Electrical Units and Characters Issue 4: Volts

Volt is the unit of voltage in the International System of Units, the symbol V. If there is an ampere current flowing on a uniform, fixed width and temperature wire, then the resistance of the wire converts electrical energy into 1 watt (W = 1J/s) of thermal energy at a certain distance, and the voltage difference between this distance is defined as one volt. The unit is named after Alessandro Volt, the Italian physicist who invented the battery.

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian physicist.

Our protagonist, Volte, was born into a wealthy Catholic family in Como, Italy, and their family can be said to be religious fanatics. Volta had three uncles in the priesthood and five of the nine siblings joined the church. Volta had also been seduced by religion and greatly admired his brother and close friend Gatoni, who was the vice-bishop. Although Volta was educated by the Jesuits, he preferred to live a secular life in a maverick manner, and fortunately his ideas were not seen as heretical.

Young Volte began to do electrical experiments, of course, books are read casually in his family situation, Gatoni built him instruments and home laboratories, the world of local tycoons we really do not understand. Of course, his family status allowed him to communicate with some of the biggest names in electricity at a young age. Under such conditions, it was difficult to think of success in the enterprising volts, and as the years passed, volts' understanding of static electricity reached the best level at that time.

Soon he began to apply his theory to create a variety of ingenious instruments, and in modern parlance, the point is that he has a clear understanding of electricity, electricity or tension (as he named it), capacitance, and relational Q=CV. Today, almost at the age of college graduation, 24-year-old Volte published his first scientific paper.

Volts made a starter. A conductive plate is placed on the top of a charging resin "cake" powered by friction, and then an insulating handle is used to contact the metal plate, so that it is grounded, and then it is lifted up, so that the metal plate is charged to a high potential, which can be used to charge the Leyden bottle. This can be repeated over and over again. This invention was very ingenious and later developed into a series of electrostatic starter motors.

Volte felt strongly that he had to measure the amount of electricity quantitatively, so he designed a electrometer, the originator of all kinds of absolute electric meters, which could measure the potential difference in a repeatable way. He also established a scale for his electrometer, and according to the invention of the electric disk, according to his description we can determine that his unit is today's 13,350 volts.

In 1775, due to the invention of the electric disk, Volt became a professor of physics at some schools in Como. His fame began to expand outside Italy and the Zurich Physical Society elected him a member. Volts' interest is not limited to electricity. He discovered biogas by observing bubbles bubbling up in the marsh near Lake Maggiore. He combined his interest in chemistry and electricity to make an instrument called gas combustion, which ignites gases inside a closed container with electric sparks. He traveled to Switzerland at the age of thirty-two and met Voltaire and some Swiss physicists. Upon his return he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Pavia, the most famous university in the Lombardy region. He held this professorship until his retirement, where he made his epoch-making discoveries.

Volta made another long trip abroad in 1792, to Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. He visited some of his most famous peers, such as Laplace and Lavoisier, with whom he sometimes experimented. He was also elected a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences and soon a foreign member of the Royal Society in London.

Shortly after his forty-fifth birthday, Volta read Galvani's article of 1791, which prompted him to make the greatest inventions and discoveries. He hesitated at first, but soon he began to work, and in Volte's words, the content of his experiments "went beyond all the electrical knowledge known at the time, and therefore they seemed astonishing." At first he agreed with Galvani's idea of using frogs to make Leyton bottles, but after a few months he began to suspect that frogs were primarily a detector and that the power supply was outside of animals, and he also noticed that if two different metals that touched each other were placed on the tongue, it would cause a special sensation, some of which were acidic and sometimes alkaline. He assumed, and can amaze, electrostatic measurements that prove that two different metals, such as copper and zinc, get different potentials when they come into contact. He measured this potential difference and got results that didn't differ much from the contact potential difference between them as we know it now. At least when the metal arc that connects muscles and nerves is bimetallic, the Galvani experiment will explain it by assuming that the frog is a very sensitive electrometer. Of course, Galvani replied that even when the metal arc was monometallic, he was able to observe muscle contractions. This is a grim objection to which Volts points out the impurity of metals and other causes to justify themselves.

Volte delved more deeply into the subject, and on March 20, 1800 he announced the invention of the "Volta Stack", one of the most miraculous inventions in history.

Volta found that conductors can be divided into two broad categories, the first is metals, which produce potential differences when they come into contact; the second is liquids (called electrolytes in modern language), and they do not have a large electrical difference between them and the metals immersed in them. And the second type of conductors do not produce a significant potential difference when they come into contact with each other, the first type of conductors can be arranged in turn, so that the first of them is positive relative to the latter one, for example, zinc is positive for copper, in a metal chain, the potential difference between one metal and the last metal is the same, as if there is no intermediate contact, and the first metal and the last metal are in direct contact.

Volts finally got the idea that he connected some of the first and second conductors so that the potential difference generated at each point of contact could be added. He called the device a "stack" because it consisted of many layers of zinc plates, copper plates, and cloth sheets immersed in acid solutions. He described his invention in a famous letter (written in French) to Banksy, president of the Royal Society, titled "On Electricity Generated by Contact with Different Conductive Substances." The stack can produce a continuous current, and its intensity is orders of magnitude greater than the current that can be obtained from an electrostatic motor, thus beginning a real scientific revolution. In an article written in 1831, Arago spoke of some praise for it: "... This stack, which is separated by some liquid in the middle of different metals, is the most amazing instrument ever invented by mankind in terms of the strange effect it produces. He described everything that was known at the time, and we must remember that in 1831 there was no important practical application of electricity.

When he asked to resign as a professor at the University of Pavia in 1804 and retire, Napoleon refused his request, granting him more honor and money and conferring the title of Count. After napoleon's fall, Voltaire himself lived in harmony with the returning Austrians without much trouble. Thus he survived that period of radical change, where he was respected no matter who was in power, and at the same time he paid no attention to politics, but only to his research.

Volta spent his last eight years at his Villa Canago and near Como, where he lived a completely secluded life. Volt died on March 5, 1827, at the age of eighty-two. In his honor, the electromotive force unit was named Volts.

PS: The article is original by myself, and some of the material sources are from the network.