G'morning Paul, 

 PR> Alessandro Volta demonstrated his pile could stimulate frogs legs
 PR> to twitch as if alive.

Ha...coincidentally organising the family archives, I've a 1905 
copy of "Blackie's Science For Deginners - Magnetism and 
Electricity" by WG Baker, 1904, owned by my grandpa, which has it 
that...

"About a century ago an Italian physician named Galvani was 
studying the action of the nerves which give motion to our muscles 
and limbs, and remarked that the legs of a dead frong moved 
convulsively when an electrical machine at a little distance was 
charged. this was due to induction."

"One day he hung up the lower limbs of a frog by a copper wire 
upon the iron railings in fron of his laboratory or workroom. He 
was surprised to see that the legs gave a jerk every time the wind 
blew them against the iron-work. There was no electrical machine 
near - no thunder-cloud overhead; he thought the electricity must 
be in the frog."

"Another learned Italian, named Volta, found that the experiment 
could be performed which any two metals,  although some pairs gave 
better results that others;  among the best were copper and 
zinc..."

And the narrative rambles on to explain that the electricity 
generated by chemical action became known as Voltaic rather than 
the initial Galvanism...

It seems that the the leg twitch gave rise to the voltaic pile,  
rather than the pile being shown to stimulate the limb...

The illustration of a twitching frog leg is particularly gruesome 
and Frankensteinish...

:-))

 
___ MultiMail/MS-DOS v0.45

--- Maximus/2 3.01