“Alessandro Volta: The Electric Pioneer Who Powered the World”
Alessandro Volta was born on February 18, 1745 in the city of Como, Italy. Coma is a large city situated on Lake Como, nestled at the foot of the Alps mountain range. Where rich people have come and settled on this famous and beautiful lake, the common people of Europe mostly come as travelers from season to season.
Volta’s family was not a very rich family. But the boy was promising. Due to the influence of some eminent relatives in the church, some arrangements were made for his education. Completing the university curriculum, and graduating at the age of 17, Volta got a job teaching at the high school in Como. He remained a school teacher until 1779, when, at the age of 34, he was invited to establish a physics department at the University of Pavia. While setting up the department, some time was also spared for research.
While a school teacher in Como, Volta had researched ‘electrophores’, whose statement, in England, is found in a letter he wrote to Joseph Priestley. Electrophores are not a very useful thing. But even today we use it to demonstrate static electricity in the classroom.
But Volta used electrophores to find out which rules are useful in the work of capacitor or condenser in electricity production. Volta named this device ‘Condenser’. But the translator of ‘Transactions’ of the Royal Society of London shortened it to ‘condenser’. Volta also showed another merit in its use that the charge of electricity can also be multiplied to activate the gross instruments (electroscope and electrometer) which were used in those days to measure electricity. By charging the electroscope, he separated its plates, due to which the potential or voltage of the plates increased. He also thought of a new name for this instrument – micro-electro-scope i.e. micro-electric display.
In 1791, Luigi Galvani, professor of zoology and anatomy at the University of Bologna, dissected some frogs in the laboratory of the university.
Was studying by A pointed brass hook was forced into the frog’s spine, and an assistant touched its leg with an iron scalpel. As soon as the hook and the scalpel reached inside and touched each other, the frog’s thigh began to contract violently. Galvani looked again – again the same thing: the frog’s thigh jerked again.
Galvani published these revelations. He was of the opinion that A kind of strange electricity is generated in the frog itself, due to which this shock comes. Volta also read the findings of the test, but he was not convinced by them. But when he saw them again and again, he also said, “The thing is such that even in wonder, I myself have not diminished and how many times, having slipped from complete disbelief, I have also been thrilled with the new enthusiasm of faith. “
Somehow, Volta still did not believe that this electricity was generated from the body of the animal. He made a more in-depth study of the situation. And on March 20, 1800, he wrote a famous letter to the Royal Society, in which a kind of ‘voltaic pile’ was mentioned. Anyone can make this pile: Volta took some dry silver and zinc pans and some cut cardboard pans soaked in plenty of salt water but not dripping and placed them in a continuous sequence of silver-cardboard-zinc-silver.
Uninterrupted transmission of electricity was possible from the ends of the piles. Volta thus produced the first electric cell, a forerunner of the dry-cell ‘battery’ used in our radios, etc. This was the first demonstration of continuous flow of electricity in the history of science. And when he took two spoons of tin and silver together in his mouth, they also started generating electricity. Here also the same two metals were there, and there was a liquid medium for the transmission of electricity.
The result of this research was that many new areas of research in electricity and chemistry opened up at once. One thing happened, perhaps the first thing, that using voltaic pylons, scientists were able to split water into hydrogen and oxygen; And now some extraordinary progress has come in the study of this and magnetism.
Volta started being honored from country to country. Napoleon sent him an invitation to deliver a lecture series at the Institute of Paris. A gold medal was prepared in his honour. And when Volta said that I was too old, I should resign, he It was submitted that no, even if he continued to be a professor in the university, even if he delivered only one lecture a year, he would continue to get the same salary. Not only this, he was also nominated as a member of the Senate as a representative of Lamba. The Emperor of Austria requested Volta to become the Director-General of the Philosophy Department of Padua. Retiring from active life in 1819 at the age of 74, Volta returned to his native Como, where he died in 1827.
A grand statue of Volta still stands in Como, as a monument to his life of research. But another monument which has spread everywhere in the world is the universal use of Volta’s name everywhere in the field of electricity. In 1893, the Congress of Electricians fixed the name of the unit of electromotive force as ‘Volt’. It was Volta’s first pile that gave mankind a pass into the age of electricity.
After a pile of old Volta batteries, the next step was to somehow sequence a series of chemical cells. In its core also the same rules are active which are used in today’s motor batteries. In this, there is a type of chemical reaction between two metals in a mixture called electrolyte.
Alessandro Volta, Professor of Physics at the University of Pavia, Italy, described an experiment in these words: I covered the tip of my tongue with a thin sheet of tin, and the front end of a silver spoon against the back of the tongue. Touched the tin with its handle by touching the end. Volta’s idea was that the tongue would try to shrink something. (As if he had bitten something), but instead he got some sour-sour taste, that’s all.