Volta Prize for galvanoplasty, to Duchenne de Boulogne for the applications of electricity in medicine, to Gaston Planté for a development of a secondary battery, and to for his research on electric currents. Volta Prize The Volta Prize (French: prix Volta) was originally established by Napoleon III during the Second French Empire in 1852 to honor Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist noted for developing the electric battery. This international prize awarded 50,000 French francs to extraordinary scientific discoveries related to electricity. The prize was instituted by the Ministry of Public Instruction with the personal funding of the French Emperor, the selection committee
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