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There have been many fierce battles in the history of electricity (AC/DC war, coal vs. gas, etc.), but our favorite is probably the War of the Frog Legs.

In 1780, Prof Galvani in Bologna is dissecting a frog and notices the legs twitch when he touches them with a metal scalpel. He believes that he had discovered "animal electricity," the idea that biological life contained a unique, intrinsic electrical fluid. He runs a series of experiments and publishes De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius.

Europe goes wild for it. If electricity is the animating force of living things, then the dead might be made to move, and be made alive, again. This work inspired Mary Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein decades later.

But up the road in Pavia, a physics professor named Alessandro Volta wasn't convinced. He repeated the experiments and noticed that the legs only twitched when two different metals were in contact with them. Iron and copper? Silver and zinc? Twitch. A single metal on its own? Nothing.

The frog, Volta realized, wasn't a source of electricity. The frog was a very wet, very salty wire and sensor, an extremely sensitive detector of current that was being generated by some external chemical reaction.

In 1794 he goes public with it, and European science splits into camps — the Galvanists versus the Voltaists. It's a genuine, bitter, years-long academic fight. Galvani dies in 1798 still defending his theory.

Volta continues his work to disprove animal electricity. He wants to produce the current himself, with no animal tissue anywhere in the room. So he stacked discs of zinc and copper, separated by cardboard soaked in salt water, and ran a wire from the top to the bottom. The wire warmed. And the flow of current didn't stop, it kept going as long as the metals stayed connected.

That device, called a voltaic pile, was announced to the Royal Society in 1800. It was the world's first true battery.

For the first time you had a steady, controllable current. The discoveries came fast: arc lights (Davy), the link between electricity and magnetism (Ampere), and how to turn motion into current and back (Faraday). For most of the next century voltaic piles were the primary source of electrical power, and they're the scientific ancestor of every battery we have today.

Galvani was wrong. But he was wrong loudly enough, and publicly enough, to provoke someone into building the instrument that unlocked the next hundred years of discovery. We gave Volta the volt. We gave Galvani the galvanic cell, and galvanize.

For the long story of King Coal and his fall:

stepchange.show/coal-part-i

In October 1878, Edison crashed gas stocks in both the US and the UK by announcing a new product he intended to develop.

He didn't have a working bulb. He went straight to the press and proclaimed his vision: the same wire that will bring you light, will also bring you power and heat. "You may cook your food with it." He had seen past illumination to an entire electrical civilization.

The reaction by the gas companies was fury. British Parliament appointed a committee to investigate, and it ruled his dreams "good enough for our transatlantic friends, but unworthy to the attention of practical or scientific men."

Edison didn't care. He incorporated the Edison Electric Light Company and went to build the thing anyway. 14 years later, this company would become General Electric after a wild journey of invention, mergers, and the influence of J.P. Morgan.

For the full story, link in bio.