Makers of Electricity

by Brother Potamian; James J. Walsh

While attending the Jesuit school, he expressed, it is said, a desire to enter the Order. As his father, however, had been with the Jesuits for eleven years and had then given up his studies, his family feared a repetition of such an experience; and so his clergymen uncles took him away from the school and sent him for a while to the Seminary at Benzi. After a time Volta abandoned the idea of becoming a priest, but would not consent to follow the wishes of the family council further, at least not to the extent of becoming a lawyer. Though he studied law for a time, he constantly wandered away to the reading of books on the natural sciences and to the study of natural objects. Finally he was allowed to give up law to devote himself exclusively to science.

Fortunately, one of the canons of the Cathedral of Como, a former fellow-student of his and a man of considerable means, was also interested in the natural sciences, and obtained the books and instruments necessary to enable Volta and himself to continue their studies. Father Gattoni seems to have realized at once the possibilities for great advances in science that lay in Volta's wonderful powers of observation, and encouraged him in every way. As a consequence, some of the important experiments that laid the foundation of the modern science of electricity and proved the beginning of Volta's world-wide reputation were carried on in Gattoni's rooms.

As a young man, Volta was so completely devoted to scientific investigations that there could be no doubt of the bent of his genius for original work of a high order. His power of concentration of attention on a subject was supreme. Biographers emphasize that there was no time, much less inclination, for the levities that so often appeal to the growing youth. He was almost too staid and preoccupied with his work for his own health and the comfort of his friends. When he became interested in a series of experiments, he often forgot the flight of time, and was known to miss meals, and inadvertently to put off going to bed—apparently quite unconscious of his physical necessities. This intense concentration of mind had its disadvantages. One of his friends complained playfully that he made a rather disagreeable traveling companion on account of his tendency to become abstracted; and on occasions this friend was deeply mortified to see Volta, when in company, take out a pocket-handkerchief that had been used for some purpose in the laboratory—which showed unmistakable signs of its previous employment as a cleansing agent for dirty instruments or hands, though its possessor was evidently unconscious of its appearance. More than once, too, his handkerchief proved, when taken out for its natural uses, to be as preoccupied as its owner: specimens of rocks or natural curiosities that he had gathered and inadvertently allowed to remain in his pocket came with it.

All during his life he retained an unusual faculty for concentrating his attention, which at times amounted to complete abstraction from his surroundings. It is related that, one cold morning his students at the University of Pavia found him in his shirt sleeves, so intent on arranging the experiments that were to illustrate his morning lecture that he was unconscious of the time, and even did not notice their coming into the room until they had been for some time in their seats and he had finally completed the arrangement for the demonstrations. He was constantly occupied with problems in natural science, looking for the explanation of phenomena that he did not understand as well as gathering new data by observation and experiment. He was gifted with the supremely inquisitive spirit, in the scientific sense of the epithet, and could not be satisfied with accepting things as he found them without knowing the reasons for them.

Volta furnishes another excellent illustration of how soon genius gets at its life-work. We have his own authority for the fact that he had come to certain conclusions with regard to the explanation of electrical phenomena, which, when he was only nineteen years of age, he set forth in a letter to the Abbé Nollet, who was then one of the best known experimenters and writers on electrical phenomena in Europe. Though so young, Volta had tried to simplify Franklin's theory of electricity by assuming that there was an action only between a (supposed) electrical substance and matter. It is curious to see how much he anticipated what was to be the thinking for more than a century after his time and practically down to the present day. He considers that all bodies, in their normal state, contain electricity in such proportion that electrical equilibrium is established within them. Electrical phenomena, then, are due to disturbances of this equilibrium. Such disturbances may be produced by physical means, as by friction or by chemical means, and even atmospheric electricity may be explained in the former way.

Volta's first formal paper on electricity, bearing the title De Vi Attractiva Ignis Electrici, was published in 1769, when he was twenty-four years of age. His second paper, Novus Ac Simplicissimus, Electricorum Tentaminum Apparatus—New and Very Simple. Apparatus for Electrical Tests, shows that Volta was getting beyond the stage of theorizing about electricity into the experimental work, which was to form the foundation of his contributions to electrical science. It is not surprising, then, that when he was just past thirty, in 1775, he was able to announce to Priestley his invention of the electrophorus. Priestley is usually thought of as one of the founders of modern chemistry, but he was known to his own generation, especially at this time, as the writer of a very interesting and complete history of electricity. It is characteristic of Volta's careful ways, that the reason for his letter to Priestley was in order to obtain information from him as to what extent this invention, which Volta knew, as far as he was concerned, to be original with himself, was novel in the domain of electrical advance.[19]

With the intense interest in his work that we have noted, it is not surprising to find Volta's investigations proving fruitful. His active inventive genius stood him in good stead in enabling him to demonstrate principles by working instruments. The electrophorus is but one of the instruments that show the very practical character of the man. He was especially taken with the idea of securing some method of measuring electricity. Among other things, he invented the condensing electroscope, in which, instead of the ribbons of gold leaf now employed, he used straws. With this instrument he was able to demonstrate the presence of minute quantities of electricity developed under circumstances in which ordinarily the occurrence of any such phenomena would be unsuspected. These two instruments, the electroscope and the electrophorus, lifted the department of electricity out of the realm of theory into that of accurate scientific demonstration, and made the electrical departments of the physical laboratories of the time much more interesting and important than they had been before.

Though so early occupied with electricity, Volta did not confine himself to this subject, nor even to the wider field of physics, and that he did not hesitate, in his scientific inquisitiveness, to follow clues even in chemistry, is well illustrated by his first step in the investigation of gases. His attention being called to bubbles breaking on the surface of Lake Maggiore while on a fishing excursion, he set about finding their source, and noted that whenever the bottom of the lake near the shore was stirred somewhat a number of bubbles arose, and that the gas thus set free was inflammable. He constructed an electrical pistol in which gases thus set free were exploded by a spark from the electrophorus. About the same time, on the principle of the electrical pistol, he invented the eudiometer, an apparatus by means of which the oxygen content of air could be determined.

With regard to these inventions, Arago calls attention to a special quality that is peculiar to all of Volta's work. "There is not a single one of the discoveries of Professor Volta," says the distinguished French scientist, "which can be said to be the result of chance. Every instrument with which he has enriched science existed in principle in his imagination before an artisan began to put it into a material shape."

After these inventions and his previous work, it is not surprising that in 1774 Volta was offered the professorship of experimental physics in the College of Como. Here he labored for five years, until he received a call, in 1779, to the professorship of physics at the University of Pavia, where he was destined to remain in an active teaching capacity for a period of forty years.