics that in some aspects still today is not at all easy to understand, I will now try to illustrate Voltas work on chains of conductors, by adhering to the language and the methodologies as they emerge from the discussions of the end of the Eighteenth century, that is to say, without interpolations or interpretations made possible by the scientific knowledge that came after. he field of research of Luigi Galvani, who was an anatomist in Bologna, was physiology and had as its main subject the working of muscles and consequently their nervous stimulation. Different hypotheses had been put forward, but as studies on electric phenomena became popular, the theory of the nerve electric fluid, as responsible for stimulations, gradually began to catch on. This was also due to the growing familiarity with those phenomena and to the tendency to attribute to electrical phenomena the most different effects. Volta at that time was involved only marginally in those problems.

Volta was therefore beginning and then bringing to an end his main scientific work, and also other valuable works, in the troubled and tumultuous atmosphere that characterized the last ten years of the Eighteenth century, where fear and anxiety reigned. Fortunately his being cautious and his aristocratic detachment towards any accusation of being pro Austrian or Jacobin according to the winning party, would allow him to overcome that difficult moment without serious damages.

At that time Galvanis experimentation laid the foundations of a theoretical framework that was still confused and the hypothesis of the existence of animal electricity was still very much discussed. Moreover, there was no experimental proof that clearly suggested which mechanism could give origin to the nerve electric fluid, nor suggested his localization in the animal body.
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The hypothesis of the existence of a kind of electricity that was specific to the human body and to the animal body, that is to say of an animal electricity of biological origin different from what was known at the time, was making its way. This was also a consequence of the studies on the behaviour of the torpedo and on similar animals. However, researches in the field were carried out with different and questionable approaches from the methodological point of view, making confusion between electricity observed on animals and electricity observed in animals, and as much confusion on the results obtained making experiments on living animals and on dead animals.

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In 1791 Galvani published his research in his pamphlet De viribus electricitatis in motu muscolari commentarius.

Major contributions to this research would be mainly Italian.

He had been lucky enough to observe an unexpected and in a certain way casual phenomenon: the scorched hind legs of dead frogs contracted themselves when the lumbar nerves were connected to the crural nerves through a metal conductor arc. He interpreted the fact he had observed by imagining nerves and muscles as unbalanced seats of an electric fluid of biological origin different from the one that was known at the time, that is to say animal electricity, which in order to find balance discharged itself along the conductor arc causing muscles stimulation. He attributed a passive function to the conductor arc and underestimated the fact that contractions were livelier when the arc was made of two different metals put in contact, the one close to the other. What had been observed was a new and surprising phenomenon that aroused interest and curiosity. Volta overcame his reservations and starting from March 1792 he devoted himself completely to the study of those phenomena. Galvanis interpretation was purely electro-biological.

nitially he supported Galvanis thoughts, apart from some differences, and made public in May 1792 his Memoria prima sulla elettricit animale. Yet, after a few days, he took the distance from these ideas with his Memoria seconda sulla elettricit animale, whose conclusions were based on a great variety of observations. Volta, differently from Galvani, overestimated the importance of the arc that was made of two different metals and attributed different electrical unbalances to their contacts with the nerves that were subject to muscle contractions: one with the lumbar nerves, the other with nervous terminations of the crural nerves. The electrical current that flowed in the nervous system and, by exciting it, stimulated muscles contractions was due to the different electrical unbalances caused by the two contacts. Therefore he denied that it was necessary to assume the existence of an animal electricity of biological origin, which was also different from the one that was known at that time. He attributed to frogs nervous system, the function of discharging arc and to the frog itself the function of a highly sensitive detector of electricity that was activated somewhere else through physical processes. Voltas interpretation was purely electro-physical.

Metals he said behave not anymore as simple deferents as actual motors of electricity.

Volta became more and more convinced by working also on nervous terminations of muscles different from motory muscles. In particular he paid attention on the stimulation of the senses in the human body, and could generate the acid or basic taste on the tongue and flashes in the eyes by working only with arcs of two metals. He was courageously taking a new position that could not be easily
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With his assertion in conclusion, what matters is the difference made by the different metals he took a position that he would not abandon later on because this diversity would become for him gradually from advantageous to necessary.

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accepted by the official science of the time that denied to metals and their combinations active electrical properties.

He summerized his thought in the Memoria terza sulla elettricit animale, where he referred more to physiological rather than physical aspects of his observations. The two interpretations were one the opposite of the other. This is how that exclusive and strong scientific controversy started, a controversy that all Europe would follow with great curiosity and participation, a controversy that became well known in the history of science.

Those poor frogs would undergo the most incredible vexations. Yet, at that time it was impossible to imagine the extraordinary consequences to which the study of the behaviour of innocent, harmless and apparently dead little animals would bring. oltas interpretation would lead in a few years to the invention of the battery and its relevant consequences. Galvanis interpretation, which was long forgotten after the invention of the battery, would lead to the establishment of electrophysiology, although many years after. The first phase of the discussion ended in 1792 and started again shortly after following however different and opposing directions. It is not easy to enter into the contents of the controversy between the two parties, even if one tries not to go into details. Moreover, the discussion would have been subtle and detailed and I wouldnt like to run the risk of not being clear and essential. Galvani and his followers would have always maintained their original ideas by putting at the centre of the discussion the existence of an electricity of biological origin that was responsible for the contractions. They made experiments on frogs without using metals but with arcs made of wet conductors such as parts of the human body (like fingers for instance), wet with sweat, saliva and blood, and they obtained the contractions. Voltas statement what matters is the difference made by the different metals... was therefore drastically denied and one could state that metals do not possess any secret magic virtue. Volta reacted with great determination and carried out serious experimental tests to prove all the hypotheses that had surfaced in the meantime. He was able to explain with his contact theory the results obtained with the wet conductors used by Galvani and his followers. So he could include their results obtained without using any metals into his principles. To say it in a few words.

On one hand Galvani and his followers had eliminated metals by acting always on biological structures. On the other hand Volta would go on working with metal chains eliminating biological structures and replacing them with simple solution of water and salt. And he would be successful, because without the elimination of frogs and of any other biological structure, that is to say any possible source of animal electricity, Galvani and his followers would have been right.
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In the years 95 and 96 a new and decisive phase of experimentation began.

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Getting rid of those possible sources, he moved the problem from the electro-kinetic field to the electro-static field, a field in which he had invented tools, in particular the electroscope-condenser that in the past had made of him one of the main creators of quantitative electrostatics and as such recognised over all Europe. His tools would have allowed him to discover that, also by putting in contact two different metals, one could always obtain an electrical unbalance, which was a very important fact. The argumentation that since the beginning had brought him to state that what matters is the difference made by different metals had been confirmed although in different and better expressed forms.

This was a further extension of his contact theory to couples of conductors, of no matter which nature.

His ideas were contained in three well-known Memoirs dated 96 and 97 addressed to Friedrich Gren in Halle, where he announced to the scientific world new fundamental contributions to pure electrology.

In later years until 99, the controversy would reach tones of extreme harshness. Some attempts were made to come closer from the opposing theories, but with no success. Volta closed hastily the discussion strong with the following fundamental results.

The first concerns the electrical unbalance caused by the contact of two different metal conductors, that is to say his last discovery. In its correct interpretation it can be traced back to the so-called Volta effect, that is to say in modern terms, that there is a difference in electrical potential between the external points of two different metals in contact with each other. The second regards the impossibility to produce an ongoing electrical current in closed chains made of solely different metals in a no matter which a priori number.

Moreover, by stacking more open single Voltaic elements one above the other with the same sequence, and then by summing through the wet conductor the unbalances produced between couples of metals, which once stacked are in contact with each other, one obtains what Volta had called column device, that is to say the Voltaic pile. The news of this invention is contained in a letter sent on March 20th, 1800 to Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, which was then read in a meeting that became famous. The news flew rapidly all
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The third result is the following. When one puts a wet conductor (such as cardboard soaked in salted water) between two different metals or reciprocally, when one puts a metal conductor between two wet materials , that is to say when a system of three different conductors in contact with each other is realized so as to make an open single Voltaic element, and then the two metals are put in contact with each other, an ongoing electric current is generated in the closed arc built in such a way. Here one finds again Mascheronis intuition on wet parts, the base tin and the rich silver and the never-ending turning of the blind virtue.

Both results would find a satisfying interpretation after the establishment of modern electronic theories on metals and therefore in relatively recent times.

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On October 1801 Volta was introduced to the Classe des Sciences of the Institut de France where he illustrated his research at the presence of the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte. He received flattering and unconditioned approvals and was awarded a gold medal prize. He wrote to his wife Maria Teresa and then to his brother Luigi mentioning how he was welcomed and the great space that was given to him and to his studies by the press in all Europe. He finished the letter to his wife in this way: He had the humbleness of a real scientist.

over Europe, arousing a great interest everywhere.

Among many things that certainly please me, and which are too much flattering, Im not so vain as to think Im more than what I am, and to a life troubled by vainglory I prefer the tranquillity and sweetness of domestic life At this point I could end my reflections, but we are across the two centuries and the battery has been invented. Yet it is interesting to go back to the verses by Mascheroni and then it is necessary to make some final conclusions.

alvani and Volta had come across a kind of reality that was only apparently simple. It was instead very complex, since physical, chemical and biological phenomena mingled in a confused way and it was difficult to separate them, at least with the means and the knowledge acquired at the end of the eighteenth century.

In this way Mascheronis intuition appears even more a particularly happy intuition with no mistakes and omissions. It dates back to 1793 and takes us very close to the conclusions Volta reached just before 1799. Every word in those verses has a precise meaning, none is superfluous and their sequence is clear in what it wants to say. As it was already reminded, they describe with a happy intuition the structure and the physical functioning of the so-called single Voltaic element of the battery. Approvals and disapprovals, support and criticism, immediate or successive, have involved Voltas work in a very lively way, taking the time of physicists, chemists and biologists among the greatest in the world until nowadays.

Therefore, one can understand the right and wrong, the truths and mistakes in both of them. Yet, after a deeper analysis, on the basis of the consequences of their work and of todays knowledge, they were both right and wrong.

Voltas electro physical interpretation of how a battery works, approved with authority by the French school, would be harshly criticized for underestimating or even neglecting the importance of the chemical processes that took place on the contact surface between metal and electrolyte. Volta neglected these processes because he thought that the humid layer contributed only, although weakly, to the production of tension as a consequence of the contact between two close metals. Yet, in fact it turned out that he had in his hands an electromotor device with which a perpetual motion was realized. Volta had clearly understood how contradictory the whole thing was already in the letter where he announced his invention:
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...Cette circulation sans fin du fluide lectrique (ce mouvement perpetuel), peut parotre paradoxe, peut ntre pas explicable: mais elle nen est pas moins vraie et relle, et on la touche, pour ainsi dire, des mains. The electro-chemical interpretation would solve rapidly all doubts and then the question would come to an end with the final approval of thermodynamics from the general point of view of energy. It is incredible how different theories that were contradicting each other would bring to the invention of the pile. Voltas invention took place in the middle of the century that saw the first scientific and technological revolution of the modern age and soon became central and would have remained so through improvements and later developments. It would soon become an equipment of primary importance in all research laboratories.

Galvanis theories, instead, were soon to be forgotten after his death in 1798 after he was tragically ruined because he didnt accept the French authority, The hypothesis of the existence of an animal electricity different from the one known at that time, although it had found influential supporters, was not considered a scientific theory and was mentioned, if it was, as of no use and with no foundations. It practically disappeared from the scientific literature. His followers became quickly fewer and fewer and a great part of physiologists abandoned, wrongly, the idea of establishing links between electricity, nervous fluid and muscle stimulation.

Electrodynamics and electrochemistry were thus born, as well as a new way of thinking to electric phenomena by bringing new and important knowledge with great rapidity in their continuous progress. Everything is under our eyes and it would take too long to mention only the most important things.

Voltas invention was a very important moment because its content was absolutely new and surprising from every point of view, and, as such, would have an impact of paramount importance both on the scientific and on the technological field.

Volta closed in triumph the eighteenth century, happily in re electrica princeps for his decisive contribution to the autonomous progress of electrical science, but also marking important stages in the more general history of science, so that he is universally considered among the greatest characters of the eighteenth century science.
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Nobilis experiments were not decisive as well. Yet he gave again full scientific dignity to the problem. His researches, taken up and disseminated by physicists and physiologists started off the modern post-galvanian electro-physiology, which after many years would bring, besides, to the realization of tools of great importance for diagnostic applications.

Yet, thirty years after Galvanis death, Leopoldo Nobili took up his experiences and making use of tools good for measuring the electric current, as galvanometers, which electrodynamics a consequence of the invention of the battery had made possible to realize. Galvanometers proved the existence of an electric current belonging to the frog itself but of the same nature of the one that was known at that time. The scientific community would be astonished in front of this new fact, which was not new to the few remaining followers of Galvani.

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Those who will visit Como will find extremely interesting to give a look to the original batteries kept in Voltas Temple. When Einstein saw them he said: the battery is the fundamental basis of all modern inventions. They are interesting but also astonishing because they are made of very poor objects: disks of different metals, disks of cardboard wet with salted water, little pieces of wood and string.

However, these poor things, piled together in a trembling way and somehow kept together, have contributed in a very determining way to the rise and success, direct or indirect, immediate or remote, of those sciences that touch all of us so closely, in the duration of our life as well as in our way of living. Those sciences that, in good and bad, whether we like it or not, have had such a large part in the rising and in the establishing of what we call today the consumer culture.

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* See p. 30

1 A. Einstein, L. Infeld, The evolution of physics, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961.

lectrical phenomena were already known in ancient Greece. In the sixth century B.C. Thales from Miletus discovered that amber rubbed with a woollen cloth attracts light objects as small pieces of straw. In the sixteenth century Gilbert had discovered that the attractive property of amber was much spread in nature. It was discovered that there were two types of electrical charges that could explain the tendencies of bodies charged with electricity to attract or repel one another. Electrostatic experiments could therefore be developed.

