TechStuff Tidbits: A Profile On Alessandro Volta

science in general. And I thought I would start off with Conte Alessandro Giusippe Antonio Anastasio Volta, or Alessandro Volta for short. He was an incredibly important physicist and technologist in a time when science was really just starting to take shape. He was born in seventeen, which puts his uh maturation within the Age of Enlightenment. So this was a period that followed the Renaissance, and it saw society start to turn away from long traditions and embrace more

experimentation and reason. Now I don't mean to say it was all rationality and egalitarianism, of course, because there was a a lot of horrible stuff that happened in the seventeen and eighteen and into the early nineteenth centuries. But this would be when the modern world would start to take shape, and we moved away from the the world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and into the modern era. Volta was born in seventeen forty five, as I mentioned, and his parents were noble, but not not

terribly wealthy, but aristocrats certainly. There was a Filippo Volta, his father who died when Alessandro was a teenager, and then his mother, Donna Maria Madelena Volta. They had four children, including Alessandro Volta, and his parents his family in general, had some high hopes for Alessandro once he grew up a little bit. They they kind of wanted him to

become a lawyer. Now. As a child, Alessandro was sent to live in the household of Ludovico Monty, and Monty was a barometer maker, so he made tools that could measure atmospheric pressure. Now. According to biographies, Volta's family worried that Alessandro might have some problems because he didn't start speaking the around the same time that most children do. He was non verbal, uh fairly late into his childhood.

In fact, according to one biography I read, he only became you know, talkative when he hit the of seven or so, though it's entirely possible he just didn't have much to say. Around the same time that he started talking, he also developed a keen interest in natural sciences, really just a insatiable curiosity about the world and how it worked. So he was really eager to observe and to experiment.

He attended private school and at age thirteen he was then enrolled in the School of the Jesuit Fathers in Como, Italy. His own father actually passed away while Volta was attending this school, so then his uncle, also named Alessandro, would send him to the Royal Seminary in Como. Now at this stage this was where his family was really hoping he would study law. Meanwhile, his lead instructor at the Royal Seminary was really hoping to snag Alessandro for the priesthood.

But at this point Volta was determined to become a scientist, and he dove into studies revolving around chemistry and physics, and was particularly fascinated with the study of electricity and electrostatic charges. Before he was twenty, he was designing electro static experiments. He was helped by the fact that a childhood friend of his had constructed a laboratory and gave

Alessandro access to it. So Volta must have had a pretty high opinion of himself around this time, because at the ripe old age of twenty four he wrote his first memoir, like come on, you don't have enough memories to fill a memoir when you're twenty four. Anyway, Volta was in contact with other scientists of the era. He was always eager to share what he had learned and find out what other people had learned, so it was really collaborative environment in the scientific field of the time.

In seventeen seventy four he became professor sort of physics at the Royal School of Como, and the following year, in seventy five, he took a little invention created by Johann carl Wick or vic a decade earlier, and it was called the electro for us and Volta made some improvements to this basic invention, and as the name of the device implies, it has something to do with electricity,

specifically electrostatic charge. Okay, let's talk about electrostatic charge and what this device actually did, because we have to remember that in the early days of experimentation with electricity, one of the few ways that you could actually generate any kind of electrical output at all was through electrostatic charges. So the way that this device worked went like this. You would start off with a plate made out of some sort of material like wax or pitch or resin,

and this would serve as a dielectric late. So a dielectric medium is an electrical insulator, so it doesn't allow electricity to flow through it. It doesn't have enough free electrons to allow for that. However, with a dielectric medium, if you expose that kind of material to an electric field, the field will cause the medium to become polarized. That is, one side of the material will have one type of electric charge to it, and the opposite side of that

material will have the opposite electric charge to it. You can think of it as the positive charge migrates to one side the negative charge migrates to the other side. But collectively, if you look at the piece as a whole, it as an electrically neutral charge. It's just that the individual charges have migrated to the edges as opposed to just being kind of all mixed in together. So with

