Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and How the Tech Are Young. I'm starting a new
Speaker 1: kind of tech stuff episode today, sort of within the
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff Tidbits overall umbrella, and I'm doing a quick
Speaker 1: profile on someone who made significant contributions to tech and
Speaker 1: science in general. And I thought I would start off
Speaker 1: with Conte Alessandro Giusippe Antonio Anastasio Volta, or Alessandro Volta
Speaker 1: for short. He was an incredibly important physicist and technologist
Speaker 1: in a time when science was really just starting to
Speaker 1: take shape. He was born in seventeen, which puts his
Speaker 1: uh maturation within the Age of Enlightenment. So this was
Speaker 1: a period that followed the Renaissance, and it saw society
Speaker 1: start to turn away from long traditions and embrace more
Speaker 1: experimentation and reason. Now I don't mean to say it
Speaker 1: was all rationality and egalitarianism, of course, because there was
Speaker 1: a a lot of horrible stuff that happened in the
Speaker 1: seventeen and eighteen and into the early nineteenth centuries. But
Speaker 1: this would be when the modern world would start to
Speaker 1: take shape, and we moved away from the the world
Speaker 1: of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and into the
Speaker 1: modern era. Volta was born in seventeen forty five, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, and his parents were noble, but not not
Speaker 1: terribly wealthy, but aristocrats certainly. There was a Filippo Volta,
Speaker 1: his father who died when Alessandro was a teenager, and
Speaker 1: then his mother, Donna Maria Madelena Volta. They had four children,
Speaker 1: including Alessandro Volta, and his parents his family in general,
Speaker 1: had some high hopes for Alessandro once he grew up
Speaker 1: a little bit. They they kind of wanted him to
Speaker 1: become a lawyer. Now. As a child, Alessandro was sent
Speaker 1: to live in the household of Ludovico Monty, and Monty
Speaker 1: was a barometer maker, so he made tools that could
Speaker 1: measure atmospheric pressure. Now. According to biographies, Volta's family worried
Speaker 1: that Alessandro might have some problems because he didn't start
Speaker 1: speaking the around the same time that most children do.
Speaker 1: He was non verbal, uh fairly late into his childhood.
Speaker 1: In fact, according to one biography I read, he only
Speaker 1: became you know, talkative when he hit the of seven
Speaker 1: or so, though it's entirely possible he just didn't have
Speaker 1: much to say. Around the same time that he started talking,
Speaker 1: he also developed a keen interest in natural sciences, really
Speaker 1: just a insatiable curiosity about the world and how it worked.
Speaker 1: So he was really eager to observe and to experiment.
Speaker 1: He attended private school and at age thirteen he was
Speaker 1: then enrolled in the School of the Jesuit Fathers in Como, Italy.
Speaker 1: His own father actually passed away while Volta was attending
Speaker 1: this school, so then his uncle, also named Alessandro, would
Speaker 1: send him to the Royal Seminary in Como. Now at
Speaker 1: this stage this was where his family was really hoping
Speaker 1: he would study law. Meanwhile, his lead instructor at the
Speaker 1: Royal Seminary was really hoping to snag Alessandro for the priesthood.
Speaker 1: But at this point Volta was determined to become a scientist,
Speaker 1: and he dove into studies revolving around chemistry and physics,
Speaker 1: and was particularly fascinated with the study of electricity and
Speaker 1: electrostatic charges. Before he was twenty, he was designing electro
Speaker 1: static experiments. He was helped by the fact that a
Speaker 1: childhood friend of his had constructed a laboratory and gave
Speaker 1: Alessandro access to it. So Volta must have had a
Speaker 1: pretty high opinion of himself around this time, because at
Speaker 1: the ripe old age of twenty four he wrote his
Speaker 1: first memoir, like come on, you don't have enough memories
Speaker 1: to fill a memoir when you're twenty four. Anyway, Volta
Speaker 1: was in contact with other scientists of the era. He
Speaker 1: was always eager to share what he had learned and
Speaker 1: find out what other people had learned, so it was
Speaker 1: really collaborative environment in the scientific field of the time.
