The First Battery Was Inspired By a Dead Frog

In a display case on the lower level of the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution in London, there’s an unassuming stack of gray metal discs and blotting paper. It’s not at all obvious that this humble object is the starting point of today’s multibillion-dollar global battery industry. The object’s invention in 1799 grew out of a disagreement that Alessandro Volta —the Italian physicist for whom the unit of measurement for electrical potential is named—had with his friend Luigi Galvani over a dead frog.