It's pretty old, the battery...!


In the context of the climate debate, which sometimes has hysterical tendencies, the word "electromobility" is on everyone's lips, as is the battery, which to this day is the only technical device that can store electricity...:



But who actually invented the battery? And above all: When?

I would have spontaneously guessed "around 1850" and was badly wrong! The battery is much older!

To make it short - the inventor of the battery was called Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta and came from Como in today's northern Italy...:



That's why the Italians claim him as one of their own - even though Alessandro Volta was a Habsburg subject, because for most of his life the area belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire!

But let's leave that to the exaggerated nationalists - in this house Alessandro Volta was born on February 18, 1745 and died there - on March 5, 1827...:





Unlike five of his nine brothers, Volta was not to become a priest. His father (also a priest!) wanted him to pursue a career in law.

During his law studies, however, Volta discovered his interest in electricity - and trained as a physicist through self-study!

As early as 1775 he was appointed professor of experimental physics at the school in Como. In 1776 he was the first to discover methane in gas bubbles rising from the swamps on Lago Maggiore and began to experiment with the combustible gas (volta pistol, in which an electric spark in a bottle triggers combustion, i.e. a kind of gas lighter)...:



He used it to construct continuously (flicker-free!) burning lamps with methane as fuel...





...and also used his "Volta-Pistol" as a measuring device for the oxygen content of gases (eudiometer)...:



All of these discoveries led to him being appointed professor of physics in 1778 (after a trip to Switzerland in 1777, where he met Voltaire, among others) and holding the chair in experimental physics until 1819 at the University of Pavia.

However, his greatest and most successful invention was the "voltaic pile" constructed around 1800, the first working battery (after he had already investigated electrical voltage series of different metals in the 1790s)!

We even know the exact day that Volta successfully tested his invention for the first time: It was November 5, 1800!

This date can be found in a letter in which Volta describes his invention in detail to his English colleague Sir Joseph Banks of the Royal Society...:



Volta's battery consisted of stacked elements, each consisting of a copper and a zinc plate, which were separated from each other by textiles that were soaked in acid (initially water or brine)...:





In 1791 the London Royal Society made him a member and in 1794 awarded him their highest award, the Copley Medal...:



In 1792 he went on his second trip abroad, during which he u. a. Pierre Simon Laplace, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier at Paris and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at Göttingen.

In 1801 he traveled to Paris, where he presented his battery to the 1st Consul Napoleon Bonaparte on November 7th...:







After Napoleon had conquered Italy and turned it into the "Cisalpine Republic", he appointed Volta, who actually wanted to retire back then, as a senator in 1809 and elevated him to the rank of count in 1810.

After the invention of the battery, he increasingly gave up research and teaching, but was persuaded to stay on until his final retirement in 1819 when he was appointed dean of the philosophical faculty in 1813.

His career had survived the changing regime unscathed - he was in favor with both the Habsburgs and Napoleon. In retirement he retired to his country house in Camnago near Como.

In Como today there is a monument that reminds of Volta - it shows him together with the "Volta'sche pillar"...:



And until the introduction of the "euro", the portrait of Conte Alessandro Volta also adorned the Italian 10,000 lire banknote...:



Pretty old, the battery, huh..?