The beginning of the nineteenth century brings us at last to the question: who invented the battery? The short answer is that in 1799, an Italian named Alessandro Volta, created the first device recognizable as the modern battery.

The long answer is all of the history of electricity that you’ve read up to this point, as well as the work of Luigi Galvani.

To understand how Volta made his discovery, it’s necesssary to understand the state of the electrical theory in the late eighteenth century. The theory had been limited to electrostatics before Benjamin Franklin’s experiments revealed current electricity. In explaining the origin of electricity, scientists followed their national prejudices. British scientists adhered to the single fluid theory advanced by Franklin. The French, additionally influenced by the physics advances of Pierre Simon LaPlace (1749-1827),  adhered to Coulomb’s two-fluid theory. The Italians opposed Coulomb’s theory. But in the late 1700s, the revolutionary experiments of Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), a physician, anatomist and professor at the University of Bologna, would bolster the world’s knowledge of current electricity, creating a platform that Alessandro Volta would build on.
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Can you image a world today without batteries? A world without the wireless power? It would be hard in today’s mobile power society, where cell phones and laptops are the norm.  This begs the question, why were batteries invented so long ago and what purpose did they serve? And what should I expect to see in the near future?
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