Alessandro Volta was an Italian pioneer of electricity who is well known for the invention of the electric battery called "The Voltaic Pile". He invented it in 1799 and proved humankind that the electricity could not only be created by living beings. Volta's inventions led other people to make more experiments, which led to the development of the field of electrochemistry.

Volta drew admiration from several public figures at that time including Napoleon Bonarparte who invited him to the Institute of France to demonstrate his big invention.

Volta's life

He was born in Como, Italy on 18 February 1745. His father was a lineage and his mother came from the family of Inzaghis. Volta became a professor of physics at the Royal School in Como, in 1774 and a year later he popularised a device that produced static electricity called electrophorus. Volta married an aristocratic lady also from Como, with whom he raised three sons.

Volta's work

In 1776 Volta started studying the chemistry of gases, and he discovered methane after reading about the flammable air. In 1778 he managed to isolate methane.

Volta also studied electrical capacitance, developing separate means to study both electrical potential and charge, and discovering that for a given object, they are proportional. This is called Volta's Law of Capacitance, and for this work the unit of electrical potential has been named the volt.

In 1779 he became a professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia and kept the position for 40 years.

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