1980 Upper Voltan coup d'état up against the President, which caused the 1966 Upper Voltan coup d'état, in which Lieutenant Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana took power. This marked the beginning of a long era of military rule in Upper Volta and later Burkina Faso. Lamizana would go on to rule the country as a military dictator until the Upper Voltan presidential election in 1978, when he was elected as the leader of a civilian regime. During the 1970s, the Lamizana government faced many problems, among them continued opposition from the trade unions, the rise of new political opposition groups, a strong Sahel drought, increasing desertification, and
Alessandro Volta between 1776 and 1778, Volta studied the chemistry of gases. He researched and discovered methane after reading a paper by Benjamin Franklin of the United States on "flammable air". In November 1776, he found methane at Lake Maggiore, and by 1778 he managed to isolate methane. He devised experiments such as the ignition of methane by an electric spark in a closed vessel. Volta also studied what we now call electrical capacitance, developing separate means to study both electrical potential ("V" ) and charge ("Q" ), and discovering that for a given object, they are proportional. This is called Volta's