an electro for us. You take this die electric plate of resin or wax or whatever, and then you rub it with cloth or fur, and that's what starts to cause this polarization within the plate itself. Then on top of this die electric plate you put a metal plate, so it's like you're putting a metal disk on top of a larger cake of this wax material or whatever

that you've already rubbed down with cloth or fur. Attached to the top side of the metal plate is a handle that's insulated so you don't accidentally discharge the electrophorest prematurely. And when you put the metal plate on this dielectric base, you also polarize the metal plate, which is unusual, like typically you would have the charge move to the metal plate, but because at a microscopic level, the plate is not making enough contact with the dielectric plate underneath. Instead you

have this polarization. So again, the metal plate has charges separate to either side of the metal plate. So let's say that the uh the the top side of the dielectric plate is of a negative charge, Well, that would mean that the positive charge within the metal plate would migrate down to it. Because opposites attract and it would mean that the negative charge of the electric of the metal plate rather would migrate to the top side, the

side where the handle is. And so you've got this plate now that has the charges that are polarized, but the plate itself still as a system, has a net neutral charge. Then you ground the plate, you allow the charge that has accumulated on the top of the plate to discharge. You probably do this just by touching it. You become the ground like you might hold the handle in one hand and touch the surface of the plate and the other and this allows the charge that has

accumulated on the top of the plate to discharge. However, now what this means is that the metal plate actually does have a net charge, and that positive charge in this case because you allowed that negative charge the head accumulated on the top surface to go away, but the net positive charge that's on the other surface is still there. So if you lift it with that insulated handle, so

now the charge is nowhere to go. What you have is a metal plate that has a net positive charge on it, which you can then use for your various electro static experiments. So really this was a way of holding an electro static charge so that you could do something else with it, and it was a very important

tool for those early experiments. Pretty cool, and it makes sense that Volta did this right because he was interested in electrostatic experiments, and so he had an incentive to make the instruments he relied upon easier to use and more reliable. All that being said, I am sure there are documents out there that explain exactly what improvements Volta introduced to this basic device, but I didn't find them

when I was looking in my research. But knowing that Volta had this keen interest in electricity and electrostatic charges, makes sense that he would try to improve those devices. I just don't know what it was he did that made it better. I do know that it had already existed. So while some people have credited Volta with creating the electrode for us, the truth of the matter is is that device pre existed Volta's work in the field. Okay, I've got a lot more to say about Volta before

we get to any of that. Let's take a quick break. Okay, So, around the time that Volta was starting to experiment with electro static charges and to improve the electro forests, he was also interested in bubbles. No tiny bubbles in the wine. No wait, I'm sorry that was someone else. No, he was interested in bubbles that were rising to the surface of Lake Maggiore in uh specifically in a marsh area around the lake called Iselina Patta Gora. And the lake

is huge. It's partly in Switzerland, it's mostly in Italy. It's on the south side of the Alps mountain range. And Volta was visiting a friend and while wandering around the marsh saw these bubbles popping up, and he wondered what was causing it. So he got some bottles and he was able to capture some of the escaping gas, and in experiments he learned that the gas was flammable or inflammable, because that means the same thing, and it

shows that English is a dumb language. The gas had no color, it had no odor, but it could catch fire and it turned out to be methane. So Volta became the first scientist to isolate methane. And Volta also invented a device to demonstrate how gas can be flammable. And this was a really interesting thing that I bet was really cool to see demonstrated and also more than

a little scary. So what he did was he created a metal container, so it has a hole on the top of it which can be corked, and it has a hole on the side of it which is insulated by a ring of glass. So the metal around the little hole on the side is covered in glass to keep it insulated. What you would do is you would insert a brass rod into the side hole so that the end of the brass rod is close to, but

not touching, the interior wall of this metal canister. Through the top hole, you would introduce oxygen as well as whatever gas you plan to test, like methane, and you would then cork up the container so now the gas can't escape. The brass rod is in that hole in the side. And then what you do is you would create an electrostatic generator to create an electrostatic charge. You would bring the entire metal canister, rod and all over to the electrostatic generator and you would bring the rod

into contact with the generator. So the generator then discharges its electrostatic charge into the brass rod. Because the end of the other end of the brass rod is close to the interior metal wall but not quite touching it. It would allow a spark to generate between the end of the brass odd and the interior of this metal container.

