generation of electricity by injured tissue, although Galvani did not make this connection, thinking still
in terms of his animal electricity. Volta responded immediately, depreciating these experiments with
obviously specious, non-experimental, theoretical arguments. While Galvani himself never responded
to these arguments of Volta's, his nephew, Giovanni Aldini, a physicist, was convinced that Galvani
was right and was not at all loath to engage in scientific controversy. Volta was of similar temperament
and in a short time Galvani was all but forgotten in the heat of a particularly acrimonious debate
between Volta and Aldini. In June 1796, just five years after the publication of Galvani's first paper,
Bologna came under French control, Galvani was dismissed from his university position, losing his
home and his fortune at the same time. He was forced to seek refuge in the home of his brother, where,
cut off from science and with no facilities to communicate with other scientists, he died in I798. Two
years later Volta presented his discoveries to Napoleon himself, receiving a special award and unusual
honors. Not too surprisingly, Volta never made another substantive contribution to science.
In the welter of acrimony and debate over "animal electricity" one voice of reason and
moderation was heard. Humboldt was then a young man in his 30's and had just completed his studies
as a mining engineer. While employed as an inspector of mines for the Prussian government, Humboldt
carried with him the equipment to conduct experiments on the controversy. His publication in I797, just
before Galvani's death, clearly established that both Volta and Galvani were simultaneously right and
wrong. Bimetallic electricity existed but so did animal electricity. Humboldt went on to become a
spectacular scientist, traveling widely around the world and making many of the original observations
that established geology as a science.
Aldini continued to vigorously promote the cause of animal electricity in the early years of the
next century. Being a physicist with no medical background, his experiments, such as the animation of
corpses with electrical currents (generated incidentally by the bimetallic piles discovered by his arch
enemy Volta), often verged on the grotesque. However, in one instance Aldini treated a patient who
would today be diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Administering the currents through the head, Aldini
reported a steady improvement in the patient's personality and ultimately, his complete rehabilitation.
Nevertheless, all the advantages lay with Volta. His world of bimetallic electricity was both a quantum
jump in technology and a simple, easily verifiable phenomenon. Galvani's world of living things on the
other hand was incredibly complex and imperfectly understood as it remains even today.
Volta's observations were extended and his apparatus refined by many other workers. Voltaic batteries
of several tons in weight were constructed, enabling Humphry Davy to do his experiments laying the
foundation for electrochemistry, and leading to a better understanding of the material world at the
atomic level. In 1809 von Soemmering, a German physician, demonstrated the first battery-operated
telegraph, and the following year Davy displayed the first electric arc light using the 2000 plate voltaic
battery of the Royal Society. Electricity was beginning to move from the status of a laboratory curiosity
to that of a tool for probing the material world, simultaneously showing promise of future technical
applications in commerce and industry.
Again, another surprising discovery was made quite by accident. Hans Christian Oersted, then
professor of natural philosophy at Copenhagen, was giving a lecture-demonstration of voltaic
electricity to his students early in 1820. A compass happened to be on the same demonstration table
and Oersted noticed that every time the electrical circuit was made the compass needle moved. In a few
months he completed his experiments on this chance observation and in July 1820 he published the
observation that an electrical current flowing in a conductor generated a circular magnetic field around
the conductor. Oersted had discovered electromagnetism. More than 200 years after Gilbert had shown
the difference between the two forces, he had proven the interrelationship between them. His discovery
ELECTROMAGNETISM & LIFE - 14