Speaker 1: In seventeen seventy four he became professor sort of physics
Speaker 1: at the Royal School of Como, and the following year,
Speaker 1: in seventy five, he took a little invention created by
Speaker 1: Johann carl Wick or vic a decade earlier, and it
Speaker 1: was called the electro for us and Volta made some
Speaker 1: improvements to this basic invention, and as the name of
Speaker 1: the device implies, it has something to do with electricity,
Speaker 1: specifically electrostatic charge. Okay, let's talk about electrostatic charge and
Speaker 1: what this device actually did, because we have to remember
Speaker 1: that in the early days of experimentation with electricity, one
Speaker 1: of the few ways that you could actually generate any
Speaker 1: kind of electrical output at all was through electrostatic charges.
Speaker 1: So the way that this device worked went like this.
Speaker 1: You would start off with a plate made out of
Speaker 1: some sort of material like wax or pitch or resin,
Speaker 1: and this would serve as a dielectric late. So a
Speaker 1: dielectric medium is an electrical insulator, so it doesn't allow
Speaker 1: electricity to flow through it. It doesn't have enough free
Speaker 1: electrons to allow for that. However, with a dielectric medium,
Speaker 1: if you expose that kind of material to an electric field,
Speaker 1: the field will cause the medium to become polarized. That is,
Speaker 1: one side of the material will have one type of
Speaker 1: electric charge to it, and the opposite side of that
Speaker 1: material will have the opposite electric charge to it. You
Speaker 1: can think of it as the positive charge migrates to
Speaker 1: one side the negative charge migrates to the other side.
Speaker 1: But collectively, if you look at the piece as a whole,
Speaker 1: it as an electrically neutral charge. It's just that the
Speaker 1: individual charges have migrated to the edges as opposed to
Speaker 1: just being kind of all mixed in together. So with
Speaker 1: an electro for us. You take this die electric plate
Speaker 1: of resin or wax or whatever, and then you rub
Speaker 1: it with cloth or fur, and that's what starts to
Speaker 1: cause this polarization within the plate itself. Then on top
Speaker 1: of this die electric plate you put a metal plate,
Speaker 1: so it's like you're putting a metal disk on top
Speaker 1: of a larger cake of this wax material or whatever
Speaker 1: that you've already rubbed down with cloth or fur. Attached
Speaker 1: to the top side of the metal plate is a
Speaker 1: handle that's insulated so you don't accidentally discharge the electrophorest prematurely.
Speaker 1: And when you put the metal plate on this dielectric base,
Speaker 1: you also polarize the metal plate, which is unusual, like
Speaker 1: typically you would have the charge move to the metal plate,
Speaker 1: but because at a microscopic level, the plate is not
Speaker 1: making enough contact with the dielectric plate underneath. Instead you
Speaker 1: have this polarization. So again, the metal plate has charges
Speaker 1: separate to either side of the metal plate. So let's
Speaker 1: say that the uh the the top side of the
Speaker 1: dielectric plate is of a negative charge, Well, that would
Speaker 1: mean that the positive charge within the metal plate would
Speaker 1: migrate down to it. Because opposites attract and it would
Speaker 1: mean that the negative charge of the electric of the
Speaker 1: metal plate rather would migrate to the top side, the
Speaker 1: side where the handle is. And so you've got this
Speaker 1: plate now that has the charges that are polarized, but
Speaker 1: the plate itself still as a system, has a net
Speaker 1: neutral charge. Then you ground the plate, you allow the
Speaker 1: charge that has accumulated on the top of the plate
Speaker 1: to discharge. You probably do this just by touching it.
Speaker 1: You become the ground like you might hold the handle
Speaker 1: in one hand and touch the surface of the plate
Speaker 1: and the other and this allows the charge that has
Speaker 1: accumulated on the top of the plate to discharge. However,
Speaker 1: now what this means is that the metal plate actually
Speaker 1: does have a net charge, and that positive charge in
Speaker 1: this case because you allowed that negative charge the head
Speaker 1: accumulated on the top surface to go away, but the
Speaker 1: net positive charge that's on the other surface is still there.
