On March 20, 1800, Italian scientist Alessandro Volta reported that he had created the Battery – a device to generate electricity from a pile of dissimilar metal discs, some salt water, and wire.  Two centuries later many people believe Volta’s invention will save the planet.

Among the educational products the Italic Institute created in the 1990s was a paper placemat for pizzerias listing sixteen inventions that revolutionized the lives of humanity – all spawned by the Italic mind.  It was intended to replace the placemats that diners usually stare at with those drawings of straw-covered wine bottles, donkey carts, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Mt. Vesuvius.  I still believe these placemats are the best way to teach heritage to the masses.  Unfortunately, our logistical and distribution challenges were never quite resolved.  Volta’s battery was given its due on the placemat, although we had no idea at the time how batteries would revolutionize transportation.

Volta’s Battery was inspired by Italian biologist Luigi Galvani. You might recall from high school biology that Galvani’s fame rests on an experiment with frog legs.  Like Benjamin Franklin, Galvani was fascinated by electricity – static electricity and lightning.   One day while using a scalpel to dissect a frog’s leg, he observed that the muscles convulsed.  When he told his friend Volta that frog muscles produced electricity when stimulated, Volta was skeptical.  What actually created the electricity, Volta surmised, was a reaction between metals, not frog muscles.  Galvani’s steel scalpel reacted with the frog’s bodily salt (an electrolyte) and some static electricity from Galvani’s hand.  To prove his point, Volta designed a “pile” with some 30 alternating discs of zinc and copper, with brine-soaked cardboard in between to create the first battery.  Ecco! electrical current.  And no frogs were harmed in the process!

However, Galvani wasn’t totally wrong.  He proved that muscles need internal electrical stimulation to function.  His bio-electrical experiments furthered medical knowledge and went on to inspire English author Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein – the monster brought to life by a lightning bolt.

Meanwhile, Volta’s battery changed the world.  That same year 1800, English scientists used a battery to separate oxygen and hydrogen from water.  That feat led to all sorts of inventions from lifesaving oxygen tanks to German zeppelins and the now-promising hydrogen fuel cell development.  By the end of the 19th Century, Volta’s battery evolved into electro-magnets that powered such game-changers as the Telegraph and the Telephone.  Volta also enhanced our language with the terms volts, voltage, photovoltaic.  And lest we forget, to galvanize (electrically coating a metal or to arouse action) came from “Galvani.”

Going down the roster of other inventions, Italians developed the Arch, the Dome, Concrete, Double-entry Bookkeeping, Eyeglasses, the Piano, the Telescope, the Thermometer, Atomic Energy, the Fork, the Barometer, the Blood Pressure Gauge, Musical Notation, and Polypropylene Plastic, just to name a few.

So many sub-sciences came about through the efforts of Italian genius.  Even at the height of the Inquisition, scientific thought was freer in Italy, and education more advanced, than in any other country in the 15th and 16th Centuries, according the late historian Will Durant.  He noted how one English graduate of Italian universities at that time, upon leaving Italy, set up an altar in the Alps dedicated to Italy: Alma Mater Studiorum (“the fostering Mother of all Studies”)

In addition to the inventions noted above, Italians pioneered modern science and technology: long-span concrete construction (Pirelli Building in Milan 1958), Atomic Weights (Cannizzaro), the Scientific Method (Galileo), Paleontology (DaVinci), Mycology (fungus, Micheli), and Wireless Telegraphy (Marconi). 

Marconi’s work has puzzled me in the matter of radar.  He didn’t invent it even though he did experiments in that direction.  He was the “master of the ether”- he knew long waves, short waves, and microwaves, but he never solved the problem of bouncing waves off objects.  Radar was a British secret that cost the Italian Navy and Air Force dearly in the Second World War.  Marconi used his private yacht, The Elettra, during the early 1930s to conduct all sorts of experiments on radio waves.  He might have worked it all out, given the time.  But he died in 1937, three years before Italy went to war.

For Italy, Radar was an invention too far. -JLM

PS. If you know of a restaurant or cultural center that wants a box of Inventions of Italy placements, we will donate and ship them free.