FROM AN

ACADEMIC

ALESSANDRO VOLTA:

SIRO LOMBARDINI

OF ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

DISPUTE TO A GREAT TRANSFORMATION

Electrical phenomena that manifest themselves in nature, i.e. lightning, cannot be studied as those that are going to be the object of classical physics (mechanics). Others, like the electric shock received after kissing a lady standing on an isolating platform charged with electricity, or the phenomenon of shaggy hair, can be considered just as an amusing game. The logical and semantic context of classical physics had no principles and could not produce hypotheses that could explain these phenomena that seemed interesting because they were surrounded by an aura of mystery. In fact, until the seventeenth century electrical and magnetic phenomena were only the object of philosophical discussions. The situation changes with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Some scientists try to build electrical machines, that is to say tools and devices that produce phenomena that could disclose the mystery and describe the properties of charges and electric currents. It can be remembered for instance the electrostatic machine by Otto von Guericke (1660), the Leyden jar by Pietre van Musschenbroek and the lightning rod by Benjamin Franklin (1752), which constitute a decisive contribution to the knowledge of electrostatics.

The new field of investigation looks innovative compared with the theoretical context of classical physics as it is remarked by EinsteinInfeld through the comparison between Newtons law of gravitation and Coulombs law. The differences are the following: the attraction of gravitation is present everywhere, whereas electric forces exist only if bodies are charged with electricity. In the gravitation only attraction 1 exists, whereas electric charges can attract or repel one another .

The new field of study could pave the way to important applications only after the discovery of the electric current. Voltas contribution was then crucial. He had already attracted the attention of scholars with his memoir De vi attractiva ignis electrici sent to Beccaria, where he gave the definition of the electrical balance resulting from the saturation of attractive forces. With the perpetual electrophorus sent to Priestley he realizes an advanced electrostatic machine that once charged with electricity does not lose its charge and
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continues to produce electric discharges. The turning point that changes the perspectives for the use of electricity is however the invention of the battery.

It is important to remember how this important result has been reached, both in order to show how many fundamental discoveries have been made by chance or almost by chance, and to underline the importance of debates also if the idea around which they develop is wrong.

HE GALVANI-VOLTA DISPUTE. Luigi Galvani, professor of anatomy in Bologna, in his experiments on the electrical condition of scorched frogs, notices that muscle contractions can be obtained by applying a two-metal conductor arc that connects the lumbar nerves with the muscles of the thigh. The conclusion he draws from this experiment is that there is animal electricity accumulated in the frog, which discharged itself through the arc.

Galvani does not give up. A controversy is born between those who support Galvanis views and those who support Voltas views. The debate makes Volta carry out more experiments to support his thesis. In 1792 he gives the abbot Tomaselli the news of an important discovery of his: electricity originates from the contact of two different conductors. He discovers the characteristics of continuous electricity through experiments with electromotive couples made of disks and glasses. Galvani insists, although Volta has been able to obtain contractions in the frog without the metal arc, and tries to confirm his theses by eliminating the two metals. Volta explains the result that seems to give advantage to Galvani as follows: nerves and muscles are different bodies and the theory of contact is true for them as well. He decides not to use the frog. Volta, who in 1796 had announced to professor Gren the general principle of electricity through contact, repeats the experiment with different types of metals and of liquid substances. He arrives therefore to the discovery of the battery. By putting zinc disks (negative pole) and copper disks (positive pole) and disks soaked in a acidulous solution one upon the other, he obtains an artificial electric organ, the battery precisely. He can prove that Galvani was wrong, but also, which was a much more important result, that plates are weakly charged conductors, which move unceasingly so that they recharge themselves after every discharge. In one word, they provide an unlimited charge, that is to say they cause an ongoing action and propulsion of the electric fluid. It is the discovery of the electric (continuous) current. Volta has had an insight, many years before the problem could be tackled in scientific terms, on the possibility of conveying electricity from a distance.

Volta at first applauds the discovery and tries to confirm it by repeating the experiments. Numerous analyses and rigorous measurements convince him that the electrical unbalance is due to the contact between two metals, and the frog acts as a revealing electroscope. It is not correct to state that some electricity is condensed in the frog.

More discoveries prove the genius of the physicist from Como. In 1776 he had noticed some small bubbles that came out of the muddy
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3 S. Lilley, Rivoluzione industriale e progresso tecnico (1700-1914) in C. M. Cipolla (ed.), Storia economica dellEuropa, III: La rivoluzione industriale, Utet, Torino, 1980, p. 210. 4

2 This is the way A. Einstein and L. Infeld point out the difference: within classical mechanics if, at a given instant, position and speed of a particle, as well as the forces acting upon it, are known, then the whole path of the particle is predictable. In Maxwell theory instead, once the state of the field at a given instant is known, then the way the field as a whole will change in time and space can be deduced from Maxwell equations.

bottom of the marshes of the Lake Maggiore. He notices that if they are mixed with common air they can catch fire. In opposition to the ideas of the time, he demonstrates the organic origin of these steams that he calls inflammable air of the marshes. Today we know that it is methane, an important source of energy.

S. Lilley, ibidem, p. 211.

The studies on electricity show a good interaction between empirical research and theoretical research. This is in fact an empirical research that is not mechanized as much of todays research is, which apply in a not always sufficiently critical way the methods of statistics, but using it not to make deductions from empirical data but to suggest improvements or even new hypotheses for other empirical researches. A theoretical research, moreover, that, even accepting the limits necessary for abstraction to which points of strength correspond , does not forget real problems from which it started.

The crucial step for the applications of electricity was the result of the studies by Ampre and Faraday on magnetic fields and by Ohm on electric circuits. The possibility of changing mechanical motion into electric energy was definitely proved by Faraday in 1831. An Italian, Antonio Pacinotti, would then build in 1874 with his ring the first machine that could transform mechanical energy into continuous electric energy. Maxwell would then formulate a theory that could explain the new phenomena with new conceptual schemes compared with those of classical physics, and in particular the concept of field. One can talk about gravitational fields but these are different from 2 electrostatic and magnetostatic fields.

AND TECHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON ELECTRICITY DEVELOPED. We have remembered a bunch of discoveries in which Voltas discovery plays a crucial role in order to show how science has opened up new possibilities to the technological development and to economic growth without being urged by military demands or by perspectives of development of the economic demands but out of scientific curiosity.

HE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTEXT IN WHICH THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC

The discovery of the possibility to transform mechanical energy into electric current could have led to important applications in a couple of decades. A half a century would instead pass by before industrial applications could come true. Lilley notices this by reminding of Bernels thesis according to whom the delay has been caused by an economic structure that had no interest in encouraging 4 innovations that were not profit-bearing. In fact, Volta could carry out his researches thanks to the encouragements first of the Austrian government and then of Napoleon. Bernal observed that builders of electrical appliances could not sell them because there was no low cost energy. On the other hand there was no incentive to build generators because there was no demand of energy. The use of energy for lighting could be taken into consideration when innovations for reducing cost in generators became possible. As the demand grew more and more, the electrical industry became more
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Lilley observes that the reason why in the eighteenth century research in the field of electricity has been carried outwas that it was a clean activity that, in the age of Enlightenment could be performed 3 without dirtying ones hands and clothes also by gentlemen.

The first practical use of electricity was the telegraph.

Innovations in cable and insulators and in flow and consumption registration systems contributed to the diffusion of the use of electric 6 energy. It was understood very soon that it was convenient to place generating plants close to the source of energy and then to convey it to consumption centres.

and more important. The invention of the incandescent filament lamp, that took place simultaneously in England thanks to Swan and in the United States thanks to Edison who brought innovations to generators as well , made it possible to extend rapidly enough the use of electric lighting. Yet as it is remarked by Court electricity and oil started being used in the years 1880ies and 1890ies, although they 5 were very far from being a challenge to coal and steam energy.

5 W H. B. Court, A concise History . of Britain from 1750 to Recent Times, Cambridge University Press, 1958, pp. 216-7. 6

J. A. Schumpeter, Business Cycle. A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, Summary with an Introduction by Rending Fels, McGraw Hill Book Co., New York, 1964, p. 259.
7

D. S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 284.

Very soon the use of energy was extended to transportation and to numerous productive activities. Exactly in 1879 when the first incandescent filament lamps were put on the market, Siemens showed at the industrial exhibition in Berlin its first electric locomotive. Different primary energy sources were transformed into electric energy, in particular coal and oil. Hydro-electric plants allowed to obtain renewable energy and made it possible to make use of great quantities of energy at convenient conditions. The hydro-electrical enterprise as remarked by Schumpeter has started a large scale 7 production when the Niagara Falls plant began to operate in 1895.

Technological changes made possible by electricity have increased this tendency. Relatively small enterprises can now operate in an efficient way thanks to the more reduced and usually more convenient dimensions of plants. In fact, as I have underlined in some of my essays, the large dimension can be justified now, usually for reasons that regard finance and sales promotion and for certain complementarities that can be established, above all in research, between different productions (this is true in particular for the chemical industry). The development of chemistry, that takes place almost in parallel
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In fact, mechanization has made it possible and convenient to make many intermediate products uniform. As a consequence a division of labour among enterprises became possible. The purchase of standard intermediate products from specialized enterprises allowed the production of final products to be carried out in plants smaller than those necessary when intermediate products were produced from within (this tendency has been studied by Young).

HE EFFECTS OF ELECTRICITY ON THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. The two typologies that have characterised the first two phases of the process of industrialization are the division of labour and mechanization. Both, although with different rhythms and methods, have pushed towards larger and larger dimensions of enterprises. This tendency has been interpreted in different ways. For Marx it is doomed to bring to a crisis the competitive system that is necessary to guarantee the efficiency that is absolutely needed for the survival of the capitalistic system. For Marshall and Pareto this tendency has some limits, which are for the first the efficiency of entrepreneurship (being that of the children lower than that of the fathers), for the latter the diseconomies of scale which imply organisational systems and end to prevail on economies associated with the different production techniques.

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J. A. Schumpeter, ibidem, p. 258.

with that of electricity and its applications, favours also a certain reorganisation of enterprises as far as productive scale economies in a strict sense are concerned.

Technologies of transformation of primary energy sources and of distribution have made concentrations in production and in the sale of electric energy convenient. For these enterprises it was also easier to obtain a monopoly in a more or less large area. Let me then at this point make a digression to say an opinion that I had the opportunity to express when the nationalization of electrical private Companies in Italy was discussed. At that time I was in favour of the nationalization of the network of distribution not of the nationalization of production. I thought it was important to favour the production of energy by self-consumption. The cost of energy at its source is easy to determine; monopoly profits can be more easily achieved through the distribution process. Also the social need to guarantee the availability of energy to small centres could be satisfied with the nationalization of distribution. The most important measures to be taken as far as energy production is concerned are however different as I will tell you later on. The use of electric energy in the different positions has had its effects not only on the dimension of enterprises and consequently on the structure of economy, but it has also had an effect on localization. A clear example is the localization of the textile industry.

Schumpeter lists the main features of the first sixteen years of the third of the great cycles that are named after the Russian economist that first studied them Kondratieff although with a different schemes from that of Schumpeter who uses the threefold conception of the economic cycle (short, medium, long) since it allows to point out, describe and interpret facts better: Soon after the beginning of the new century the long distance transmission, the three-phase current, the diffusion of the steam turbine, the improvement of hydroelectric engines, the building of hydro-electric and thermo-electric plants with increasing capacities and the triumph of high power stations over the plants of industrial consumers became the leading 8 feature of the period. The effects of electricity on the economy and on society are much greater than what it appears from these first incisive effects on productive structures. The third Kondratieff cycle is truly characterized according to Schumpeter by electricity, chemistry and engines. The innovation featuring these evolutions has had strong effects not only on the economic system but also on the social system.

HE

INDUSTRIALIZATION.

FEATURES

OF

THE

NEW

CYCLE

OF

THE

PROCESS

OF

It is sufficient to think of the effects that the advances of chemistry, biology and electricity took on agriculture and industry to get a first picture of the transformation of the economic system. The lower dependence on the availability of raw materials on the spot has emphasized the role of other features of the socio-economic system, that is to say, entrepreneurial skills, the efficiency of the financial system, professional and educational qualifications and the width of the internal market. The economic power of the United States could become stronger also for these reasons. However, the most important changes took place not as much in
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the production methods, but above all in the structure of consumptions with important effects on social structures and on the territorial organization.

The development of the mechanical industry in this phase has brought to the discovery of a new consumer durable good that initially seemed to be a toy for the rich and then, thanks to Fords initiatives too, has become a mass consumption good: the automobile. How much the way of living has changed after the appearance of this good is clear to everybody. More consumer durable goods came after the automobile, from the radio to home appliances, from television to the computer. The birth has been possible thanks to electricity.

The availability of these new consumer goods, of which the sales promotion and advertising activities have increased the consumers desire, has had an influence on the consumption propensity. This seems to have a tendency to move higher in the long term and therefore the average consumption propensity does not decrease, in opposition to what was supposed by the Keynesian analysis. These are changes that have important socio-cultural implications. The first implication is a certain standardisation in aspirations that together with other factors has contributed to organize society in classes. I think one can talk about a growing entropy in the social system associated with more and more evident forms of negative entropy in productive and financial systems. The second implication is actually linked with the first. It is a growing aspiration towards a rapid growth that allows for an increase in consumptions rather than in leisure time. In fact, it has no sense to speak about needs when referring to the various consumptions as economists used to do once. When the radio has appeared, it was thought that there was the need for a radio per family. The radio industry was the only one not to be affected by the great depression since the appearance of different models has brought about a growth in demand also when incomes were decreasing. A too much rapid development has highlighted unbalances and dangers. Consequently after the Second World War, the problem was whether some limits should be put to the economic growth. Today, with reference to pollution processes, we talk about the conditions of a sustainable development.
HE IMPORTANCE OF ELECTRICITY AS A SECONDARY SOURCE OF

At the same time the availability of energy has strongly increased both as a consequence to the discovery of new oil wells and of new methane reservoirs and also for the possibility of making use of nuclear energy. The energy that keeps together all the elements of the atomic nucleus is a million times higher than the one that keeps
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Energy consumption has strongly increased in transportation, domestic heating and in connection with new production technologies and for a whole range of consumptions.

