Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery in 1800: the voltaic pile, a stack of alternating zinc and copper discs separated by brine-soaked cloth, produced the first steady electric current. It settled his feud with Luigi Galvani, whose twitching frog legs in the 1780s Volta had shown were caused by the metals touching them — not by 'animal electricity.'
Volta announced the pile in a letter to the Royal Society of London, and the news electrified Europe — literally: Napoleon summoned Volta to Paris, and scientists everywhere used the new current to decompose water, discover new elements and, within decades, build the telegraph. Stored electricity had entered the world.
