Vasily Petrov

Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov was a Russian experimental physicist who lived from 1761 to 1834 and spent most of his career at the Medical-Surgical Academy in Saint Petersburg. In 1802 he built what was then the world's largest and most powerful voltaic pile, roughly 4,200 copper and zinc discs stacked together, and used it to produce a sustained electric arc between two carbon rods, one of the earliest deliberate demonstrations of the phenomenon. He described the discovery in his 1803 book News of Galvanic-Voltaic Experiments, correctly predicting that the arc could be put to practical use in artificial lighting as well as in melting and welding metal, decades before either application became a reality. Petrov's work went largely unrecognized in his own lifetime and was nearly forgotten after his death, until a surviving copy of his 1803 book turned up by chance in a library in Vilna near the end of the nineteenth century, restoring his claim to the discovery.