Speaker 1: So if you lift it with that insulated handle, so
Speaker 1: now the charge is nowhere to go. What you have
Speaker 1: is a metal plate that has a net positive charge
Speaker 1: on it, which you can then use for your various
Speaker 1: electro static experiments. So really this was a way of
Speaker 1: holding an electro static charge so that you could do
Speaker 1: something else with it, and it was a very important
Speaker 1: tool for those early experiments. Pretty cool, and it makes
Speaker 1: sense that Volta did this right because he was interested
Speaker 1: in electrostatic experiments, and so he had an incentive to
Speaker 1: make the instruments he relied upon easier to use and
Speaker 1: more reliable. All that being said, I am sure there
Speaker 1: are documents out there that explain exactly what improvements Volta
Speaker 1: introduced to this basic device, but I didn't find them
Speaker 1: when I was looking in my research. But knowing that
Speaker 1: Volta had this keen interest in electricity and electrostatic charges,
Speaker 1: makes sense that he would try to improve those devices.
Speaker 1: I just don't know what it was he did that
Speaker 1: made it better. I do know that it had already existed.
Speaker 1: So while some people have credited Volta with creating the
Speaker 1: electrode for us, the truth of the matter is is
Speaker 1: that device pre existed Volta's work in the field. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got a lot more to say about Volta before
Speaker 1: we get to any of that. Let's take a quick break. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: around the time that Volta was starting to experiment with
Speaker 1: electro static charges and to improve the electro forests, he
Speaker 1: was also interested in bubbles. No tiny bubbles in the wine.
Speaker 1: No wait, I'm sorry that was someone else. No, he
Speaker 1: was interested in bubbles that were rising to the surface
Speaker 1: of Lake Maggiore in uh specifically in a marsh area
Speaker 1: around the lake called Iselina Patta Gora. And the lake
Speaker 1: is huge. It's partly in Switzerland, it's mostly in Italy.
Speaker 1: It's on the south side of the Alps mountain range.
Speaker 1: And Volta was visiting a friend and while wandering around
Speaker 1: the marsh saw these bubbles popping up, and he wondered
Speaker 1: what was causing it. So he got some bottles and
Speaker 1: he was able to capture some of the escaping gas,
Speaker 1: and in experiments he learned that the gas was flammable
Speaker 1: or inflammable, because that means the same thing, and it
Speaker 1: shows that English is a dumb language. The gas had
Speaker 1: no color, it had no odor, but it could catch
Speaker 1: fire and it turned out to be methane. So Volta
Speaker 1: became the first scientist to isolate methane. And Volta also
Speaker 1: invented a device to demonstrate how gas can be flammable.
Speaker 1: And this was a really interesting thing that I bet
Speaker 1: was really cool to see demonstrated and also more than
Speaker 1: a little scary. So what he did was he created
Speaker 1: a metal container, so it has a hole on the
Speaker 1: top of it which can be corked, and it has
Speaker 1: a hole on the side of it which is insulated
Speaker 1: by a ring of glass. So the metal around the
Speaker 1: little hole on the side is covered in glass to
Speaker 1: keep it insulated. What you would do is you would
Speaker 1: insert a brass rod into the side hole so that
Speaker 1: the end of the brass rod is close to, but
Speaker 1: not touching, the interior wall of this metal canister. Through
Speaker 1: the top hole, you would introduce oxygen as well as
Speaker 1: whatever gas you plan to test, like methane, and you
Speaker 1: would then cork up the container so now the gas
Speaker 1: can't escape. The brass rod is in that hole in
Speaker 1: the side. And then what you do is you would
Speaker 1: create an electrostatic generator to create an electrostatic charge. You
Speaker 1: would bring the entire metal canister, rod and all over
Speaker 1: to the electrostatic generator and you would bring the rod
Speaker 1: into contact with the generator. So the generator then discharges
Speaker 1: its electrostatic charge into the brass rod. Because the end
Speaker 1: of the other end of the brass rod is close
Speaker 1: to the interior metal wall but not quite touching it.
