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
Will-o'-the-wisp create ephemeral fires. Furthermore, phosphine produces phosphorus pentoxide as a by-product, which forms phosphoric acid upon contact with water vapor, which can explain "viscous moisture" sometimes described as accompanying ignis fatuus. In 1776, Alessandro Volta first proposed that natural electrical phenomena (like lightning) interacting with methane marsh gas may be the cause of ignis fatuus. This was supported by the British polymath Joseph Priestley in his series of works "Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air" (1772–1790); and by the French physicist Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare in "De l’électricité des météores" (1787). Early critics of the marsh gas hypothesis