Voltaic Pile

The voltaic pile was the first electrical battery able to supply a continuous current to a circuit, invented by the Italian chemist Alessandro Volta and published in 1799. Volta built it by stacking alternating discs of copper and zinc separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in salt water, with each copper-zinc pair producing about 0.76 volts and the voltages of the stacked pairs adding together; connecting the top and bottom terminals by wire then drove a steady current through the circuit. The device gave scientists their first continuous source of electric current, enabling the discovery of water electrolysis and the isolation of several chemical elements, and battery designs built on its principles powered the electrical industry until electric generators emerged in the 1870s. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/