| Luigi Galvani |
Index for Luigi |
Website Links For Luigi |
Information AboutLuigi Galvani |
|
Luigi Galvani ( September 9 1737 – December 4 1798 ) was an Italian Physician and Physicist who lived and died in Bologna and who discovered that Muscle and Nerve Cells produce Electricity . Dissecting a Frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with Static Electricity , Galvani touched an exposed Sciatic Nerve of the frog with his metal Scalpel , which had picked up a charge. At that moment, he saw the dead frog's leg kick as if in life. The observation made Galvani the first investigator to appreciate the relationship between electricity and animation — or life. He is typically credited with the discovery of Bioelectricity . Galvani coined the term ''animal electricity'' to describe whatever it was that activated the Muscle s of his specimens. Along with contemporaries, he regarded their activation as being generated by an electrical fluid that is carried to the muscles by the Nerve s. The phenomenon was dubbed " Galvanism ," after Galvani, on the suggestion of his peer and sometime intellectual adversary Alessandro Volta . Galvani's investigations led shortly to the invention of an early Battery , but not by Galvani, who did not perceive electricity as separable from biology. Galvani did not see electricity as the essence of life, which he regarded Vitalistically . Thus it was Alessandro Volta who built the first battery, which became known therefore as a '' Voltaic Pile ''. While, as Galvani believed, all life is indeed electrical — in that all living things are made of Cell s and every cell has a Cell Potential — biological electricity has the same chemical underpinnings as the flow of current between Electrochemical Cell s, and thus can be recapitulated in a way outside the body. Volta's intuition was correct as well. Galvani's name also survives in the Galvanic Cell , the Galvanometer and Galvanization . Galvani Crater , on the Moon , is also named after him. Reference
|