That spark would ignite this mixture of gas inside the container that would create an explosion that would be strong enough to force the cork on the top of the container. So Volta had created an exploding gas powered cork gun. The popular name for this device is Volta's pistol, and you could argue that this early experiment kind of laid the groundwork for the internal combustion engine. Later on, in seventeen seventy eight, the University of pavia named Volta the

Chair of Experimental Physics. But by seventeen eighty one he must have had itchy feet, because he started to travel across Europe, learning and teaching and making friends along the way. The University of Pavio wasn't done with him either. It elected him dean for seventeen eighty five to seventeen eighty six, and he would teach there off and on until eighteen nineteen.

One of the friends that Volta made in his many travels and discussions in the scientific field was another scientist by the name of Luigi Galvani, and it was Galvani who discovered, while experimenting with muscle tissue that if he put two metal pieces in contact with a skinned frog's leg, it would induce an electric current and the leg would twitch,

something that Volta would call the galvanic response. This discovery actually led to a pretty heated professional disagreement between Galvanni and his buddy Volta, because Galvanni thought that the electricity that was responsible for this movement was within the muscle itself, that that was the source of the electricity. He called

it animal electricity. Volta disagreed. He thought the muscle had really just acted as an electrical conductor between the two metal points of contact, and he called it metallic electricity, especially when Volta was thinking about using different types of metal, not two of the same kind, but two different types

of metal that you could create electric current between the two. Now, this disagreement led Volta to start experimenting with different metals as he tried to determine if by combining them you could create an electrical current. By bringing them into contact with one another, you could induce current to flow between them,

and by jove, he did it. Through all of this, there was this really dramatic feud between the proponents of the animal electricity hypothesis and the metallic electricity advocates as well. It got ugly like there were some pretty heated disagreements in the scientific community around this time about which of the two hypotheses was correct. Volta ultimately was able to show that there was no need for animal tissue in order to create a current between two different pieces of metal.

He used some cloth or some cardboard that have been soaked in brine and showed that you can still get current to pass through, saying, well, you know, there's nothing here that was part of an animal, so your hypothesis that electricity is part and parcel with the concept of living organisms is not necessarily correct. Now, of course we know that stuff like like muscular movements are made through electrochemical signals in our brains, but that wasn't exactly what

Galvanni was saying at the time. So you could argue that both of them were right to different degrees. But what Volta demonstrated was that you didn't need the organic tissue, uh right there, in order to conduct electricity. You just needed something that could serve as a conduit. Now we'll take a short break from his science experimentation to deal with matters of the heart. In seventeen, Alessandro Volta married Maria Teresa Alonza Peregrini, and the couple would ultimately have

three children together. Now I wish I could tell you a lot more about Maria, but sadly the historical records are scarce. I don't even have a birthday, nor do I have the date when she died. The only records I could find listened to her as wife to Alessandro and mother to Zannino, Flaminio and Luigi. Or refrain from

making further commentary on the matter. Volta continued his experiments with metallic electricity, and in sevent announced that if you were to take a disc of a metal such as silver, and then you cover that disc with a material like cloth soaked in brine, and then you put on top of that cloth soaked in brian another mata like disc, but at this time of a different metal like zinc, that collectively this would generate an electric current, and if you attached a wire to it, current would flow from

one end of this little stack to the other. In eight hundred he would build a full stack of discs alternating between copper and pewter, or maybe silver and zinc. The records aren't clear, and he separated the different metallic discs with cloth or cardboard that had been soaked in brine. And he showed that if you increase the number of disks, if you built the stack taller, you would also increase

the electromotive force of the current. And he was the first to describe this as electromotive sort of the power behind the current, not how much current there was, but how much there was to the current, and building a taller stack made more. Ultimately, we would describe this invention as the voltaic pile. And if you connected a wire from to the top of the pile to the bottom of the pile, you would complete the circuit and thus

