- So why is this called a battery,
and what does it have to do with an artillery battery,
which is a group of missiles or canons.
Well, I'll tell you from shocking jars
to Volta
and beyond.
Ready?
Let's go!
(upbeat jazz music)
- As soon as 40-year-old Benjamin Franklin
built his first electricity machine,
he became addicted to performing
shocking electricity demonstrations, writing,
"My friends come continually in crowds to see them.
I have, during some months past,
had little leisure for anything else".
One of the things that Franklin liked to use
in these experiments was a little jar, called a Leyden Jar,
that could store electricity from the electricity machine,
and then give it later in a jolt.
Being a thrill seeker,
Franklin liked to use multiple jars at the same time
to give a really good jolt.
By 1749, Franklin started calling multiple Leyden jars
a battery of Leyden jars,
or an electric battery,
as the jars reminded him of a battery of cannons.
And the name stuck.
In 1751, Franklin published a book
of his letters about electricity
and soon, all of Europe was debating his ideas
and, recreating his "fun" experiments,
with particular interest
in his theory that lightning was the same electricity
as the shocks he was getting at home.
Inspired by Franklin's book, on May 10th, 1752,
a retired soldier named Coiffier,
at the request of his landlord, Thomas Dalibard,
who gets all the credit, verified this theory,
by getting sparks from a metal pole
in a lightening storm in Marley, France.
The "Marley Experiment" caused international interest
in scientists playing in electrical storms,
including inspiring a married couple
named Laura Bassi,
and her far less famous husband,
Giuseppe Veratti,
both of whom were independent physics professors
at the University of Bologna,
to become the first people in the papal state
to "catch" lightning in a bottle.
However, when they later tried to install lightning rods,
there were riots and they had to take them down.
Laura Bassi, who was prevented from teaching
at the University due to her gender,
taught her students the physics
of Benjamin Franklin in her home.
Safe from the rioting populace
and the restrictive university,
she set up
an outdoor laboratory
to study the effects
of electrical storms.
Actually, she set up two, because they were so popular
she had to relocate to make enough room.
One of the students,
pushing his way to see the amazing electrical results,
was a biology student named Luigi Galvani.
In 1762, just after graduating,
Luigi Galvani married a woman named Lucia Galeazzi,
who was the daughter of the head of the science department,
and both Luigi and Lucia worked full time
as Lucia's father's assistant.
Twelve years later,
in 1774,
Galvani's father-in-law died
and Galvani became a full professor,
and was finally required to do his own original research.
Side note,
in 1776,
Laura Bassi was awarded
Luigi Galvani's father-in-law's old position,
making her not only the first female professor
in modern history,
but, also the first female head of a science department.
And, she was finally,
finally,
finally
allowed to teach in the university itself.
Tragically, she ended up dying
just two years later from a heart attack
and is now often ignored by historians.
Back to the Galvani's.
In 1780, their work was poached
by a rival, and so,
they turned to something that was new to them,
the effect of electricity on biological systems.
This is when Galvani's assistant accidentally discovered
that electricity not only makes animals, like frogs jump,
also, can make
a dead frog jump.
Amazed, the Galvanis then electrified
every dead animal they could find
and found that most could be moved with electricity,
although the frog leg was the most
easy to see.
To be thorough,
they created their own outdoor electricity laboratory
to verify the dead frogs would jump in thunderstorms too.
This is when they realized
that sometimes the frog would jump on calm days,
which is how Galvani discovered
the metal in the wire holding the frog,
and the metal in the gate,
could make an electric shock
and make the frog jump.
Galvani went all, "Dr. Frankenstein", about it
and published the theory (a form of which
we believe to this day)
that electricity is the life force
that causes all of us to function.
His nephew, Aldini, took it even further
in the, "Dr. Frankenstein", department
and actually electrified
and animated
dead bodies a few years later.
Galvani published in 1791,
and the scientific world was entranced.
And, soon everyone was electrifying dead animals
in what they were calling Galvanic Experiments
(which is the origin of the term galvanized, to mean,
"shock or excite someone into taking action").