ENERGY. THE ECOLOGICAL PROBLEM. Primary energy sources are either exhaustible such as coal, oil and methane and others renewable such as water energy, solar energy, wind energy, biomasses, energy from the waves and from ocean thermal gradients. Today because of the advantages seen in the remarks previously made, more than one third of primary energy sources are transformed into electricity.

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9 As a matter of fact, one should rather speak of well-having than of welfare i.e. well-being. Its being increasingly believed that neuroses are originated much more by frustrations, which are associated with progressively higher aspirations, than by the factors discovered by S. Freud.

together the atoms in the molecules. The energy produced by nuclear reactions is therefore enormously higher than the energy produced by a chemical reaction. As it is known there are two ways to free nuclear energy: the breaking of the nuclei heavy atoms (fission) or the fusion of nuclei of light atoms. The first way has been largely explored and has led to the construction of nuclear plants. This is also due to the military demands for which the first applications of the studies on the nucleus have been promoted. Research orientations became stronger and ended up in reinforcing this direction of research.

The growth of social welfare in the forms that the consumer 9 society has privileged and spread has been possible thanks to the increasing availability of energy, electricity in particular. There are two sides to everything. The growing energy consumption together with other phenomena linked with it, such as deforestation, have caused a series of effects that have negative impacts on health and that can endanger the life of the planet and as a consequence the survival itself of mankind.

Economic interests explain why primary sources of renewable energies are still insufficiently valued, in particular solar energy, wind energy and biomasses. We shouldnt forget that economic interests have a direct influence on research orientations. That is why free research activities need to be strongly encouraged. It can be reasonably hoped that in the future a greater attention to scarcely explored areas will make energy forms available which are less polluting.

In particular, if we take electricity into consideration, phenomena of pollution and environment deterioration can be found both in the production of raw materials necessary to the running of thermoelectrical plants and in the diffusion of various consumptions that the availability of electricity makes possible. The transformation into electricity of renewable sources (for the moment only hydro-electric production has reached an important level) could strongly reduce pollution. For nuclear energy there are specific dangers. Also for these reasons it is necessary to intensify the possibilities of valorisation of renewable sources. It has then to be remembered that more rational solutions to the problem of waste disposal can bring to a reduction of certain processes of pollution and at the same time to a certain availability of energy.

A research that I have carried out in collaboration with Enrico Canuto of the Politecnico di Torino, whose results I hope will be soon published, shows that the factors contributing in larger part to produce pollution processes are the following: population growth, consumption standards and the evolution of technologies. The first has negative effects; the second bears today the greatest responsibility (but could play a positive role in the future, according to the evolution that can be predicted for the reasons that will be explained later on); the third, if some evolutions take place which have to be adequately encouraged, could result decisive in determining a process of sustainable development.
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These considerations lead to a reflection that is worthwhile making. Certain orientations in technical progress may allow for a reduction in pollution also in accordance with the current growth rate of the population and of the present consumption standards. It is sufficient to think about the planning of new less polluting chemical plants and to the possibility, thanks to suitable plants, to greatly reduce the pollution produced by thermo-electric plants.

OWARDS A NEW DEVELOPMENT. THE ROLE OF ELECTRICITY. A deep technological revolution is now clearly taking place, which is particularly evident in the innovations of electronics and computer science. Computers imply a certain consumption of electricity. The changes that may take place as a consequence of the different applications of the new technologies and of their impact on the socio-cultural and territorial system can allow for reductions in energy consumption, such as to compensate the increase of consumption due to the use of computer systems.

A remark is sufficient to have an idea of the meaning of the ongoing changes. Let us imagine that electric energy will not be available anymore: life would become impossible. Differently form other inventions, the discovery of electric energy has made a sequence of innovations and changes in the economic and social structure possible, according to which radical changes can be foreseen that have not only negative effects (the ecological problem has already been mentioned), but also positive ones. We already had the opportunity to mention the long cycles. This scheme is used by Schumpeter to describe the changes in the economic system and make possible those explanations that certain theories of the economic system, considered as coherent in its essential features, do not allow. As it was remarked these changes were not without consequences on the socio-cultural system.

I believe we are close to the beginning of a new long cycle. Maybe a phase of reduced growth preceding the beginning of the new cycle has started (for Europe in particular not for other areas). Although it may seem a paradox, in certain developing countries an intense and spread application of information technologies can facilitate growth by reducing the number of working areas, considering the sociocultural context.

3. The same concept of growth will have to be revised not only because of the growing importance of services, whose assessment (in particular for public services and in any case for external economies that may be generated) gives rise to specific problems, but also for the
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2. A cultural revolution will be necessary, both because at school one will have to learn how to learn and also because the school will need to be renewed so as to allow for the achievement of a level and a quality of culture as it is required to consume the new products by maintaining ones own ability to reason and to make autonomous choices. The effect of this revolution on mass media cannot but be significant.

1. Technological innovations are bound to change deeply the standards of consumption. The Internet phenomenon is only a first sign. Evolutions that do not overwhelm the individual are desirable (the excess of ungovernable information could endanger the development of thought itself). For sure consumptions will lead to a reduction in mobility. They also require more free time. The reduction of working hours is possible for the reasons that will be mentioned in point 4. The technical progress will eventually make possible to everybody to benefit from these consumptions. More than the availability of income, it will be the availability of free time to limit the possibility to access these consumptions.

In order not take more than the time that I have been given, I will go on summarizing what we think are the most interesting prospects.

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10 Its worthwhile observing that the relevant criterion for profit is not the classical one, but the one pointed out by J.A. Schumpeter, which is associated with the Darwinian idea of development.

economic significance of certain changes (as those aimed at the preservation of the environment and with it also of certain consumptions of nature, necessary to compensate those connected with the computer). The possibility of considering the effects on the environment in determining the Gross Internal Product is already under discussion. 4. The advantage of the growth for the individual will have to result in an increase. This is in the interest of both the workers, that otherwise will remain for a large part unemployed, and of the producers of the new products if information technologies that can expect an increase in their demands coming from the increase in free time.

5. The possibility of decentralizing both the production and consumptions will reduce the role of the objective factors that make urban agglomerations necessary. This doesnt mean that urban concentrations will not exist any longer. Actually, in relation with this possibility and others that will be mentioned, some pathological evolutions could take place, as unfortunately are those already foreseen, or evolutions that will improve both he natural and the socio-cultural environment, such as those desirable and made possible by the electronic and computer revolution.

6. With reference to the old system and to the changes that are now taking place, the reduction of the role of the state seems possible and for many desirable. If the evolutions mentioned are taken into consideration, the role of the state seems essential and will have to be reinforced. It is however a different role from the one it had in the recent past as a consequence of different interests and powers. The new infrastructures necessary for the realization of the potential for technological development and for the expansion of new consumptions (also those linked to the environment) cannot be in substance the result of private choices. The alternative could be the concentration of an immense power in the enterprises that control information and computing technologies for the solution of the various problems. This would be an unprecedented event in the history of mankind.

A radical change can be foreseen that could take place through the growing importance of services that directly or indirectly depend on public decisions. I here remind you some discussion of mine in the seventies with the great economist Joan Robinson that had special sympathies with the Chinese regime. I foresaw at that time that the criterion of profit would in the end prevail in China, as I was and still am convinced that there is a link between the supremacy of private consumptions and the criterion of profits (that only in certain socio10 economic contexts is a stimulus to efficiency ). Robinson strongly

It is now possible to foresee how the new cycle will develop today. Every sector has its interests. The possibility of pathological evolutions cannot be excluded. Lets take the democratic system as an example. The development of computer science can make direct democracy possible or even a stable dictatorship without any need of the Big Brother. The first alternative requires the acceptance of common values, the development of true forms of communication, which are conditions that can be realised only through that cultural revolution I have previously mentioned.

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criticized my position, as she was convinced that the difference between the ethic-religious conception of China and ours would have made a development that was not anchored to profit possible in that country. Unfortunately Joan Robinson had time to see the reevaluation of profit taking place in China before dying.

I had decided to stop at this point my consideration, not to run the risk of going too far from scientific arguments, when I had the news of Hawkings intervention in a seminar taking place in Cambridge on the future of science. Hawking foresees that in the new millennium, as a consequence of the applications of genetic engineering, the new criterion of profit will not be limited to the field of plants and animals, but that a new mankind will be born. In the next one hundred years it will be possible to have a boy with no willy. Hawking does not like this prospect but he thinks it is inevitable unless a totalitarian global system is established. This perspective cannot be ignored, even if today, on the basis of the knowledge that we possess, it seems extravagant; this is how it appears to Dulbecco. As extravagant as many of the inventions that were realized in the last twenty years appeared on hundred years ago. It can be that the new mankind can be biologically not much different from the present one because of the reasons at which Dulbecco hints. Differences in physical and intellectual abilities could however be produced and established. Classes would not be a product of the socio-political and economic system but would be a characteristic of mankind, which would be sufficient to make us talk about a new mankind. As far as we are concerned, we could consider the third long cycle as the last one in a phase in which the new Prometheus has thought of being able to govern the cosmos without limits. Maybe the replacement of the criterion of he profit with others that are more rational given these long prospects will enable us to keep a historical horizon for more long cycles.

Let us go back to our theme. The transformations that began with the discovery of electricity have a value that, in a sense, cannot be compared with those of other technological revolutions. Scientists, after considering its effects, cannot close themselves in their labs. We therefore have to remember about Volta not only his genius or his honesty and his fruitful effectiveness, but also his moral commitment.

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* See p. 46

I
Background pictures to the graphs in the following pages are taken from chromolithographic plates illustrating the natural history section of the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, LeipzigVienna, 1897.

FROM

THE

VOLTAIC PILE

CARLO RUBBIA

TO THE FUEL CELL*

would like to talk about energy. Why have I made this choice? Because, as many of the speakers have very rightly mentioned this morning, Volta truly changed our way of seeing things in terms of electricity use, to the point that today, some 200 years later, we are confronted with a much more complex and new situation, since electricity has become the most noble of all the forms of energy possibile. Volta was the first to introduce electricity as a usable form of energy, but we must not forget that the subsequent developments in the use of electric power originated from two other very important Italian contributions: the dynamo by Pacinotti and the rotating magnetic field and the trasformer by Galileo Ferraris. Our country has undoubtedly given an enormous intellectual contribution to engineering and electricity.

Two-hundred years later, electricity has become the favored conveyor of energy worldwide. This is a crucial point, because electricity, together with hydrogen, is the only means which conveys energy over long distances without causing pollution. In the future, electricity will certainly be the leading source of power available, and as such it is bound to become synonymous with energy.

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I would like to show two simple charts, based on the results published in scientific literature.

Table 1 shows the energy consumption-GNP ratio in the USA, as well as the electricity fraction related to overall consumption. The curve shows that, while energy efficiency has improved enormously over the past 100 years, now we can generate the same amount of wealth with approximately one half of the energy produced initially. This is mainly because today the use of electricity accounts for 40% of the total power consumption as against 10% of the early XX century. In other words, in the USA electricity accounts for 40% of the total energy use. The next chart (table 2) shows that the industrial use of electricity can be subdivided into three stages. The initial stage features a curve which reaches a saturation point, during which electricity is used to produce lighting and to operate the simplest motors. This stage ended around 1940, with the onset of the second world war, and accounted for about 1100 kWh per capita that is 40 GW of installed power for a country such as the United States, and something like 180 billion kWh spent each year.

Lastly, there is a third industrial revolution of electrification, which involves electric vehicles, electrical technologies in general, airconditioning, office automation systems and all the technology associated with electronics. In the wake of this revolution, over the next 50 years electricity consumption per capita should hit the record figure of 25,000 kWh and account for two-thirds of the total energy value.

In the second stage, which began around the Forties and is now drawing to a close, electricity has been used for refrigeration, air conditioning, heating, TV sets, computers and industrial electrification. During this stage the total energy consumption has increased from 20% to the current 40%.

Table 2. The industrial use of electricity as a three-stage process. In less than 100 years there has been an increase from 1100 kWh per capita to 25000 kWh.

Table 1. US energy consumption/GNP ratio and electricity fraction related to time (Electricity in the American economy, Sam H. Schur et al., 1990).

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A very promising future is in store for the Pile. As we mentioned earlier, the Voltaic Pile is that of computers, record players and so forth. The future cell will no longer be employed to operate these devices, but it will become the fundamental source of energy for transportation. Fuel cell will shape the future of motor vehicles for a very simple reason: the electric vehicles of today powered by batteries and not by cells are not competitive: storage batteries are heavy and expensive, have a limited efficiency (they run down quickly) and in the event of accidents are even dangerous.

The future lies undoubtedly in fuel cell that is the updated version of the Voltaic cell. Its basic structure is identical to that of Volta but, unlike the latter, it does not work with copper and zinc, but with hydrogen and oxygen in the air, and produces steam. Energy density and weight are identical to those of explosion engines. It is therefore possible to produce the same amount of energy per kilogram of cell weight contained in an ordinary explosion engine. In addition, fuel cells have a high energy efficiency (over 40%), feature no moving parts and produce neither pollution, nor noise. I believe that a cell of the same size as a car engine will be housed behind the bonnet. The chemical reaction of transformation between externally produced hydrogen and oxygen from the air, with emission of steam, will take place inside this cell. Can we imagine anything better? I feel that this will be a major breakthrough. The initial difficulties can be overcome; costs are high but should easily be reduced by mass production. As a matter of fact, costs are expected to be about USD 50 per KW of power.

