Volta Prize 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 was usually constituted by members of the French Academy of Sciences. Notable recipients have included, Heinrich Ruhmkorff, who commercialised the induction coil, and Zénobe Gramme, inventor of the Gramme dynamo and
Electric potential one can therefore write where "V" is the scalar potential defined by the conservative field F. The electrostatic potential is simply the special case of this definition where A is time-invariant. On the other hand, for time-varying fields, unlike electrostatics. The SI derived unit of electric potential is the volt (in honor of Alessandro Volta), which is why a difference in electric potential between two points is known as voltage. Older units are rarely used today. Variants of the centimeter gram second system of units included a number of different units for electric potential, including the abvolt and the statvolt.