Italy's premier electrician, Allesandro Volta,
declared that Galvani's results were miraculous
and dropped all of his research
to focus on Galvanic experiments.
However, Volta soon found
that he could get a living frog to jump
by placing two different metals on the living frog.
And, he decided that the jumping frog leg
had nothing to do with the living force,
it only had to do with the power
of the two different metals.
Volta then got into very public debates
with Galvani's nephew
about the nature of Galvanism.
Finally, in May of 1800,
Volta produced a device
that, in his words,
combated,"the pretended animal electricity
of Galvani".
This device was a pile of zinc and silver
with salt water-soaked paper between them,
which Volta found would give a shock over and over again
without any rubbing, or electrical machine,
or thunderstorm, or dead frog in sight.
In fact, Volta had just invented the battery.
Of course he didn't call it the battery,
Volta preferred the term artificial electric organ,
which, not having an opinion on.
Not me, nope, nope, nope.
Don't have an opinion on.
Anyway, Volta's device was instantly popular.
Not only was it useful to shock alive and dead bodies,
it was quickly found that it could also be used in chemistry
to electrically separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Soon, multiple chemists and biologists
were experimenting with what they called
a Galvanic Pile.
The first reference that I can find
to calling Volta's device a battery,
came seven months later,
in December of 1800,
when a report on Volta's galvanic apparatus,
in France,
referred to Volta's device as, "la batterie,"
and it was translated into English as, the battery,
in February of 1801.
Four months after that, in June of 1801,
a 22-year-old chemist named Humphry Davy
wrote an article about the galvanic apparatus of Mr. Volta,
where he, too, referred to this device
as a, "Galvanic battery".
I mentioned Davy in particular
because a few months after that,
Davy was awarded the plum job
as a lecturer at the Royal Institute of London,
where he impressed British high society
with his fabulous experiments, love of laughing gas,
and startling good looks.
A contemporary remembered the Davy's talks,
"excited universal attention and unbounded applause.
Compliments, invitations, and presence
were showered upon him in abundance from all quarters".
A few years later,
Davy learned that he could make a bigger battery
if he turned the pile on its side.
And Davy built the world's largest battery,
in 880 square feet of the basement of the Royal Institution.
Davy proceeded to use this battery
to discover eight new elements
and the first practical,
and ridiculously bright, electric lamp.
So, why did scientists in the 1800s, call
a battery
a battery?
That was actually because of Volta.
First, Volta came up with a name that no one liked.
Second, in order to make his invention
sound more impressive, he often compared it
to the most powerful electric device available at that time.
i.e., a bunch of Leyden jars,
or as Ben Franklin put it, an electric battery.
Like, when Volta wrote,
"my new instrument imitates the effects of the Leyden Flask,
or, of electric batteries".
So to recap,
Benjamin Franklin named a bunch of Leyden jars,
a battery of jars,
and inspired people to play in thunderstorms.
Coiffier got a spark in the thunderstorm for his boss,
Dalibard, in France, and, inspired Laura Bassi, in Italy
to play with atmospheric electricity and teach Franklin's
theories to Luigi Galvani.
Galvani discovered that electricity could animate dead
frogs, and so could two different metals.
This inspired Alessandro Volta to get
continuous electricity from a pile of metal and salt water,
which he compared to a battery of Leyden jars.
Finally, chemists started using batteries
for electrical experiments and, some, like Humphry Davy,
called Volta's device, a battery,
and the name stuck because people thought
Davy was cute and his science was top notch.
One small addendum, Humphry Davy was so popular
in the early 1800s,
that in 1813,
as an Englishman, was given permission by
Napoleon Bonaparte, himself,
to visit France and French controlled Italy,
even though they were at the height of the Napoleonic Wars.
By 1814, Davy made his way to Como, Italy
and met the 69 year old Volta.
Volta gave Davy a gift of one
of his original batteries,
which is still on display at the Royal Institute.
On this visit, Davy brought along his young,
uneducated assistant, a man who Ernest Rutherford described
as, "one of the greatest scientific discoverers
of all time".
That assistant's name?
Michael Faraday.
And that is why a battery, is called a battery.
What do you want me to do for the next video?
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