Galvani

Luigi Galvani was a professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna in the 1780s. During an experiment in 1780—the exact circumstances are debated—he or an assistant noticed that a dissected frog's leg twitched violently when touched by a brass hook while in contact with an iron surface. Galvani spent the next decade investigating this phenomenon, conducting hundreds of experiments. He concluded that the frog's muscles contained 'animal electricity'—a vital force intrinsic to living tissue. He published his findings in 1791 in the 'Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion,' one of the most significant scientific papers of the 18th century.

Alessandro Volta, a physicist in Pavia, read Galvani's paper and disagreed. Volta argued that the electricity did not come from the frog but from the contact between two dissimilar metals—the brass hook and the iron surface—with the frog's moist tissue serving merely as a conductor. To prove it, he built a stack of alternating zinc and copper discs separated by brine-soaked cloth in 1800: the voltaic pile, the world's first battery. Volta was right about the source of the current; Galvani was right that electricity animated living tissue. Both men were half-correct, and both gave their names to physics: volt and galvanic current.

The immediate cultural impact of Galvani's discovery was dramatic. The idea that electricity could animate dead flesh captured the Romantic imagination. Giovanni Aldini, Galvani's nephew, toured Europe performing public demonstrations of 'galvanism,' applying electrical current to the corpses of executed criminals. Audiences watched dead men's faces grimace, arms rise, legs kick. In 1803 in London, the body of murderer George Forster appeared to open his eyes and raise his fist under Aldini's electrodes. Mary Shelley attended a lecture on galvanism in 1814 and began writing 'Frankenstein' shortly afterward.

The verb 'galvanize' moved through several meanings. Technically, galvanizing means coating iron or steel with zinc through an electrochemical process to prevent rust—the shiny corrugated iron on rooftops and fences worldwide is galvanized steel. Metaphorically, to galvanize became to shock into action, to jolt a person or crowd out of inertia. The metaphor is precise: Galvani's frog legs did not choose to move—they were made to move by an external shock. To galvanize a community is to bypass its deliberation and compel it into motion.