There are also other new and extremely interesting systems currently under development, such as the absorption of large quantities of hydrogen in graphite arrays. Im sure technology will provide a solution for the next few decades. Hopefully, 250 years after its discovery, the upgraded version of the Voltaic cell will become the main source of energy even for conventional applications as motor vehicles. Clearly, electricity is nothing else than a conveyor of energy more important than others. Therefore we should spare some thought on the problem of energy as such.

The problem is that fuel cell requires hydrogen, which is difficult to transport and to distribute.Today, to maintain liquid fuel, we can use methanol and after having produced a reaction inside the vehicle, transform it into hydrogen, which will be employed in the system.

I would like to make a few remarks on the energy sector and illustrate the transition from a world of the utmost simplicity to the present, extremely complex world. It is truly remarkable to see how in 200 years problems have changed to the point that nowadays we are confronted with globalisation and so on. Electricity is a mere vehicle of energy production. The problem upstream is that of the primary source of energy, that is the driver of industrial civilisation. The key question is that of the primary sources of energy.

Today, fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) are the primordial sources of energy. They are extremely limited and with the exception of coal will probably only last for another 40/60 years. What is going to happen next? In addition to the problem of the
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availability of primary sources, there is also another very important issue to be taken into account: the environment. The limits set by environmental requirements upon the use of some sources of energy fossil fuels in particular will be much higher than the availability of these sources. This chart shows our Planets energy consumption in billions of tons/year of fossil fuel in relation to time. Here I have tried to represent our civilisation as a whole. I started from Homer, Egypt, Greece, Rome, from the beginning of the Christian era and the discovery of America. During the Industrial Revolution, there was an impressive peak, which soon disappeared because of lack of resources, at least the estimated ones. That peak lasted for about one hundred years. During that time, all the fossil energy of our Planet accumulated over hundreds of millions of years was depleted. Since every year we burn the equivalent of one million years worth of accumulated natural resources, which are absolutely unique to our Planet, what will happen next? How will future generations produce energy, how will they manage to maintain their economic and social well-being?

The interesting chart shown in table 3 illustrates the situation very well.

Here we come to another question: after this rapid flash of combustion of fossil compounds, what kind of energy will we use? I would like to stress that, even though it covers only a very short period in the story of mankind, consumption of fossil fuels until depletion is an enormous drain on the resources of the Planet. How will we handle the transition, how will we prepare for the future? We must tackle these questions, all the more so when we reflect on science, industrial applications and their impact on our society, when

Table 3. The fossil energy consumption until its depletion represents only a very short period in the story of mankind, but an enormous drain on the resources of the planet. How will future generations manage the transition and what kind of energy are we preparing for the future?

1 ton Carbon 1 ton CH2 1000 m CH4

3

3,5 ton CO2 3,0 ton CO2 2,0 ton CO2

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we discuss about what we can and must do with the help of science and technology .

Population growth is another crucial issue. Years ago, when Aurelio Peccei founded the Club of Rome, such issues were considered disruptive and explosive. We are confronted with an exponential curve, which by definition is unbeatable; we will experience a crisis and face the end of use, etc.. These are the words that were said back then. Today the situation is completely different, because population growth which is a key factor in energy consumption is expected to drop after having reached a saturation point at about 8-10 billion people (table 4). This means that we are no longer confronted with the danger of an explosive transition. Probably the population problem will stabilize. Its stabilization, together with the end of the danger of war, will be of paramount importance to stabilize development and will trigger off a new cycle of investments. What will be the impact of energy? Energy is essential for human progress and for the quality of life. An energy crisis could destabilize a system, which now seems to be more stable than it looked in the beginning. We have to bear in mind that when it comes to energy, time constants are extremely long. A nuclear reactor, for example, has a life cycle of 40-50 years. Therefore, if we want to start thinking about a solution today, we have to imagine something which will be created in 2020 and will be working for 60 years. Our energy choices will affect the future of our country, of Europe, and of the whole earth. We are setting the course for the entire next century.

Table 4. Population growth.

The first question we have to ask is: how much energy do we consume? Energy is the result of the power consumed per capita, multiplied by the number of people. There are enormous discrepancies in the world in terms of expenditure of energy. Table 5 illustrates the

World population, billions

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per capita expenditure of energy in tons of oil equivalent (TOE)/year in different countries in 1990. Basically, an American consumes 8 TOE/year roughly 100 times his weight. This means that every 3 days an American consumes his own weight in form of oil. Western Europeans do a little bit better, in that they consume approximately 3 TOE/year.

In South-East Asia or in the Pacific area this figure drops to a record low of about 0.39. It is like saying that on average, everyone eats half a chicken, but some people eat two and some others do not eat any at all.

In the light of population growth and a per capita expenditure of 2-4 TOE (a sensible average, considering what is happening in the world), in 100 years from now global consumption would reach approximately 30-50 gigatons of oil (GTOE) 3 or 4 times as much as the current figure. When the transition we are going though is over, things will remain more or less stable. The name of the game is to manage this transition. Lets see what is going to happen. Energy expenditure will reach approximately 2-4 TOE/year. The process will be determined by costs. Whatever the other considerations might be, the best energy is always the cheapest. External factors first of all the environmental issue will play a crucial role. Carbon-tax , for example, is a new item in the energy balance, which did not exist 20 years ago. The future availability of fossil fuels will also depend on these factors. Let s take a look at the problem of energy intensity (table 7) As you can see, the different models are wholly arbitrary and cause

This state of affairs wont last forever. Eventually, the average per capita expenditure will be about 2-4 tons of oil. If we multiply this figure by the number of people making up the world population, we come to the forecast shown in table 6.

Table 5. Energy demand per capita in 1990 by geographic region.

CIS

Pacific

CEE

North America

Western Europe

Latin America

South Asia

World

Middle East & North Africa

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World, circa 2100

confusion. For instance, it is not clear how much carbon will be used in 100 years from now. According to some models, carbon consumption will remain steady, while according to others, it will account for one fifth of the exploitable energy.

The real problem stems from two factors. A great deal depends on how we handle the transition until the end of the fossil exploitation phase. Fossils wont disappear at the end of this transition, but there will be a world of difference between developing and industrialized countries. While the latter will resort to new technologies and will succeed in producing innovative sources of energy, the developing countries will be forced to use simpler fuels like coal. There is no state of emergency, but there are just two important events to consider: 1) depletion of uranium 235, which is the key element in conventional nuclear reactors (these reactors are fuelled only by uranium 235, which accounts for 0.7% of the material contained in the initial reactor ); this source of energy will be depleted by the middle of the next century; 2) depletion of gas. According to forecasts, fossil fuels are already declining. Table 8 shows the projection made by the International Energy Agency.

Table 6. Global energy consumption: forecasts

There is no need to panic. The transition wont be painful and the world of tomorrow will be perfectly acceptable. Nevertheless, as a result of depletion or of laws such as the tax on CO2, both natural uranium of reactors and, above all, fossil fuels will be depleted. What

The straight line represents demand, while the dotted curve indicates the output capacity. According to forecasts, around 20102020 there will be a gap between the growing demand for and the availability of these fuels especially as far as developing countries are concerned .

World population (billions)

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Carbon intensity index, 1990=100

will be the future sources of energy? Even though they play an important supporting role, renewable energies can hardly become the energy driver on a worldwide scale, and this because of problems of quantity. Let s assume that we want to meet the current consumption needs of fossil fuels which amount to 300EJ. If we decide to use solar cells (Tables 9 and 10), and we choose the most Perhaps renewable energies.

Table 8. The International Energy Agency projects a declining world conventional crude oil production after 2015. Graph also shows the global demand for oil, the oil production of Middle Eastern OPEC countries, and that of other countries.

Table 7. Energy intensity: evolution models in time.

Global demand for oil

World conventional crude oil production

Oil production of Middle Eastern OPEC countries

Oil production of other countries

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favourable location maximum exposure with a 10% yield, which means a quarter of the area covered with solar panels we would need a surface of 700,000 square kilometers. If we decide to resort to wind turbines, look for class 4 sites (in the classification from 1 to 5, in Italy this class does not exist) and use 50-metre high poles and vanes measuring 33 metres in diameter, with a spacing of 50 metres and 500 metres in other directions, we would need a surface of 7 million square kilometres. To have a clearer idea, you just have to think that cultivated land in the world covers a total of 10 million square kilometres and the total surface of our country is 300,000 square kilometres. I would like to make another important remark on renewable energies. Italy has a population of approximately 55 million people, who consume 3 TOE per capita. If we consider solar radiation on our Planet and calculate the conversion capacity, we would need a surface of 22,000 square kilometres to meet one half of the national energy requirements. This means that we would have to cover the whole of Sicily or Sardinia with solar panels. On top of that, we have to consider the environmental impact and costs, because covering such a vast area with solar panels is no mean feat.

Table 9. Pratical yield for solar panels by geographic region.

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What are the alternatives? Conventional nuclear power should be ruled out, because the quantity of uranium 235 available today cannot supply enough energy. And what about the chart in table 3, showing the enormous flash of energy consumption which erodes millions of years of accumulation in less than no time, with a projected end to the process by the next 50-60 years, barring changes due for example to the CO2 restraint policies?

I think that at this point we have completed the circle. Now we must go back to where Volta started, start from scratch and reflect. The key word is research.

We will be able to provide this new source of energy only by reshaping the role of science and basic research, in the endeavour to fulfil the primary need of our society: enough energy to sustain life and civilization. To conclude, I would like to say that best renewable energy still within our reach and hopefully the source of the future is innovation. Science, technology and a civilized society like ours have the duty to set the stage for the future energy sources of the world.
Table 10. Solar energy vs. area utilization by country and geographic region.

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* See p. 59.

Discovering that the age of electricity began more than two centuries ago, in an age that liked to define itself as philosophical and enlightened, but that didnt even think that there were wonderful phenomena now familiar to us such as electrical lighting, is more than a historic curiosity. The fact of adopting a long term perspective on the age of electricity may help us understand better the mingling of culture, science and technology beyond fragmentary and partial events that seem typical of the present intellectual and technological transformations. In my report I intend to take into consideration the relationship between philosophy and science as it emerges from the study of the intellectual character and of the work of Alessandro Volta. Son of the eighteenth century age of enlightenment and one of the founders of the electrical science, Volta has many characteristics that make it profitable to travel with him into the origins of the scientific age in which we are living.

In the next future, our age will most probably be called the age of power electricity. We are quite aware of this, the technologies around us remind us of this fact every day. However, we dont ask ourselves very often about how we entered this age of human history.

AS A

ALESSANDRO VOLTA NATURAL PHILOSOPHER AND

GIULIANO PANCALDI

SCIENTIST*

Since Volta has personally undergone this shift from the natural philosopher to the scientist, his character can help us understand a
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As a matter of fact, Volta is an emblematic character of a fundamental transformation that took place between the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Century: the shift from the natural philosopher of the classical age of the scientific revolution, who aims at a vision of the world as a whole, to the scientist that is familiar to us today, with his inclination towards being a specialist, his reticence on philosophical issues, his attention to useful applications.

Im instead convinced that, by studying Voltas intellectual life course, we can better understand in what terms is still today the relationship between science and philosophy in the age of electricity.

Volta was a convinced follower of the Enlightenment movement, but at the same time he was against any abstract declamation on science. He was an excellent theoretical physicist although he became known for his inventions as applied electrician. He was probably the greatest Italian scientist after Galileo, yet he was never able to quote Galileo more than once in his works in twelve volumes. For these reasons Volta compels us to modify the schemes we usually use when we reflect upon the relationship between science and philosophy. These adjustments are in fact quite important since they do not only affect Voltas case.

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tension that deeply affects even today the relationship between science and philosophy. That is to say, the tension between the desire of the philosopher to achieve a vision of the world as a whole and the desire of the scientist to pursue a particular knowledge, limited truths, which would lead to those applications that have shaped since Enlightenment our civilization.

In Volta this transformation from the natural philosopher to the scientist is partial, and is still in progress. It is a transformation stressed by the extraordinary success of the new machines that go along with his intellectual achievements. That is why Voltas character is important in order to understand the aspirations and the tensions that characterize the relationship among science, philosophy and technology two centuries after our entrance into the age of electricity. For my convenience, I have divided our journey with Volta into the origins of the scientific and technological age in which we live into two phases. In the first I will briefly go through Voltas training as a natural philosopher in the age of Enlightenment, as it is an absolutely necessary premise for my argumentation. The second part brings us into the heart of the matter, which lies at the centre of my study. This second part could be entitled: Volta: the philosopher and the machines. Making use of some hints that I found in Voltas papers that date back to 1799, I will put forward a new interpretation of the process that brought Volta to the discovery of the Voltaic pile. I will then prove that the Voltaic pile is an emblematic case of how Voltas science and philosophy worked together to realize a tool that had unforeseen and extraordinary consequences. I will prove that the Voltaic pile is the result of the presence in Volta of the philosopher and of the scientist. I will then start with providing some information on Volta as a natural philosopher.
HE TRAINING OF THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER.

At the age of seventeen he went through a religious phase that to some seemed such as to make him enter the order of Saint Ignacio. After that he started cultivating interests of another kind. Among the classics he fell in love with Lucretius, which was available in the library of the Jesuits in Como. Among the moderns he started studying the scientists and philosophers of the European Enlightenment movement, who were also well represented in the libraries in town. A good knowledge of the French language that was at that time the lingua franca of the aristocracy, of the merchants and of the intellectuals and soon also a discrete knowledge of the English
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Alessandro Voltas education was irregular but full of suggestions that made him sensitive to the culture of the Enlightenment that was spread all over Europe in the first half of the Eighteenth century. At that time Latin classic writers were still the basis for every kind of training. Volta studied them privately, first with the help of many members of his family belonging to this or that religious order and then for more than one year at the Jesuits boarding school in Como. There he also studied, as was the custom, a great deal of philosophy, which at that time included also a lot of mathematics, geometry and above all natural sciences.

