Alessandro Volta Alessandro Volta Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (; 18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian physicist, chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power, who is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the Voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the President of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of
Alessandro Volta Law of Capacitance, and it was for this work the unit of electrical potential has been named the volt. In 1779 he became a professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia, a chair that he occupied for almost 40 years. Luigi Galvani, an Italian physicist, discovered something he named, "animal electricity" when two different metals were connected in series with a frog's leg and to one another. Volta realised that the frog's leg served as both a conductor of electricity (what we would now call an electrolyte) and as a detector of electricity. He replaced the frog's leg