Electric battery common fuels such as gasoline. In automobiles, this is somewhat offset by the higher efficiency of electric motors in converting chemical energy to mechanical work, compared to combustion engines. The usage of "battery" to describe a group of electrical devices dates to Benjamin Franklin, who in 1748 described multiple Leyden jars by analogy to a battery of cannon (Benjamin Franklin borrowed the term "battery" from the military, which refers to weapons functioning together). Italian physicist Alessandro Volta built and described the first electrochemical battery, the voltaic pile, in 1800. This was a stack of copper and zinc plates, separated by
History of chemistry succeeded in isolating the metal now known as tungsten by reduction of this acid with charcoal, and they are credited with the discovery of the element. Italian physicist Alessandro Volta constructed a device for accumulating a large charge by a series of inductions and groundings. He investigated the 1780s discovery "animal electricity" by Luigi Galvani, and found that the electric current was generated from the contact of dissimilar metals, and that the frog leg was only acting as a detector. Volta demonstrated in 1794 that when two metals and brine-soaked cloth or cardboard are arranged in a circuit they produce