The bicentennial of the Voltaic battery (1800–2000): the artificial electric organ

Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery at the end of 1799 and communicated his invention to the Royal Society of London in 1800. The studies that led him to develop this revolutionary device began in 1792, after Volta read the work of Luigi Galvani on the existence of an intrinsic electricity in living organisms. During these studies, Volta obtained a series of results of great physiological relevance, which led him to anticipate some important ideas that marked the inception of modern neuroscience. These results have been obscured by a cultural tradition that has seen Volta exclusively as a physicist, lacking interest for biological problems and opposed in an irreversible way to the physiologist, Luigi Galvani.