The Italian physicist Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta, son of Philip Volta and Countess Maria Magdalena Inzaghi, was born in Como (Italy) on February 18, 1745. He received a careful humanistic education. However, when he began higher education, he turned to the sciences. At the age of 18 he had already discovered some of the fundamental keys to electricity and maintained epistolary relations with some of the main European scientists. In 1774, he was appointed professor of physics at the Royal School of Como. Between 1776 and 1778 he devoted himself to chemistry and discovered and isolated methane gas. A year later, in 1779, he was appointed full professor of the Chair of Experimental Physics at the University of Pavia. In 1800 he communicated his invention of the pile to the Royal London Society. The prestigious institution verified its proper functioning and publicly recognized the merit of his discovery.
In 1800 he successfully demonstrated the operation of the first electric battery, a demonstration that validated his thesis. The battery was made of silver disks and zinc disks, placed alternately and separated by cardboard disks soaked in brine. When the upper and lower ends of the battery were joined by a wire, a flow of electric current was produced which, for the first time, was constant; unlike the Leiden bottle, which discharged all the stored electricity at once. Thanks to Volta's invention, physicists could begin to work with electric currents that they could set and cut off at will. The current could also be strengthened or reduced by adding or removing disks. Soon after, other researchers discovered that the electric current from these batteries could be used to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen; a possibility that, because of its applications, opened up yet another field of research for science.
On March 5, 1827, Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist who will go down in history among other things for being the inventor of the electric battery, capable of generating a constant electric current, a milestone for the time, died in the Italian town of Como.
In his honor, the unit of electric potential in the international system was named "volt".