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The new age, which the young Volta felt to belong to, was an age in which, according to his champions, in order to ban ancient superstitions, everybody had to be educated, and public administration had to prove its efficiency towards agriculture and commerce by avoiding at the same time strong social tensions. These were the objectives declared by many administrators of the Austrian Empire to which Lombardy belonged at the time. Among them there were people like the Minister Carlo di Firmian, generous protector of arts in his house in Milan the young Mozart played and of useful sciences to the advantage of commerce and public administration. Firmian knew also how to appreciate the young Volta and supported the first decisive step of his public career. So by adhering to the culture of the Enlightenment and by participating actively to the intellectual life of the circles in Lombardy that had adopted it, Volta, that had no regular education behind him, found himself to supervise, as an officer and a professor of physics, the transformation into a public school of the ancient Jesuits School in Como where he had started his career as a natural philosopher.

and of the German language, put Volta in direct contact with the authors that were spreading the myth and the reality of a new age, an age that liked to think of itself as more enlightened than the preceding ages.

In the meantime he had expanded his reading to the works of the eighteenth century followers of Newton, above all Benjamin Franklin, protagonist of the American Revolution and author of a successful handbook on subjects like The art of getting rich. He had chosen, like Franklin, electricity as his main field of study and had read books that were considered as classic on the subject. Strengthened by these readings and by his ambition he had published a first treaty of theoretical physics on the attractive force of electrical fire. In this treaty there were traces of the ideas of another follower of Newton, the Jesuit Roger Boscovich, active in the circles in Lombardy. Moreover, he had established direct correspondence with some great experts of the generation preceding his. Finally he had built and spread his first fortunate machine the perpetual electrophorus or inexhaustible carrier of electricity.

The ability as demonstrator of the marvels of electricity, the fortunate machines", the trust in himself that he took both from his noble background and from the fact that he was an officer of the Austrian administration and since 1778 a professor in the most prestigious university of the Empire, Pavia, ensured to Volta attention and success in the academies, in the scientific circles in Paris, London, Vienna and Geneva during his various journeys exactly as in Como, Milan and Pavia. When he was a little more than thirty the young philosopher brought up by priests and by Jesuits had become both for personal and
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In the meantime Volta had also cultivated, and will continue to do so during part of his life, the education of the senses, to which he was brought by his great vitality and customs that were common to the Lombard nobility to which he belonged. Music, theatre and society parties were for the young Volta opportunities as frequent as the practice of his extraordinary ability as demonstrator of his electricity experiments, with which he could entertain the same society people. In the age of Enlightenment electricity was both a new science and a fashionable phenomenon in intellectual circles and in the salons.

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cultural reasons, a follower of Lucretius and of the Enlightenment movement. He had become the expert of a new and intriguing sector of the ancient natural philosophy, the science of electricity, and had transformed himself into a respected professor and officer, an informal but very effective ambassador of the Austrian Lombardy travelling throughout the Enlightenment Europe.

Having given some sketches on Voltas education and training, we now have some useful information that will allow us to go straight to the point of our interest: the relationship between science and philosophy, between Volta the philosopher and his machines.

HE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS MACHINES. The main characteristics of Voltas scientific personality may be described by taking into consideration the image that his contemporaries had of him. This image was made, as we will see, of two main aspects quite different from each other. The complexity that derives from this is very interesting and may help us understand the relationship between science and philosophy in Voltas personality.

For some of his contemporaries Volta was, already in 1780ies the Newton of electricity, the man that had been able to explain in a rational way the various and deceptive world of electrical phenomena, at which personalities like Newton had given just a look.

If one takes into account these ongoing transformations, Volta was not exactly either the Newton of electricity or a simple inventor.
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Who was right? As it often happens, the contradicting pictures that his contemporaries had about Volta grasped important aspects of his personality and at the same time ignored other important aspects. And above all the merits of Volta were measured with parameters that didnt correspond anymore to the reality of that ancient achievement known as natural philosophy that was transforming itself into something new. This explains the apparent contradiction in the Voltas image.

On the other hand, according to some other contemporaries, Volta was above all a virtuoso of physics, a capable inventor and demonstrator of electrical experiences, someone between the natural philosopher and the craftsmen and amateurs that haunted intellectual circles at the age of Enlightenment. Those who criticised him didnt often literally see the originality and the importance of the notions introduced by Volta in the science of electricity. To them his machines were not a consequence of his intellectual originality but a product of his virtuosity, of his applied, operational and experimental vocation, to which it was difficult to recognize philosophical dignity.

For these estimators, what was very important about Volta were his theories and the principles not less than his successful inventions and his brilliant experiments. For these estimators Voltas writings, abundant but incoherent, could have been easily put in order so as to build a coherent system of electrical science, conceived as a new important chapter in the universal philosophy of Nature as it was sketched by Newton.

For those Volta had the intellectual stature, the knowledge, and the global vision that was expected from an authentic natural philosopher of the age of the scientific revolution. He had applied this quality to electricity with results that were comparable to those obtained by Newton in the field of mechanics and astronomy.

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He was educated so as to nourish the ambitions of the natural philosopher and of Newtonian tradition, he was an ingenious inventor and as such he could appreciate the ability of toolmakers and craftsmen that he like to mix with. The qualities of Volta as experimenter and inventor of new machines were as important as his desire to have an overview of the natural world as the ancient philosopher wanted it, and to found a comprehensive science of nature as it was suggested by Newtons model.

He represented a complex, dynamic combination of both of them.

From these characteristics, which can all be found in his personality, Volta resembles more to the scientists of the Eighteenth century and to those of our time than to the protagonists of the first scientific revolution. That is why his work and his inventions put him, more than Galileo and Newton, at the origins of the technological and scientific age to which we belong. For this reason we shouldnt be surprised by the fact that he rarely quoted Galileo. But how were these two souls living together in Volta, the ancient one of the natural philosopher and the emerging one of the scientist? And above all which role have these two souls played in the invention of the Voltaic pile? Who was that invented the Voltaic pile, the philosopher or the scientist?
HE

VOLTAIC PILE. My answer to this question is both of them together. Volta would not have built the Voltaic pile if the two souls of the natural philosopher and of the scientist hadnt interacted closely together in an unconventional and extraordinarily creative way. I will prove this using some undisclosed witnesses on the process that brought Volta to the building of the Voltaic pile.

It is known that the starting point for the invention of the Voltaic pile can be traced back to the dispute that had opposed Volta to Galvani on the subject of animal electricity. During this dispute Volta had maintained the idea that, if an electric fluid (as it was expressed at that time) existed in nature, this had to be the same and had to be subject to the same laws in the physical world as in the living world. To demonstrate this principle, which is a philosophical principle rather than a scientific principle, Volta had developed a specific theory, the contact theory. This theory presented the contact between different substances as the universal cause of the movement of the electrical fluid. A theory that Volta based on a long series of experiences on faint electric charges set in motion by as he said the contact between different substances.

It is also known that the contact theory, which was typical of Volta as a natural philosopher, had already developed in his mind around the year 1793. And it is known to everybody that Volta built the Voltaic pile only six years later at the end of 1799.

For those who think that the contact theory and as a consequence Voltas natural philosophy can alone explain the Voltaic pile, these six years of delay are difficult to explain, seeing moreover that the contact theory was not subject to any modifications in these years. The contact theory by itself was not enough to build the Voltaic pile.

It was only in 1799 that, beside Volta the natural philosopher, Volta the scientist entered the scene again and Voltas two souls
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interacted in an episode that is not much known, which I highlighted some time ago while studying the data Volta obtained in his laboratory. This episode is decisive for the building of the Voltaic pile. I will briefly sum it up. At a certain time in 1799, while the contact theory was stagnating, an English magazine Volta had subscribed to arrived from London. William Nicholson was the editor. Nicholson belonged to a group of scientists, inventors, toolmakers and independent professors of natural sciences that lived in a quickly changing city like London, capital of a nation that was experimenting the first industrial revolution.

Volta had many good reasons to subscribe to Nicholsons publication: in Nicholsons London he had had a great personal success and the Royal Society in London had recently conferred an important prize to him. Above all, Nicholson was like Volta one of the main scientists in the field of faint electric charges, the speciality in which Volta had given the best proofs of his virtuosity as an experimenter. When the magazine arrived on Voltas table, Volta read an article of the editor where he spoke about two things that were very important for Volta. The first was the electrophorus, his first invention, which was twenty years old then, but to which he still had a strong affection. The second thing was instead something of present importance for him, that is to say animal electricity. In that article Nicholson made a proposal that was curious and intriguing to Volta. Nicholson suggested to imitate the best known of electrical fish, the torpedo, by building a machine that combined many of Voltas electrophori. The main message was the idea of building a new machine that was able to multiply faint electric charges. Yet, if we look in more detail, well see that Nicholsons suggestion to realize the new machine by combining many electrophori could not work. Volta noticed that, of course. Which was the message of Nicholsons article to Volta?

Volta knew well that the shocks produced by some fish had an electric nature. The majority of the experts of the time agreed upon this. On the other hand, Volta, differently from Nicholson, had behind him seven years of research on galvanism and on his contact theory. He could not admit that inside an animal an isolating material like the dielectric of the electrophorus could be found. The contact theory had taught Volta to conceive animals as made of many conductors of different nature: there could not be isolators inside the torpedo and consequently no electrophori.

Yet the image of the electric organs of the torpedo used by Nicholson, who conceived them as cylinders made by many layers of different materials put one above the other, could be reinterpreted by Volta under the light of his contact theory. Volta knew that pairs of different conductors set in motion, as he said, the electrical fluid. From his point of view the alternate layers of different materials in the cylinders of the torpedo could be many pairs of different conductors connected to each other so as to multiply the effects and produce the strong shocks the animal is able to.

Guided by the objective to achieve this new original imitation of the torpedo, based on the contact theory rather than on Nicholsons conjectures, Volta realized the Voltaic pile in a few months towards the end of 1799.
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Let me underline the interaction among natural philosophy, electrical science and machines that manifests itself in this episode. In Voltas journals that preceded his reading of Nicholsons article, the idea of building a machine capable of multiplying weak electricity generated by different substances in contact with each other is not mentioned at all. The idea to build such a machine is given to Volta by Nicholson. Nicholson on the other hand conceives his aim as a sort of intellectual and technical exercise. As a matter of fact he didnt try to build his artificial torpedo, nor he had a new theory to test in order to realize it. To Nicholson the artificial torpedo was an exercise through which he could prove the ability of the electricians and in case that of the toolmakers. The suggestion that came from Nicholson was for Volta purely technological rather than scientific and without vast implications for the philosophy of nature. On the other hand, in order to transform into a reality the artificial torpedo that Nicholson had imagined, Volta had to transform it into the language and the principles of his contact theory, that is to say of his natural philosophy. Another spur for doing this was to demonstrate to the galvanians that the electricity of a machine could imitate the electricity of a living being like a torpedo. This was also an important goal for his natural philosophy.

This shift gives us an idea of the complex ways through which, in the age of electricity, the work of the natural philosophers is connected to the work of scientists and to technology. The shift we perceive between the programme that brought Volta to the invention of the Voltaic pile and the consequences that the Voltaic pile had, make us realize the difficulties that are facing us still today when one tries to foresee the direction in which the relationship among science, technology and culture will develop. And this relationship is fundamental for our civilization.
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I believe that the shift that we perceive between, on one hand, Voltas philosophical programme to imitate the torpedo, and on the other hand the development of research and of the electrical industry made possible by the current generated by the Voltaic pile, is a highly instructive shift to understand the age of electricity in which we live.

These events had consequences that were largely unexpected on Voltas power on natural phenomena. This was evident the day Volta managed to combine his metal couples so as to produce a constant flow of electricity, combining together his two souls of natural philosopher and scientist. The Voltaic pile, like many other machines in the history of science and technology, had soon a life of its own independent from the ideas and the philosophy of his creator.

The new form of electricity generated by the Voltaic pile, as it is known, drew immediately the attention of the experts and of the well educated. The curious origin of the Voltaic pile as imitation of the torpedo was soon forgotten. On the other hand, the current generated by the Voltaic pile, the chemical reactions, the magnetic effects that came with it set the conditions for a new era of the science of electricity and for new generations of electric machines.

Therefore in Volta and only in him, the natural philosopher and scientist, these different scientific, philosophical and technological ingredients could interact and bring to the invention of the Voltaic pile. The interaction between natural philosophy, science and technology is the fundamental trait of Voltas personality and is the key to understanding the invention of the Voltaic pile.

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The complexity of these relations and the difficulty to foresee the future developments of our civilization, however, should not prevent us from distinguishing an important guiding thread that goes through our civilization. This guiding thread puts together, from the age of Enlightenment up to now, the research of natural philosophers like Volta and the machines like the Voltaic pile.

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* See p. 67.

n the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Alessandro Volta a famous international conference took place in Como, Pavia and Rome from September 11th to September 20th, 1927. Although physical sciences were the subject of the conference, the agenda reminds the first famous Conference of Italian scientists held in Pisa in 1839. It is worth mentioning that in the Como conference everyone spoke and wrote in ones own language without causing the slightest difficulty in understanding to the rest of the participants. The scholars of that time were acquainted with the main languages of European culture. Today a similar polyphonic experience would not be possible.

THE RELEVANCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF PHYSICISTS IN 1927 IN COMO*

G. FRANCO BASSANI

The famous professor Quirino Maiorana, President of the Italian Society of Physics was elected President of the Conference of 1927 at the beginning of the works by acclamation. The professors H.A. Lorentz, E. Rutherford, M. Planck, R.A. Millikan , A. Cotton and G.C. Vallauri were elected vice-presidents, whereas professor A. Pontremoli was nominated secretary general. All were eminent personalities, on whom much could be said regarding their scientific works after the Conference. The names of the 61 participants from 14 different nations, 12 of whom had already won the Nobel Prize and many would in later years, are engraved on a plaque at the Istituto Giosu Carducci where the conference sessions were held.