Speaker 1: It would allow a spark to generate between the end
Speaker 1: of the brass odd and the interior of this metal container.
Speaker 1: That spark would ignite this mixture of gas inside the
Speaker 1: container that would create an explosion that would be strong
Speaker 1: enough to force the cork on the top of the container.
Speaker 1: So Volta had created an exploding gas powered cork gun.
Speaker 1: The popular name for this device is Volta's pistol, and
Speaker 1: you could argue that this early experiment kind of laid
Speaker 1: the groundwork for the internal combustion engine. Later on, in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy eight, the University of pavia named Volta the
Speaker 1: Chair of Experimental Physics. But by seventeen eighty one he
Speaker 1: must have had itchy feet, because he started to travel
Speaker 1: across Europe, learning and teaching and making friends along the way.
Speaker 1: The University of Pavio wasn't done with him either. It
Speaker 1: elected him dean for seventeen eighty five to seventeen eighty six,
Speaker 1: and he would teach there off and on until eighteen nineteen.
Speaker 1: One of the friends that Volta made in his many
Speaker 1: travels and discussions in the scientific field was another scientist
Speaker 1: by the name of Luigi Galvani, and it was Galvani
Speaker 1: who discovered, while experimenting with muscle tissue that if he
Speaker 1: put two metal pieces in contact with a skinned frog's leg,
Speaker 1: it would induce an electric current and the leg would twitch,
Speaker 1: something that Volta would call the galvanic response. This discovery
Speaker 1: actually led to a pretty heated professional disagreement between Galvanni
Speaker 1: and his buddy Volta, because Galvanni thought that the electricity
Speaker 1: that was responsible for this movement was within the muscle itself,
Speaker 1: that that was the source of the electricity. He called
Speaker 1: it animal electricity. Volta disagreed. He thought the muscle had
Speaker 1: really just acted as an electrical conductor between the two
Speaker 1: metal points of contact, and he called it metallic electricity,
Speaker 1: especially when Volta was thinking about using different types of metal,
Speaker 1: not two of the same kind, but two different types
Speaker 1: of metal that you could create electric current between the two. Now,
Speaker 1: this disagreement led Volta to start experimenting with different metals
Speaker 1: as he tried to determine if by combining them you
Speaker 1: could create an electrical current. By bringing them into contact
Speaker 1: with one another, you could induce current to flow between them,
Speaker 1: and by jove, he did it. Through all of this,
Speaker 1: there was this really dramatic feud between the proponents of
Speaker 1: the animal electricity hypothesis and the metallic electricity advocates as well.
Speaker 1: It got ugly like there were some pretty heated disagreements
Speaker 1: in the scientific community around this time about which of
Speaker 1: the two hypotheses was correct. Volta ultimately was able to
Speaker 1: show that there was no need for animal tissue in
Speaker 1: order to create a current between two different pieces of metal.
