GALVANI'S EXPERIMENTS WITH FROGS' LEGS Animal Electricity--Galvani and Volta In his "General Theory of Pleasures"
of 1767, Sulzer, a German metaphysician, noted that a person would experience
an unusual taste if two strips of different kinds of metal were allowed
to touch each other after one was placed on top of the tongue and the
other under the tongue (4). In the 1790s, on the basis of a related phenomenon,
Luigi Galvani conducted a series of experiments with animals, beginning
with dissected frogs. These experiments were inspired by a chance event
in which the nerves of a frog were prodded by a knife while the frog was
on a table. The experiments involved the use of an "electric machine,"
an early hand-cranked generator. When the electric machine produced sparks
and at the same time a nerve of the frog was touched with a knife, the
muscles of the frog contracted, producing convulsive movements. Galvani
carried out a wide ranging series of experiments which found that there
were convulsive movements of the frog when two metals were made to touch
each other while one metal was in contact with a nerve and the other was
in contact with a muscle of the frog. Finally, Galvani came to the conclusion
"that the electricity was inherent in the animal itself"(2 ). According to G
When Alessandro Volta r |