March 20, 1800 is considered to be the date the pile was invented. It is actually the date on which Count Alessandro Giuseppe Anastasio Volta, from Como, he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks of the Royal Society of London (the English Academy of Sciences). The letter is written in French and begins like this: “After a long silence, for which I will not try to apologize, I am pleased to communicate to you, sir, and through you to the Royal Society, some surprising results I have achieved …”. The letter is kept at the Science Museum in London: dense writing, has the drawings of a pile and its functioning.
Alessandro Volta he was 55 years old, he was born in Como from a noble family, he had studied philosophy and rhetoric with the aim of becoming a priest, but in the seminary he had become passionate about scientific subjects. It was like this became a distinguished physicist and a recognized inventor (“He has in fact made some very important inventions on the subject, including the perpetual electrophore, an electrostatic generator capable of accumulating a modest quantity of electric charge in a discontinuous way; and the capacitor, which allows to accumulate electrical energy by keeping electrostatic charges separate. The best is yet to come “). Time he is also considered the discoverer of methane gas“A flammable water” in a spring near the Lambro, which he sensed was of organic rather than mineral origin.
But Volta will go down in history above all for the pile that he made starting from the results of Luigi Galvani’s experiments with frogs. The first battery “was completely different from the practical and efficient modern batteries, in fact it was a column made up of a series of discs of zinc, felt soaked in salt water, and copper, stacked one on top of the other. By connecting an electric wire at both ends, it was possible to take the electricity generated by the chemical reaction ”. The invention came called a “pile” precisely because the disks were stacked one on the other.
What happened after that letter of March 20, 1800? “The letter to the Royal Society it ended up in the hands of Tiberio Cavallo, the scientist member of the society with which Volta had a consolidated relationship of scientific esteem and friendship. Cavallo skipped the stages and allowed Volta to publish the article after only 5 months, in September 1800, with the title: On the Electricity excited by the mere Contact of conducting Substances of different Kinds. In this way Volta was consecrated without question as a genius and he was assigned the paternity of the pile without others being able to beat him on time. The letter was also written in French, a far-sighted choice since in those years the war raged between Napoleon and the Austrians, who returned to Lombardy in April 1799 had suppressed the university by dismissing and even imprisoning the professors and forcing Volta to return to Como. Three months after the communication with the Royal Society, however Napoleon, a great admirer of the Como areaafter the victory in Marengo on 14 June 1800, he reopened the University of Pavia, reinstating Volta as professor of experimental physics and appointing him director of the Physics Cabinet”.