The profound reason why the Conference of Physics in Como stands out from all the others and the reading of its Proceedings (published by Zanichelli, Bologna, 1928) is still today a formative experience for all physicists is linked to the fact that in 1927 the scientific community was discussing some fundamental issues that would lead to a revolution in contemporary scientific thinking regarding the ultimate structure of matter and of the laws ruling it. In
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There were many International Conferences of Physics before and after that time, but no one can compete with that conference for scientific importance and relevance to the present both for the quality of the speakers and for the subjects dealt. In particular the last subject on the theories of the structure of the matter and on radiations would impose itself as a starting point for all successive developments.

The choice of the specific subjects into which physics was divided is a good indication of the interests of the time: experiences on the structure of the matter, electricity and its applications, electrology, physical optics and a session entitled theories on the structure of the matter and on radiations. The synthesis of the works took place in Pavia on September 17th and the official commemoration of Alessandro Volta was held in Rome at the Campidoglio on September 19th.

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( con h = 6,626 .1027 erg/s) In 1929 the probabilistic theory on the microscopic structure of matter by Max Born and Niels Bohr eventually imposed itself. The significance of this change in scientific paradigms is comparable to the revolution of Galileo and Newton, which led to the birth of modern science. I. Prigogine defined it well as The end of certainties (Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 1998). The concept that lies at the basis of this revolution could be synthesized as follows. Although it has been proved that matter is made of elementary particles endowed with electrical charge and mass (electrons and nuclei composed of protons and neutrons, whose combination makes atoms and molecules) and although the law according to which particles attract or repel one another are exactly known, the position of particles and their motion cannot be known with absolute precision. W. Heisenbergs uncertainty principles is valid, and is consistent with the association of a wave to the motion of each particle, but prevents one from knowing its exact position and at the same time its speed. One has to abandon the definition of phenomena based on the position in space and time of the particles and one has to recognize instead the energies as magnitudes that can be determined exactly for every isolated physical system and whose possible values are quantum states. About the position of particles and of their motion only probability can be known, corresponding to the above-mentioned de Broglies wave. In order to determine the wave function and quantum states, E. Schroedinger had discovered already in 1925 the equation that makes this calculation possible starting from the forces that operate among the particles. That is why the new mechanics was named wave mechanics. The model of the atom as made of electrons that orbit the nucleus has then to be seen in a different way from the usual one. This is expressed in terms of probability that an electron finds itself at a certain distance from the nucleus. The probability is the greatest at the radius of the orbit, yet there is no certainty that the electron at a given moment is exactly in that orbit. The similarity between the composition of the atom and the planetary model is not realistic. The probability of finding the electron at a certain distance from the nucleus is never zero in any point of space, although it infinitesimally approaches zero when it moves away from the nucleus. The energy of the state is instead determined. The international conference of 1927 is at the centre of this process of transformation of the scientific thinking, which is still the object of consideration for the philosophers of science, since its consequences are deep and shake deep-rooted, centuries old principles. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the great astronomer P.S. Laplace maintained that, once the world is known at a given moment, it is possible to know exactly its structure in every future and past time, since every single event is determined by the initial conditions existing at the origin of the world. The laws of nature
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fact, a very profound revolution happened in scientific thinking between 1924 and 1929. In 1924 the prince Louis V.P.R. de Broglie introduced the concept that material particles in motion, as electromagnetic fields of light, could have a wave-like character with a wave-length linked to Plancks universal constant and to the speed of the v particle throught the relation:

= h / mv

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All these papers, described in hundreds of pages in the proceedings of the conference would alone make the Como conference memorable, yet it is the last chapter on the new theories of matter and on the radiations that qualifies the conference as unequivocally revolutionary. The reports by Max Born and Niels Bohr are works of paramount clarity and illustrate the new concepts of probabilistic knowledge on the basis of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle and of the fact that it is coherent with the attribution of the probability principle to the function of the wave associated with the particle. It can be clearly understood from these reports that it was exactly Heisenbergs uncertainty principle that led to the concept of the
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The Como conference presents significant results in all fields. It is sufficient to mention that in the session on experiments on the nature of matter there is the paper by E. Rutherford (the inventor of the atomic model) on radioactivity (we should remember that Fermi in 1934 would disclose to Rutherford the results on his artificial radioactivity), Braggs paper on the diffraction of X-rays by crystals, O. Sterns paper on the production of molecular beams and the determination of magnetic moments of the atom, a work for which he obtained the Nobel Prize in 1943. The studies on networks of conductors by A. E. Kennelly and those on the electricity of the atmosphere by M. Brillouin aroused a particular interest. This was true also for the new results of the theory of metals by J. Frenkel and the explanation of the Volta s effect by O.M. Corbino. The session on physical optics presents the new results on cosmic rays by R.A. Millikan the discoverer of the electric charge of the electron , the studies on optical spectra of elements by M.N. Saha, Zeemans results on the effects of a magnetic filed on light emission by atoms, which are known today by all students of physics as the Zeeman effect.

The international conference in Como was the first scientific meeting where these principles, which had been the basis of the Science of Nature and had in any case given excellent results, were questioned when one was faced with how to explain the infinitely small (electrons, atoms and nuclei). This change in principles does not question the results obtained in astronomy or in classical mechanics or in electromagnetism, which exactly in those years was achieving great results with radio transmissions and was paving the way, through research into microwaves, to the RADAR and television. What was asserting itself for the first time was a different way to conceive science when the microscopic world is under study. With a happy definition my mentor Piero Caldirola described that evolution of thinking as the shift from macrophysics to microphysics.

would then rule every single event according to the principle of absolute causality. Also the theory of relativity, developed by Einstein at the beginning of the twentieth century does not escape this mechanistic definition. This concept is so deeply rooted in science and in human thinking that has led many philosophers to a materialistic reduction of every reality, so that even thoughts and human events would be referable to the movement of atoms and molecules, which can be perfectly known. Even in the social sphere the behaviour of groups and individuals could be completely predicable. For centuries it was thought that the material world existed as a thing in itself , perfect and immutable in its laws, which, once known, do not admit uncertainties. The principle of causality was considered as the basis of every relation between physical phenomena and the absolutely necessary condition of science itself.

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In 1927 this probabilistic vision of science was not a common heritage for scientists. To be aware of this it is sufficient to read some of the papers presented at the conference. Eyes wide shut the title of Stanley Kubricks last film comes to ones mind and one realizes how difficult it is to see what is too new compared with what we are used to. For instance in the paper presented in that session by G. Gianfranceschi one can see a radical criticism to the new principles of quantum mechanics. As it is said in the paper: thinking of having built a physical theory because one has found formulas that can be adapted to reality is an illusion that prevents one to look at real problems. () A physical theory must not lead to the creation of purely imaginative models which we dont know what can correspond to in the real order of thing. More subtle criticism and contradictions will find their defenders in Einstein himself who invented the famous saying I dont think God has gambled with the universe and in Shroedinger, the inventor of quantum mechanics. The latter in fact introduced the paradox of the cat in a box that can be dead or alive with the same probability and it can be determined only after microscopic measurements.

probabilistic knowledge of phenomena, which was so distant form the usual way of conceiving the science of nature.

In the final speech at the Como Conference, the great Lorentz who was old and distant from the new developments says prophetically: Et pour revenir la thorie des quanta, il est vident quil y a encore beaucoup dnigmes. Narrive-t-on pas jusqu formuler lhypothse de paquets non pas dondes mais de probabilits? Il est vrai que le dterminisme absolu nexiste pas. La Physique nest jamais
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It can now be stated that all the paradoxes invented in the coming decades and the experiences proposed to refute the probabilistic interpretation have led to prove it as true more and more. It may be remembered for instance the interference produced by particles that cross a screen with two cracks one at a time because there is the same possibility that they cross either one or the other. One can also remember Bells verification of inequalities, foreseen by quantum mechanics, in the polarization of photons of an atomic decay. No experiment is known where the theory of probability cannot be proved as true. Nature behaves, at a microscopic level, in an unpredictable way. Bohr himself, in a conference in 1929 at the American Academy of Sciences hints paradoxically at the freewill of electrons to explain that he was aware of the apparently unrealistic nature of the principles of quantum mechanics.

The new mechanics implies actually that measurements itself disturbs the state of the system and solves in a way or in the other options that are equally possible. In this way an atom in an excited state can decay in one of the states with less energy and emit radiations of different frequency, but it cannot be known with certainty in which state it decays. The only thing that can be known is the probability. The great novelty lies not in the fact that a set of atoms emits light with different frequencies. This can happen for a statistic effect when many atoms are present, but the fact that this happens in the single atom is the basic postulate of the quantum theory, which is enough to defeat determinism. This phenomenon has been recently proved when it has been possible to isolate the single atom. Determinism in the single event has definitely lost the significance of law of nature.

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Pauli highlights that in the case of more identical particles, there is no way to distinguish them on the basis of the new principles. One needs therefore an additional postulate on the character, symmetrical or asymmetrical, of the function that results from the exchange of two particles (this character defines the type of particle, for instance for electrons it is asymmetrical). He sees this as a flaw in his theory since it is a hypothesis that is not contained into it. However from this fact the principle of exclusion is derived, according to which only an electron can occupy a defined quantum state of energy and consequently the electrons distribute themselves on available states in a different way from that predicted by classic mechanics. On this basic principle exactly in 1927 Fermi builds his famous law on the statistic distribution of particles according to their temperature. He describes it in a comment to Bohrs speech and predicts its consequences as follows: one can try to create a theory of metals that can explain the forces that keep together the structure of metals. It is sufficient to consider positive ions at the vertex of the crystalline reticule and calculate the distribution of the valence electrons in the possible states of energy according to quantum mechanics, by applying the new statistics instead of the classical one. Numerical calculations are however very long and not yet complete.

Heisenberg makes clear the link between interpretation and his uncertainty principle.

termine... Quant a moi, je me vois comme un des petits enfants jouant sur le sable, qui a eu le bonheur de trouver quelques cailloux trs beaux, il est fier, il croit avoir tout trouv, mais la grande mer est l, pleine de richesse et de secrets. This richness and these secrets are already to be perceived in the farsighted comments by Heisenberg, Pauli and Fermi and in the enlightened paper by Bohr on the postulates of quantum mechanics. probabilistic

In the sixties, the American philosopher Gary Weaver put in the title of a lucky book a motto that everyone should keep in mind as an antidote to every form of materialism and determinism: Ideas have consequences.

To further prove the Latin saying parva sunt principia rerum one can underline that the technological revolution that we are living has its basis in the ideas and in the results presented and discussed in the 1927 International Conference in Como.

E. Wigner and F. Seitz will realize this programme in metals in 1934 and will start to study the electronic structure of all solids. Physicists have been studying this in detail for all the second half of the twentieth century. The knowledge consequently obtained on the properties of solids and in particular of semiconductors as for instance the silicon has led to extraordinary results in the field of microelectronics and optoelectronics, arriving to such a degree of perfection as to make the modern information and communication technology possible, a technology that is changing our society. How this has happened is well narrated in a book by F. Seitz and G. Einspruch, The history of silicon (Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1998).

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* See p. 129.

FROM

The debate started in 1792 with the publication of the 1 Commentarius and came to a conclusion only in 1799.

The invention of the battery came at the end of a long and heated controversy that aroused the interest and passion of the whole scientific community of that age. A controversy whose protagonist was, beside Alessandro Volta, a physician from Bologna, Luigi Galvani and as main actor a humble and harmless animal: the frog.

TO THE INVENTION OF THE

THE CONTROVERSY WITH

GIANNI BONERA

GALVANI BATTERY*

ALVANIS FIRST EXPERIMENTS.

2 Opere di Alessandro Volta, voll. 7 (Op.), National Edition, Hoepli, Milano 1918-29, Vol. II, p. 59.

1 Aloysii Galvani De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius, Bononiae 1791, published in L. Galvani, Opere scelte, (OG), edited by G. Barbieri, UTET, Torino 1967.

With these words Volta remembered in 1801 the moment in which he realized that new and revolutionary machinery that we now call the battery.

This is the great step that I made at the end of the year 1799, the step that led me very quickly to the construction of the new shaking machinery that has caused the amazement of all the physicists and 2 great satisfaction to me. (Op. II, p. 59) .

New since it was the first generator of continual electrical current, as it was defined by A. Einstein: The fundamental basis of all modern inventions, that can be compared maybe only to the invention of fire in remote times (A. Righi, Commemoration of the first hundredth anniversary of the invention of the Battery). Revolutionary since it marked the beginning of the modern age of electricity. But let us go back to the scientific debate that took place between Galvani and Volta. In the first months of 1792 Galvani made public some of the astonishing experiments carried out in more that ten years of intense work. The so-called first experiment goes back in fact to 1780. Since Galvani was a convinced champion of the existence of animal electricity, he was carrying out a series of experiments on the effects of electricity on dead animals.

While he was carrying out these experiments with some of his collaborators, as soon as one of his collaborators, by chance slightly touched with the point of a lancet the crural nerves of the frog
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In picture at p. 130, that reproduces the first table of the Commentarius, we can see the classical tools present in any scientific laboratory where experiments on electricity were made, in particular an electrostatic machine and a Leyden flask. On the left hand side of the table there is besides the drawing of a frog prepared for the experiments in the following way: cut () transversally below the upper limbs, disembowelled (),only the lower limbs left close to one another, with their long crural nerves inserted, and these either loose and free or hanging to the spinal cord left untouched in the vertebral foramen (). (OG, p. 127).

GALVANI...

