Italophilia priest and mathematician, born in 1598, is known for his work on indivisibles, a precursor of infinitesimal calculus, and for Cavalieri's principle in geometry, which partially anticipated integral calculus. Alessandro Volta, born in Como in 1745, invented the first true electrical battery, known as the voltaic pile. It provided a continuous source of electric current, which greatly benefitted Ampere, Ohm and other electrical experimenters in their development of basic electrical theory. A unit of electricity (volt) is named in his honor. Italians such as Fallopio, Eustachi, Malpighi, Morgagni and Valsalva were important pioneers of modern anatomy at the University of
Anaerobic digestion streams and lakes released flammable gas. In 1778, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), the father of Electrochemistry, scientifically identified that gas as methane. In 1808 Sir Humphry Davy proved the presence of methane in the gases produced by cattle manure. The first known anaerobic digester was built in 1859 at a leper colony in Bombay in India. In 1895, the technology was developed in Exeter, England, where a septic tank was used to generate gas for the sewer gas destructor lamp, a type of gas lighting. Also in England, in 1904, the first dual-purpose tank for both sedimentation and