Talk:Alessandro Volta

Semi-protected edit request on 18 February 2015
The order of the sons is still wrong: PLEASE CHANGE = he raised three sons: Flaminio, Zanino and Luigi

TO = he raised three sons: Zanino, Flaminio and Luigi

SOURCES = http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta#Il_matrimonio

http://alessandrovolta.it/vita-di-volta/il-padre-di-famiglia/

87.4.115.186 (talk) 21:46, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done The other sources I can find say Luigi too. Stickee (talk) 23:57, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done Cannolis (talk) 16:45, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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Misleading Introductory Paragraph
The introductory paragraph is misleading in a number of respects.

1. Volta was not a pioneer of electric power. The pile was the first battery, but he had no thought of using it to power things. Oersted didn't discover the magnetic field generated by an electric current until 1820.

2. Volta himself did not prove that electricity could be generated chemically. On the contrary: he continued to assert that the electromotive force lay in the contact between dissimilar metals, not in chemical action. Others established its chemical nature. The names of Giovanni Fabbroni, William Nicholson, and Humphry Davy spring first to mind, but there were many others.

3. There was never a prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living things. Generation of electricity by friction and induction were both well known, and it was by then widely accepted that lightning was the same thing. It was a moot point at the time whether 'animal' and 'artificial' electricity were the same thing. The dispute between Volta and Galvani was about whether animal electricity existed, not whether non-animal electricity existed.

4. To say the pile 'eventually' led to electrochemistry implies a time delay that didn't occur. News of the pile spread like wildfire, and numerous chemists, notably Humphry Davy, began to investigate its chemical effects immediately they learned of it.

Alanwikirobinson (talk) 14:29, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Link to Biology and Electric Fish
Volta (1745–1827) was professor of physics at the University of Pavia in Italy and a fellow of the Royal Society. On 20 March 1800, he sent a letter to Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, to communicate his new apparatus (A. Volta Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 90, 403–431; 1800). He termed this the Organe électrique artificiel because it was designed to reconstruct the natural apparatus of electric fish (see also M. Piccolino Trends Neurosci. 23, 147–151; 2000).

This may be original research though, as far as I can tell the above comes from "The Shocking History of Electric Fishes" (ISBN: 9780195366723), however it's mentioned in the publication Nature as well (Nature 552, 214–218; 2017). Not sure this is worthy of inclusion though, either here or in the History of the Battery page. -2001:56A:F107:D500:876:C899:171:1FCF (talk) 05:27, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Incorrect ISBN
Hello! While doing research I was trying to locate the ISBN for A Popular History of Science and discovered that the provided ISBN (0-415-38381-1) lead to another book by the same author. Then I realized that the publication year, 1881, was before the year of ISBN's standard introduction in 1970 as ISO 2108 (according to Wikipedia, although the earliest on iso.org is ISO 2108:1978). However, I don't know if this information is correct, so I wanted to run this by the community first. Does removal of the ISBN sound appropriate? SwampedEssayist (talk) 16:09, 21 March 2023 (UTC)


 * (being bold...) SwampedEssayist (talk) 20:35, 23 March 2023 (UTC)