Speaker 1: He used some cloth or some cardboard that have been
Speaker 1: soaked in brine and showed that you can still get
Speaker 1: current to pass through, saying, well, you know, there's nothing
Speaker 1: here that was part of an animal, so your hypothesis
Speaker 1: that electricity is part and parcel with the concept of
Speaker 1: living organisms is not necessarily correct. Now, of course we
Speaker 1: know that stuff like like muscular movements are made through
Speaker 1: electrochemical signals in our brains, but that wasn't exactly what
Speaker 1: Galvanni was saying at the time. So you could argue
Speaker 1: that both of them were right to different degrees. But
Speaker 1: what Volta demonstrated was that you didn't need the organic tissue,
Speaker 1: uh right there, in order to conduct electricity. You just
Speaker 1: needed something that could serve as a conduit. Now we'll
Speaker 1: take a short break from his science experimentation to deal
Speaker 1: with matters of the heart. In seventeen, Alessandro Volta married
Speaker 1: Maria Teresa Alonza Peregrini, and the couple would ultimately have
Speaker 1: three children together. Now I wish I could tell you
Speaker 1: a lot more about Maria, but sadly the historical records
Speaker 1: are scarce. I don't even have a birthday, nor do
Speaker 1: I have the date when she died. The only records
Speaker 1: I could find listened to her as wife to Alessandro
Speaker 1: and mother to Zannino, Flaminio and Luigi. Or refrain from
Speaker 1: making further commentary on the matter. Volta continued his experiments
Speaker 1: with metallic electricity, and in sevent announced that if you
Speaker 1: were to take a disc of a metal such as silver,
Speaker 1: and then you cover that disc with a material like
Speaker 1: cloth soaked in brine, and then you put on top
Speaker 1: of that cloth soaked in brian another mata like disc,
Speaker 1: but at this time of a different metal like zinc,
Speaker 1: that collectively this would generate an electric current, and if
Speaker 1: you attached a wire to it, current would flow from
Speaker 1: one end of this little stack to the other. In
Speaker 1: eight hundred he would build a full stack of discs
Speaker 1: alternating between copper and pewter, or maybe silver and zinc.
Speaker 1: The records aren't clear, and he separated the different metallic
Speaker 1: discs with cloth or cardboard that had been soaked in brine.
Speaker 1: And he showed that if you increase the number of disks,
Speaker 1: if you built the stack taller, you would also increase
Speaker 1: the electromotive force of the current. And he was the
Speaker 1: first to describe this as electromotive sort of the power
Speaker 1: behind the current, not how much current there was, but
Speaker 1: how much there was to the current, and building a
Speaker 1: taller stack made more. Ultimately, we would describe this invention
Speaker 1: as the voltaic pile. And if you connected a wire
Speaker 1: from to the top of the pile to the bottom
Speaker 1: of the pile, you would complete the circuit and thus
Speaker 1: you would get current to flow. And yeah, the more
Speaker 1: discs you add, the more strength this current would have
Speaker 1: and this would become the basis of the electric battery,
Speaker 1: and that would change the world. All right, Well, finish
Speaker 1: up on our discussion about volta in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first let's take another quick break. All right. Before
Speaker 1: the break, I mentioned that the invention of the battery
Speaker 1: would change the world, and it really did, and it
Speaker 1: continues to do so. But at the time, the invention
Speaker 1: of the battery became an enormous boon to science because
Speaker 1: scientists no longer had to rely upon either electrostatic generator
Speaker 1: or a laden jar. And I'll describe late in jars
Speaker 1: in a different episode. It gets a little too involved
Speaker 1: for us to jump in here, but it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a capacitor. It releases all of its electricity in
Speaker 1: one go. The voltaic pile became useful because you could
Speaker 1: continuously generate current until it had expired and corroded to
Speaker 1: the point where it no longer would allow current to flow.
Speaker 1: So that meant that scientists had a way to generate
Speaker 1: electricity and conduct various experiments with it. And by building
Speaker 1: larger and larger piles, they could generate electricity with more
Speaker 1: behind it. And this meant that folks like Anthony Carlyle
Speaker 1: and William Nicholson could generate enough powerful electricity to discover
Speaker 1: electrolysis of water. This is when you use an electric
Speaker 1: charge of sufficient voltage. Kind of spoiling the end of this,
Speaker 1: but we all know where volt comes from, right anyway,
Speaker 1: It's when you use an electric charge of sufficient voltage
Speaker 1: to break the molecular bonds of water, which means that
Speaker 1: when you have when you've introduced this electric current to water,
Speaker 1: it causes the water to become hydrogen and oxygen and
Speaker 1: converts into two gases. So this is one way where
Speaker 1: you can harvest hydrogen right. One of the problems we
Speaker 1: have with hydrogen is that although it is the most
Speaker 1: common element in the universe, it also bonds with other
Speaker 1: stuff and it's really hard to find hydrogen just by itself.
