Luigi Galvani

Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician and scientist who lived from September 9, 1737 to December 4, 1798 and spent his career at the University of Bologna. In 1780 he found that the leg muscles of a dead frog twitched when touched by an electrical spark, an observation that built on earlier experiments by John Walsh and Hugh Williamson, and he spent more than a decade investigating the effect before publishing his results in the 1791 treatise De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius. Galvani argued the twitching showed a form of electricity generated within animal tissue itself, a theory that set off a long scientific dispute across Europe; his rival Alessandro Volta at first accepted the finding but came to argue instead that the true source was the contact between two different metals, with the frog's tissue only completing the circuit. Volta coined the word galvanism for the direct current produced this way by chemical action between dissimilar metals, and pursuing that alternative explanation led him to build the first true electric battery, so Galvani's disputed discovery stands as the observation that set the entire line of research toward electrochemical power in motion.