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Burndy Library › Collections › Volta
Alessandro Volta
Collection
Drawings of a Voltaic pile.
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Italian scientist Alessandro Volta was one of the most important natural philosophers studying electrical phenomena in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
In 1800 Volta published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London entitled "On the electricity excited by the mere Contact of conducting Substances of different kinds." The invention he described there, the Voltaic pile, was the first device that allowed experimenters to control the discharge of electricity.
For decades scientists had known how to keep electricity bottled up in primitive batteries, but had been unable to control the flow of electricity out of the jars that held it. Discharging the batteries was essentially an all or nothing proposition.
Much like a modern battery, Volta's invention generated electricity that could be released as needed, at a relatively constant rate, without depleting the charge all at once. Even in its primitive state the pile had enormous implications. Electricity, which had been an object of scientific curiosity and the featured attraction in any number of aristocratic parlor games, suddenly became a subject with enormous potential utility.
The Burndy Library has a special interest in the Voltaic pile, for the Burndy owns many volumes from Alessandro Volta's own library. Some of those books bear Volta's marks and notes. All bear witness to the intellectual context in which Volta made his experiments