AD 1791

Luigi Galvani

Theory of Animal Electricity

Luigi Galvani (AD 1737-1798), Italian physician and anatamy professor in Bologna, was dissecting a frog in his laboratoy on a table near an electric machine generating sparks. He noticed that the frog leg jumped when a metal scalpel touched a nerve. Through many years of experimentation, he concluded that within the frog (and all animals) there was electrical nerve fluid that reacted to a completed electrical circuit and caused the muscles of even a dead frog to contract.

His insistence on "animal electricity" and not metallic or atmospheric electricity was that while he could certainly make the frog legs jump when in contact with 2 metals and also during thunderstorms, there were times when the frog legs contracted on perfectly clear days without a complete arc of two metals. This stirred up quite a controversy with Galvani on one side and Allesandro Volta on the other in support of metalic electricity.

Animal electricity was rejected after Volta succeeded in making the first battery with 2 different metals (no animal involved). It was not until the 1830s that Carlo Matteucci's experiments establish the existence of animal electricity in injured muscle.

Fun Word Facts: Galvanized, galvanism, and galvanometer are all derived from Galvani.

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