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(prepared and put on the table at a distance from the electrostatic machine) one saw all the muscles of the limbs contract themselves in such a way as to seem fallen in tonic violent convulsions. Another had the impression that the phenomenon happened exactly when the spark went off from the conductor of the machinery. Struck by novelty of the observation, he let me know immediately (). I became then incredibly curious and wished to try the same experiment again by myself in order to explain the mystery of the phenomenon. () The phenomenon occurred again in the same way. (OG. p. 89) As he wrote immediately in his notebook, the contractions were the same as those observed when one let the electrical fluid of a charged conductor of an electrostatic machine or of a Leyden flask be discharged between the nerve and the muscle of the frog. He thought therefore that the phenomenon was due in this case to animal electricity that was stimulated by the electric spark produced by the machine, which discharged itself on the earth through the hand and the body of the experimenter. By repeating these experiments in always different conditions and in particular on the home terrace in the presence of natural electrical discharges (strokes during a thunderstorm), he happened to observe an even stranger phenomenon (second experiment): We put () horizontally above the windowsill the frogs prepared in the usual way, with the spinal cord pierced by a copper hook (picture at p. 131). When the hook touched the iron foil spontaneously, frequent and unequal motions manifested itself in the frog. If one pressed with his finger the hook against the iron surface, the frogs got excited so many times as the pressure was applied. (OG, p. 33)

Some copies of the Commentarius reached Pavia on March 1792, sent by the same Galvani, to his friend the doctor don Bassano Carminati, anxious to know the reactions of colleagues of such a renowned university. Volta stimulated by his colleague to repeat the experiments, started working with a strong pessimism, but after the evidence proved by facts, he passed in a few days, as he himself declared from incredulity to fanaticism. And on May, 5th of the same year, in the speech held in the Aula Magna of the University of Pavia, on the occasion of the
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Yet, he didnt pay much attention to this detail, which, as we will see, will play a fundamental role in the following debate and was convinced that his experiments proved in an indisputable way, the presence in the frog of an electrical unbalance. The frog behaved therefore at the same time as a very sensitive electroscope and a generator of electricity, a sort of animal Leyden flask made of internal and external surfaces that delimit every muscular fibre and whose nerves constituted the internal conductor.
OLTAS EXPERIMENTS.

There seems to be no doubt. There was electricity inside the animal that manifested itself by creating a short circuit with a conductor metal arc, the nerve and muscle of the frog. However, since it is easy to be mistaken when making experiments and therefore to believe that one has seen and found what one wished to see and find, Galvani repeated the experiment more times in his laboratory, making use mainly of bimetallic arcs for putting in contact the crural nerve and the leg muscle. In fact with an arc made by only one metal the contractions were much weaker and in general present only in an animal that had just been prepared.

graduating ceremony of three engineers, after congratulating for the great discovery, he affirmed: the conductor arc cannot produce any electricity, but it has as its only task that of taking off electricity that already exists and to balance again the previously misbalanced electric fluid (). We have then to presume (), why do I say presume? to be sure that the electric fluid that produces these motions of the muscles is misbalanced in the single parts of the animal. (Op. I, p. 15)

In the second part of this dissertation, Volta registered a series of measurements on the intensity of the artificial electrical discharge that could produce convulsions in the frog, arriving at the conclusion that the frog had to be the most sensitive of all electroscopes.

Besides he was able to put forward a possible explanation of the first experiment, by referring to his theory of electrical atmospheres. An electrified conductor acts so as to move or to try to move the electric fluid that belongs to all the bodies plunged into its sphere of activity () by chasing it from the most dipped parts of the conductors to the farthest parts. Then, when the spark goes off, the electricity of the conductor discharges itself, and its atmosphere disappears, the electric fluid that was put into motion in those bodies dominated by that atmosphere goes back to its original place; and if the discharge is immediate, immediate is also the flow. (Op., I, p.36) After carrying out more experiments, he started after a few days to have some doubts on the role of the conductor arc. In fact in many experiments he could obtain contractions also in frogs that were not prepared and in other animals. In this case however, it was necessary that the arc was made by two different metals. Reflecting on all this a doubt comes to my mind, whether metal arcs are merely passive or actually positive agents, that is to say whether they move the electric fluid of the animal, which was quiet and balanced, and cause it to enter an armour of this kind and get out through another of a different kind by breaking therefore such a balance.

This analogy suggested to Volta, who supported the physiological theory of irritability by Haller, that muscles convulsions were a secondary effect due to the electrical irritation of the nerves. And the experiments proved him right. In fact he was able to obtain convulsions from the frog by applying the electrodes of a Leyden flask that was weakly charged on two close points of the same nerve, and successively two different metal armours linked through a conductor arc.
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Yet at this point it became difficult to explain how such a weak cause could produce effects that were so stressed from a mechanical point of view. The only possible analogy was that of the effect of light on the optic nerve. A similar phenomenon, which can be used as an example, is light, which, although there is no mechanical movement strong enough to produce a minimal sensitive impulse, e.g. to move a feather or any other very light body invested by light, yet it excites the optic nerve, until it is offended by this strong sensation, and so it is strongly excited also by a strong and dim light.

On May, 14th he published a Second Memory on animal electricity in which he reported about new and more accurate measurements on the exceptional sensitivity of the frog prepared as Galvani did, justifying in this way the fact that animal electricity was not detectable with any electrical tool.

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It was then clear that in order to produce convulsions it was necessary and sufficient to act on the nerves, both by stimulating them with external electric discharges and by the simple application of a conductor arc. Yet the great novelty, which had been observed by Galvani as well, who however didnt go deeply into it, was that in the majority of the cases the arc had to be made with different armours, either because the metals were different, or because of a different way of applying them.

During the summer, Volta started to formulate a first hypothesis on the electromotive role of the bimetallic contact: () if a transfer (of the electric fluid) happens with a simple application of two metals of different quality, its because of them that it is moved from the idle balance in which it lies, that it is moved from the places where they have been applied and transferred from one side to the other. () e.g. silver by attracting and sucking it in a certain way, the other, e.g. tin, by pouring it, and by putting it in this way in a perpetual turn, until there is between them a communication which is equally metallic or of other good deferents (). Metals are then not only perfect conductors but also motor of electricity. This is a new virtue of metals that was never suspected before, that my experiments have brought me to discover. Yet I dont think that is possessed only by metals. It belongs instead to all conductors, and I think it has to be established as a general rule, that the simple contact or the fitting together of conductors of different surface and above all of different qualities is enough to upset in some way the balance of the electric fluid and to move it, without any need to rub it.(Op., I, p.118) This hypothesis is taken up again and studied in depth in two letters to Van Marum dated August 30th, and October, 11th in which he presents a list of the different metals ordered according to their stronger or weaker tendency to transfer electric fluid to the wet conductor.

But which was the mechanism through which two different metals in contact with one another could make the electric fluid flow, that is
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During the next year, Volta continued to carry out experiments in which the frog played mainly the role of detector of the transfer of electric current. Besides he was more and more convinced that also in the cases in which the convulsions of frogs were produced by a onemetal arc, the two extremities of the arc were not chemically or physically identical and so the effect was due to the different behaviour of the metals put in contact with the wet conductor.

The PRESIDENT and COUNCIL of the ROYAL SOCIETY adjudged, for the year 1794, the Medal on Sir GODFREY COPLEY'S Donation, to Sig. ALESSANDRO VOLTA, Professor of Experimental Philosophy in the University of Pavia, for his several communications explanatory of certain Experiments published by Professor Galvani.

At the end of 1792, Voltas interpretations had become the most accredited. The scientist from Como received for these researches the Copley golden medal of the Royal Society in London.

Eventually on November of the same year, when he was sure about the validity of his hypotheses and of the importance of his discovery, he published a brief note on the Magazine of Physics and Medicine by Brugnatelli (Br. Giorn. 1792 T. IV, pg. 192) in which, besides, he reported another curious experiment he had carried out by stimulating the nerves of the organs of sight.

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Volta proposed a first hypothesis, different from the one that he will put forward later on, which will bring him to construct the battery. In order to have an electric fluid, it is necessary to have a circuit made of at least by two metal conductors and a wet substance (the frog, the tongue).

to say generate an electric current through the frog?

A metal attracts electric fluid from the wet conductor, whereas the other gives it away. In this way an unbalance is determined between the density of the electric fluid in the two metals. This is also due to their capability of being conductors. The balance is re-established with the transfer of the redundant fluid from the first to the second. As an alternative it is possible that the two metals attract or give away electric fluid to the liquid, but in a different measure.

HE ANSWER OF GALVANIS SUPPORTERS AND VOLTAS PROMPT REPLY. During the year 1794 Galvani and the supporters of his hypotheses published new experiences that seemed to reverse the situation. They were not only able to obtain in different circumstances the contractions of the frog by using an arc made of only one homogeneous conductor, but simply by putting in direct contact the crural nerve with the leg muscle.

In particular, Aldini, in order to obtain an arc as much homogenous as possible in the best way he used a pure mercury bath in which he plunged the nerves and legs of the frog. Galvani, after preparing a frog in the usual way paying attention that the crural nerves were completely free, he made the two lateral parts of the leg touch one another, either by raising them with a non-conducting body and then by letting them fall on the leg, or by pushing them slightly into contact with the same body, and if possible in only one point of the muscle; in the moment of contact contractions will appear in both legs. (Op., II, p. 211)

Also Eusebio Valli presented similar experiences: After putting the (prepared) frog on a flat surface, I lay the thumb of the left hand high on the legs of the animal and in the meantime I fold up with the right hand one of his legs on the spinal cord, making a sort of arc. At every touch, the frog goes off, leaps (). After moistening with saliva the nerves and muscles, I have often noticed that the weak forward movements became stronger or started again as if they had been interrupted or suspended. () In my case water could not be successfully replaced with saliva. (E, Valli, Lettera, p. VI) These new experiences seemed in fact not to leave any doubt, and many scientists began supporting Galvanis views, as Volta himself declared:

On the occasion of the publication last autumn of the leaflet by dr. Eusebio Valli on the new interesting experiments carried out according to the first system - now abandoned -, also in Italy the ferment of opposite opinions awoke again and grew ();, these experiments seemed not only to give a strong support to this hypothesis, which is in any case attractive and enticing, (proposed by Galvani and his supporters), but also to prove it in an evident way and to remove all doubts (Op. I, p. 288). Yet it went differently! The creativity of the scientist form Como and above all his firm conviction to be right, made him carry out the same experiments to give value, generalize and prove as true his own
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hypotheses. In fact, in particular in the experiments made by Valli, the presence of a liquid conductor, blood or saliva, between the nerve and the muscle was fundamental. It was then possible to create a flow of electric fluid also through the contact of two different (or of a second species, as Volta will call them later on) wet conductors, with a liquid conductor, in this case the nerve, the muscle and saliva or blood. It is the diversity of conductors that is necessary, independently whether they are metals or wet conductors. In this way the following principle can be generalised: every mating of different conductors brings about an action that moves more or less the electric fluid, so that when a circulation among the three takes place, although different, some sort of current middle, weak or very weak of fluid is always stirred up. With this new hypothesis also the existence of contractions in the presence of only one metal was explained, provided that in the point of contact with the frog a second class conductor was present, as many experiments had proved.

The problem was not only dynamic, so that instruments that were able to detect an electric current (that at the moment were only
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HE CONTACT TENSION. In 1796 Volta manage to overcome most of the difficulties, modifying his own theory on the electromotive force produced by the bimetallic arc and showing, with physical means, the presence of electrical tension directly at the point of contact of the two heterogeneous metals. From the mutual contact of silver for instance with tin, a force is born for which the first gives out some electric fluid, the second receives it, silver tends to pour it, and pours it into tin, etc. If the circuit is made somewhere else through wet conductors this force or tendency produces a current that goes exactly in the above mentioned direction from silver to tin, and from this through the conductor or the wet conductors goes back to silver to pass again into tin, etc. if the circuit is not made, if the metals lie separately, there is an accumulation of the above mentioned electric fluid in tin at the silvers cost; a positive electricity, that is to say more in the first, and a negative electricity, that is to say less in the second; a weak electricity for true, and below the level required to be registered by common electrometers, yet something that I eventually managed, better than I thought, to make sensible.

Until now, although Volta was able to reinterpret in his favour all the experiments made by Galvanis supporters, he could not produce new elements, nor could he do without making use of an organic body (frog, tongue) as detector of very small electric currents caused by the supposed heterogeneous contact between conductors. It was then difficult to decide between the two hypotheses. As it was clearly declared by the Galvani himself: He (Volta) thinks this electricity is that that all bodies have in common; I think instead that it is peculiar to the animal. He recognizes the cause of the unbalance in the tools that are used, in this case in the difference of metals; I recognize it in the animal machine. He thinks this cause is accidental and extrinsic; I think it is natural and internal. In the end he attributes everything to metals and nothing to the animal; I, instead, all to the latter and nothing to the first, if one takes only the unbalance into consideration.

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organic) were necessary, but also static. The tension generated through the contact of the two metals can then be highlighted through a traditional electroscope, although extremely sensitive. Volta had this instrument, his electroscope condenser. In this way he could highlight the weak static tension that is generated by the contact of two heterogeneous metals.

