Alessandro Volta

Inventions and inventors

Alessandro Volta, Italian physicist whose invention of the electric battery provided the first source of continuous current. In 1801 in Paris Volta gave a demonstration of his battery’s generation of electric current before Napoleon, who made Volta a count and a senator of the kingdom of Lombardy. The Austrian emperor Francis I made him director of the philosophical faculty at the University of Padua in 1815. The volt, a unit of the electromotive force that drives current, was named in his honour in 1881.