you would get current to flow. And yeah, the more discs you add, the more strength this current would have and this would become the basis of the electric battery, and that would change the world. All right, Well, finish up on our discussion about volta in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. All right. Before the break, I mentioned that the invention of the battery would change the world, and it really did, and it

continues to do so. But at the time, the invention of the battery became an enormous boon to science because scientists no longer had to rely upon either electrostatic generator or a laden jar. And I'll describe late in jars in a different episode. It gets a little too involved for us to jump in here, but it's kind of like a capacitor. It releases all of its electricity in

one go. The voltaic pile became useful because you could continuously generate current until it had expired and corroded to the point where it no longer would allow current to flow. So that meant that scientists had a way to generate electricity and conduct various experiments with it. And by building larger and larger piles, they could generate electricity with more

behind it. And this meant that folks like Anthony Carlyle and William Nicholson could generate enough powerful electricity to discover electrolysis of water. This is when you use an electric

charge of sufficient voltage. Kind of spoiling the end of this, but we all know where volt comes from, right anyway, It's when you use an electric charge of sufficient voltage to break the molecular bonds of water, which means that when you have when you've introduced this electric current to water, it causes the water to become hydrogen and oxygen and converts into two gases. So this is one way where

you can harvest hydrogen right. One of the problems we have with hydrogen is that although it is the most common element in the universe, it also bonds with other stuff and it's really hard to find hydrogen just by itself. Even though hydrogen is incredibly useful, it means that we have to find ways to break it out of other molecular bonds, like with oxygen. So electrolysis is one way to do that. You pass this this charge through water and it causes those molecular bonds to break down and

you can harvest hydrogen from it that way. So that was a very important early use of voltaic piles back in the early days of electricity. So this invention also meant that further discoveries would pour in from all parts of the world, and it was really important to physics and to chemistry. We had multiple elements discovered in this period because scientists had access to experiments that could rely upon a reliable source of electricity. So this was a

huge boost in scientific knowledge. It's hard to overstate how important it was. Volta would end up becoming highly decorated for his contributions. He was united a couple of times, especially in France. He became a count in Italy, and Napoleon Bonaparte was particularly impressed by Volta's work. He ended up creating an honorary award that would reward significant achievements

in the field of science, specifically electrical science. He said that if someone made a contribution on the level of Benjamin Franklin or Alessandra Volta, they would be deserving of such an award. So Volta achieved great fame and success. He returned to the University of Pavia, and like I said, he would teach there until eighteen nineteen. Tragically, his son Flaminio died when he was just eighteen years old, and that devastated Alessandra Volta, and so he retired from teaching

in eighteen nineteen and from public life entirely. In eighteen twenty. He moved back to Como, where he grew up, and he lived out his final years there. He passed away when he was eighty two years old, and then decades later, in eighteen eighty one, the scientific community decided that they would name a unit of electromotive force after this great scientist. That's why we call them volts. So voltage is a measure of electromotive force. And I often say, and a

lot of people do. It's not just me. In fact, I am not by far. I'm not the first person to say this, but I think of voltage kind of like water pressure in a plumbing system. Like the amount of water in the system that's the current, but the amount of pressure behind it, that's the voltage. If we were to create an analogy, so Alessandro Volta incredibly important, really sticking it to his buddy Luigi Gavani, and I thought it would be good to do a quick profile,

and I'll probably do more of these. There will be other people who will deserve much longer episodes, not that Volta doesn't, but you know, I didn't want to dive into things that would become irrelevant due to the fact that we have gone so far from his initial contributions. I just wanted to talk about the really intrinsic ones that are important in tech today, but I'll probably do

more of these in the future. That's the plan. Maybe I'll do one of Ben Franklin, although obviously I'll have to focus primarily on his contributions to tech as opposed to everything else he's known for, because that dude was busy in more ways than one, as it turns out. And um, yeah, if you have people that you would like to suggest for me to do a profile on

in the future, let me know. Like I said, if if it's someone who's done tons and tons and tons of stuff and continues to do stuff, because obviously there are a lot of very influential people alive working in tech right now, then I may be doing you know, much longer episodes or maybe even multi partners depending on the person. But I would love to hear your suggestions.

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