The last version of these experiments is the following. Two metal plates of different material endowed with an isolating handle are taken and put in contact with one another. Once separated, one of them is put in contact with the lower disk of the electroscope condenser, whereas the higher one remains laid thereon and is put to earth through a metal wire. Once the plate is detached and the condenser plate lifted, the leaflets of the electroscope diverge, revealing the existence of an electric charge, whose sign can also be established. (Op. I, p. 561)

Volta could then conclude: Here lies the secret, the magic of Galvanism. It is simply artificial electricity, put into motion by the contacts of different conductors (). Nor does this virtue belong to metals only, or to first class conductors, as one could have believed, but to everything in general, more or less according to their nature and quality. If you hold on to these principles, you will clearly explain the experiments carried out until now, without the need to resort to an imaginary principle of an animal electricity belonging to and active in the organs. (Op. I, p. 413) The study of the tension of contact between two or more metals connected to one another in a circuit led Volta to the discovery of what we call today the second law of the Volta effect. This law was enunciated for the first time in November 1801, on the occasion of the presentation of the battery at the Institut de France. It is presented as a necessary consequence of the property of metals of being ordered according to their virtue of repelling or attracting the electric fluid. If any metal is put in contact with any other, the force with which the electric fluid is pushed equals exactly the sum of the forces of the intermediate metals, that is to say those included in the series (or graduated scale) indicated between this and that, so that whether there are or not such intermediate metals in the apparatus we constructed, or all are interposed to the two at the extremities, or only one is put in the middle in no matter what order or series, it is as though none had been interposed and the resulting electric force is always the same, that is to say neither smaller nor greater than the one that is revealed when the first and the last come in direct contact. (Op. II, p.61)
HE LAST EXPERIMENTS BY

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Now which heterogeneity can help explain the contractions caused in such a way when only the nerves have come into contact?
FROM THE CONTROVERSY WITH

GALVANI. Once again Galvani did not give in. In the same year he wrote five Memoirs on animal electricity addressed to Spallanzani, who had always been a supporter of his theories and who in the last years had severely criticised Volta, often also slanderously. In these Memoirs, after attempting to find a possible compromise, by putting forward the hypothesis of the presence of two different kinds of electricity, animal and common, that could manifest themselves together or separately in the various experiments, he presents new experiments with which he could obtain contractions in the two completely separate legs of the frog by making the relevant nerves touch one another.

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One can maybe mention the stimulus suffered by the nerves when they fall on each other. Yet why if one strikes one of the same nerves on a harder and rougher arc made of non-conducting material, contractions are not obtained? (). It seems to me then that there are a series of contractions that are obtained with no stimulus, no metal, and without suspecting any heterogeneity, and produced therefore by a circuit of electricity inherent to the animal and naturally unbalanced. (OG, p. 439) These will be the last writings by Galvani, since he will die the year after. Yet for Volta the situation will also be troublesome. At the beginning of the year 1799, with the return of the Austrians in Lombardy, the University will be closed and all the professors dismissed. Volta will take refuge in Como, where with very few means at his disposal, towards the end of the same year, he will invent the battery.

More details can be found in a Memoir published in 1814 by Piero Configliacchi, who came after him as Chair Professor of Physics, that was however probably written by Volta himself in third person between 1803 and 1806: Being unsatisfied with the results, he thought of the means with which he could strongly increase the force or intensity of his metal electricity () so as to make the electrometer give well marked signs or even to have no need of the condenser (), and, if possible to obtain the spark and some excitement in the fingers, etc. And so he invented at the end of 1799 that apparatus, which not only satisfied him but also went beyond his expectations. Everyone can understand that this is his new Galvanic apparatus, or to say it more correctly, his electrical apparatus, that has aroused a great interest all over Europe and still today keeps busy a great number of physicists, of chemists, and physicians. It was evident that this apparatus could not be obtained if it were constructed using only metals, for instance by coupling a plate of
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A first hint can be found in the historical introduction to the abovementioned writing of May 1801. After having for long recalled and described the measurements made starting from 1796 with the electroscope condenser on the contact tension between different metals, he concluded: Two years later, that is to say in 1798, I went back to the experiments that I had presented to a great number of people that had showed a certain curiosity for them. () the success of these experiments was more than satisfactory and in a certain way accomplished. Yet I hoped to be able to multiply and to vary them in different ways. And in fact at the end of 1799 I reached some results that were if no more decisive than the first results, which were decisive enough, for sure more surprising and much more instructive from different point of views. And I came also to the conclusions that are the subject of the present writing (relevant to the construction and the functioning of the battery). (Op. II, p.32)

HE INVENTION OF THE BATTERY. While it has been possible to trace all the developments of Voltas scientific thought from 1792 to 1797 from the writings and the letters written before 1797, we instead lack precise information on how between 1778 and 1779 he could make more clear the electrometric effects of single couples of heterogeneous metals, succeeding in summing them among themselves. All the references to the invention of the battery have always been vague and superficial.

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silver with one of zinc and then one of silver and one of zinc and so on, expecting that the forces with which silver pushes the electric fluid in the zinc would be balanced, the lower silver pushing upwards the zinc and the upper zinc pushing equally downwards the lower silver () It was in a way a desperate attempt and one year passed by before he found a solution. At the end he found maybe the only solution, which is that of interposing well-assorted couples of metals and made them communicate one another through a wet layer, that is to say a second class conductor, by putting silver, zinc and wet layer, then again silver, zinc and wet layer and so on, making the desired series. He came to that conclusion by thinking that the action of wet conductors on interposed metals is so weak, as he had experimented, that it could not counterbalance that of the above metals on one another, which would be only slightly altered, both making it stronger or weaker. (Op. II, p. 225). It is possible that the idea of putting single couples of disks one upon the other, in particular, zinc and copper, and interposing a layer of pasteboard moistened with salt water or acidulated water may have come to him by reading some studies on the anatomic structure of the electric organ of the torpedo.

This thesis strengthened by Voltas words, who wrote in the autumn 1800 a letter to Brugnatelli, underlining what he had stated in a communication dated March, 20th to the London Royal Society: my new apparatus, that I call artificial electric organ, since it is based on the same principles and is similar also in its form, according to the first construction, to the natural electric organ of the torpedo (Op. II, p. 2) finds a further confirmation in the epigraph appeared in the already mentioned work by Volta. This work was published by Piero Configliacchi in 1814 while Volta was still alive and was successively written under the bust of the scientist laid in the Volta room at the University of Pavia.
ALEXANDER VOLTA, IN RE ELECTRICA PRINCEPS VIM RAIAE TORPEDINIS MEDITATUS NATURAE INTERPRES ET AEMULUS

The writing, after a brief hint at electricity generated by the contact of heterogeneous metals, presents a first short description of the new apparatus, which for the effects produced can be compared to a weakly charged Leyden flask.
ESSAY:
FROM THE CONTROVERSY WITH

It was probably the necessity to make public his new invention as soon as possible that convinced him to send a first writing, with the intention of writing a successive memoir that however never appeared.

Without any doubt this letter is not one of Voltas best writings. As he himself wrote, it was a writing () composed by various fragments put together with no order, which had also some gaps, taken from a Mmoire beaucoup plus tendu that I had no time to finish (Op. I, p. 587), written as I could in a language that is not mine, that is to say French, since it more widely known abroad than Italian. (Op. II, p. 15).

The construction of the battery took place, as we have seen, towards the end of 1799 and Volta gave communication of this in a letter sent on March, 20th, 1800 always from Como to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society.

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This and the following quotations are taken from the English translation of Voltas letter in Philosophical Transactions for 1800, Reprint by Universit di Pavia, Hoepli, 1999, pp. 32 ff.; see above.
3

The apparatus to which I allude, and which will, no doubt, astonish you, is only the assemblage of a number of good conductors of different kinds arranged in a certain manner. Thirty, forty, sixty, or more pieces of copper, or rather silver, applied each to a piece of tin, or zinc, which is much better, and as many strata of water, or any other liquid which may be a better conductor, such as salt water, ley &c. or pieces of pasteboard, skin, &c. well soaked in these liquids; such strata interposed between every pair of combination of two different metals in an alternate series, and always in the same order of these three kinds of conductors, are all that is necessary for constituting my new instrument, which, as I have said, imitates the effects of the Leyden flask, or of electric batteries, by communicating the same shock as these do; but which, indeed, is far inferior to the activity of these batteries when highly charged, either in regard to the force and noise of the explosions, the spark, the distance at which the discharge may be effected, &c. as it equals only the effects of a battery very weakly charged, though of immense capacity: in other respects, however, it far surpasses the virtue and power of these batteries, as it has no need, like these, of being previously charged by means of foreign electricity, and as it is capable of giving a shock every time it 3 is properly touched, however often it may be. This is the great novelty and the potentiality of the new apparatus, that is to say the possibility to supply with continuity electric current. In fact the existent apparatuses were able to produce electric discharges, even more intense, but they had to be recharged every time. He goes on giving the device a first name.

To this apparatus, much more similar at bottom, as I shall show, and even such as I have constructed it, in its form to the natural electric organ of the torpedo or electric eel, &c. than to the Leyden flask and electric batteries, I would wish to give the name of the artificial electric organ: and, indeed, is it not, like it, composed entirely of conducting bodies? Is it not also active of itself without any previous charge, without the aid of any electricity excited by any of the means hitherto known? Does it not act incessantly, and without intermission? And, in the last place, is it not capable of giving every moment shocks of greater or less strength, according to circumstances shocks which are renewed by each new touch, and which, when thus repeated or continued for a certain time, produces the same torpor in the limbs as is occasioned by the torpedo, &c.?. Here he gives a more detailed and particularized description of the way to proceed in order to construct this new apparatus and then he starts talking about the effects that can be achieved by an apparatus constructed in this way, too small for great effects.

The construction of the apparatus is mentioned again, proposing this time to call it, according to its form, columnar apparatus (appareil colonne). A second layout is therefore described, called chain of cups (couronne de tasses).

They are mainly physiological effects such as itch or concussion in the articulations, even if through a condenser it is possible to obtain a spark or signs of electricity by Cavallos electrometer. In all cases many precautions are necessary so that the contacts can be the best possible. Yet if instead than one apparatus, two or three are used connected between them in a series the effects which can be achieved can equal or surpass that of the torpedo or electric eel.

The description of these experiments, both instructive and

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amusing, carried out using the last layout, allowed Volta to explain how electric fish can possibly work. In a basin full of water in which two small metal bands are plunged and put in contact with the poles of the battery; two fingers are then introduced, one for each hand in contact or very close to the poles of the battery.

One might be surprised that in this circle the electric current having a free passage through an uninterrupted mass of water, that which fills the bason, should quit this good conductor to throw itself and pursue its course through the body of the person who holds his hands immersed in the same water, and thus to take a longer passage. But the surprise will cease if we reflect, that living and warm animal substances, and, above all, their humours, are, in general, better conductors than water. As the body, then, of the person who immerses his hands in the water, affords an easier passage than this water does to the electric current, the latter must prefer it though a little longer. In a word, the electric fluid, when it must traverse imperfect conductors in a large quantity, and particularly moist conductors, has a propensity to extend itself in a larger stream, or to divide itself into several, and even to pursue a winding course, as it thereby finds less resistance than by following one single channel, though shorter; in the present case it is only a part of the electric current, which, leaving the water, pursues this new route through the body of the person, and traverses it from the one arm to the other: a greater or less part passes through the water in the vessel. This is the reason why the shock experienced is much weaker than when the electric current is not divided when the person alone forms the communication between one arc and another,, &c.. The physiological effects of the apparatus, which is now called electro-motive apparatus (we must give new names to instruments that are new not only in their form, but in their effects or the principle on which they depend) are then described, its effects on taste, sight, hearing, and touch organs. In this part of the letter, which is even too detailed and longwinded, the insistence with which Volta speaks about the continual character of electric current produced by the battery has to be underlined. This endless circulation of the electric fluid (this perpetual motion) may appear paradoxical and even inexplicable but it is no less true and real; and you feel it, as I may say, with your hands.

There is no reference in the whole letter to the physical working of the apparatus. It seems that Volta has limited himself to present his apparatus, capable of producing continual and endless current, and to use it to deny the existence of any possible current of animal origin. In fact, also the electricity generated by electrical fishes is produced by a biological battery, which exists within the animal, made by the
ESSAY:
FROM THE CONTROVERSY WITH

The letter ends with a presentation of the hypothetical anatomic and functional structure of the electric organ of the torpedo. In treating this subject Volta recalls the works by William Nicholson (1753-1816) on the origins of the electricity of the torpedo, whose hypotheses were then out-of-date under the light of the new discoveries. This organ therefore, composed entirely of conducting substances, cannot be compared either to the electrophore or condenser, or to the Leyden flask, or any machine excitable by friction or by any other means capable of electrifying insulating bodies, which before my discoveries were always believed to be the only ones originally electric.

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contact of organic conductors of second species separated by a liquid humour. To what electricity then, or to what instrument ought the organ of the torpedo or electric eel, &c. to be compared? To that which I have constructed according to the new principle of electricity, discovered by me some years ago, and which my successive experiments, particularly those with which I am at present engaged, have so well confirmed, viz. that conductors are also, in certain cases, exciters of electricity in the case of the mutual contact of those of different kinds, &c. in that apparatus which I have named the artificial electric organ, and which being at bottom the same as the natural organ of the torpedo, resembles it also in its form, as I have advanced.

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ON THE

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CONCERNING THE INVENTION OF THE

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183-186)

ALESSANDRO VOLTAS PILE

WRITINGS

As English nowadays plays a role of common scientific language, the National Committee for the Celebrations of the Bicentenary of the Pile has taken the initiative to promote the translation into English of all the Alessandro Voltas memoirs and letters building up the first volume of the National Edition of Voltas works, which includes the writings related to the electric Battery, i.e. to say it with the editors of the volume the Piles Epics.

A group of physicists and engineers both professors and scientists belonging to Italian and foreign Universities generously took over the task. Their names are recorded at the bottom of each translated text, as well as in the List of contents published ( see pp. 183-186 of this book). Of course such a task as been no easy undertaking, due both to the difficulties of a rapidly evolving 18th centurys scientific language and to the intrinsic features of a body of knowledge whose conceptual outline itself was still in the making. The full texts of the translated memoirs and letters are to be found on the Web at the following address: www.istitutolombardo.it.

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Finito di stampare nel mese di giugno 2002 presso Grafica Marelli - Como

Dorso di copertina: Andrea Fossati (1844-1919), Ritratto di Alessandro Volta (part.), olio, Tempio Voltiano, Como; Pila ottocentesca, Sala Casartelli (o dei Nobel), Istituto G. Carducci, Como.

Finito di stampare nel mese di settembre 2002 nello stabilimento della Grafica Marelli - Como