Speaker 1: Even though hydrogen is incredibly useful, it means that we
Speaker 1: have to find ways to break it out of other
Speaker 1: molecular bonds, like with oxygen. So electrolysis is one way
Speaker 1: to do that. You pass this this charge through water
Speaker 1: and it causes those molecular bonds to break down and
Speaker 1: you can harvest hydrogen from it that way. So that
Speaker 1: was a very important early use of voltaic piles back
Speaker 1: in the early days of electricity. So this invention also
Speaker 1: meant that further discoveries would pour in from all parts
Speaker 1: of the world, and it was really important to physics
Speaker 1: and to chemistry. We had multiple elements discovered in this
Speaker 1: period because scientists had access to experiments that could rely
Speaker 1: upon a reliable source of electricity. So this was a
Speaker 1: huge boost in scientific knowledge. It's hard to overstate how
Speaker 1: important it was. Volta would end up becoming highly decorated
Speaker 1: for his contributions. He was united a couple of times,
Speaker 1: especially in France. He became a count in Italy, and
Speaker 1: Napoleon Bonaparte was particularly impressed by Volta's work. He ended
Speaker 1: up creating an honorary award that would reward significant achievements
Speaker 1: in the field of science, specifically electrical science. He said
Speaker 1: that if someone made a contribution on the level of
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin or Alessandra Volta, they would be deserving of
Speaker 1: such an award. So Volta achieved great fame and success.
Speaker 1: He returned to the University of Pavia, and like I said,
Speaker 1: he would teach there until eighteen nineteen. Tragically, his son
Speaker 1: Flaminio died when he was just eighteen years old, and
Speaker 1: that devastated Alessandra Volta, and so he retired from teaching
Speaker 1: in eighteen nineteen and from public life entirely. In eighteen twenty.
Speaker 1: He moved back to Como, where he grew up, and
Speaker 1: he lived out his final years there. He passed away
Speaker 1: when he was eighty two years old, and then decades later,
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty one, the scientific community decided that they
Speaker 1: would name a unit of electromotive force after this great scientist.
Speaker 1: That's why we call them volts. So voltage is a
Speaker 1: measure of electromotive force. And I often say, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people do. It's not just me. In fact,
Speaker 1: I am not by far. I'm not the first person
Speaker 1: to say this, but I think of voltage kind of
Speaker 1: like water pressure in a plumbing system. Like the amount
Speaker 1: of water in the system that's the current, but the
Speaker 1: amount of pressure behind it, that's the voltage. If we
Speaker 1: were to create an analogy, so Alessandro Volta incredibly important,
Speaker 1: really sticking it to his buddy Luigi Gavani, and I
Speaker 1: thought it would be good to do a quick profile,
Speaker 1: and I'll probably do more of these. There will be
Speaker 1: other people who will deserve much longer episodes, not that
Speaker 1: Volta doesn't, but you know, I didn't want to dive
Speaker 1: into things that would become irrelevant due to the fact
Speaker 1: that we have gone so far from his initial contributions.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to talk about the really intrinsic ones
Speaker 1: that are important in tech today, but I'll probably do
Speaker 1: more of these in the future. That's the plan. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll do one of Ben Franklin, although obviously I'll have
Speaker 1: to focus primarily on his contributions to tech as opposed
Speaker 1: to everything else he's known for, because that dude was
Speaker 1: busy in more ways than one, as it turns out.
Speaker 1: And um, yeah, if you have people that you would
Speaker 1: like to suggest for me to do a profile on
Speaker 1: in the future, let me know. Like I said, if
Speaker 1: if it's someone who's done tons and tons and tons
Speaker 1: of stuff and continues to do stuff, because obviously there
Speaker 1: are a lot of very influential people alive working in
Speaker 1: tech right now, then I may be doing you know,
Speaker 1: much longer episodes or maybe even multi partners depending on
Speaker 1: the person. But I would love to hear your suggestions.
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