Luigi Galvani (Galvani Luigi)

(1737-1798)
Born September 9, 1737 in Bologna. In 1759 he graduated from the University of Bologna, in 1762 received a medical degree. He taught medicine at the University of Bologna, where shortly before his death, was dismissed because he refused to swear allegiance Cisalpine republic, founded in 1797 by Napoleon Bonaparte. Fame brought it Galvani experiments on muscle contraction. In 1771 he discovered the phenomenon of muscle contraction prepared samples of the frog under the influence of electric current. In itself this fact from a physical point of view there was nothing new: the phenomenon of electric induction has been explained more in 1779. But Galvani came up to the fact not as a physicist, but as a physiologist, he became interested in the ability of a dead drug manifest themselves as a living material. He studied with the greatest care, this phenomenon, changing the various parameters: the situation in the body of a frog metal wire with a current, sources of electricity, etc.. In one such experiment, using as a source of current atmospheric electricity, he vainly waiting for a change in the weather and accidentally pressed the electrodes are stuck into the spinal cord of a frog, to an iron grating, on which she lay. There were similar reductions, as well as during the experiments carried out in a storm. Soon Galvani discovered that the muscles contract and in the absence of an external power source, by simply imposing on them of two different metals connected by a conductor. Galvani explained this phenomenon of 'animal electricity', through which the muscles are charged like Leyden jars. Results of observations and the theory of 'animal electricity', he outlined in 1791 in the Treatise on the power of electricity by muscle movement (De Viribus Electricatitis in Motu Musculari Commentarius). Galvani's discovery caused a sensation. Its verification has started the famous physicist A. Volta, armed with all the means at that time, electrical tools, which gave the correct physical interpretation of the effect (1794).
Died Galvani in Bologna on Dec. 4, 1798.