Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral TalesTolstoy, Leo, graf
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Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral Tales
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
So Galvani decided that the animals lived because there was electricity
in them, and that the electricity jumped from the brain to the flesh,
and that made the animals move. Nobody had at that time tried this
matter and they did not know any better, and so they all believed
Galvani. But at that time another learned man, Volta, experimented in
his own way, and proved to everybody that Galvani was mistaken. He tried
touching the frog differently from what Galvani had done, not with a
copper hook with an iron wire, but either with a copper hook and a
copper wire, or an iron hook and an iron wire,--and the frogs did not
move. The frogs moved only when Volta touched them with an iron wire
that was connected with a copper wire.
Volta thought that the electricity was not in the dead frog but in the
iron and copper. He experimented and found it to be so: whenever he
brought together the iron and the copper, there was electricity; and
this electricity made the dead frogs jerk their legs. Volta tried to
produce electricity differently from what it had been produced before.
Before that they used to get electricity by rubbing glass or
sealing-wax. But Volta got electricity by uniting iron and copper. He
tried to connect iron and copper and other metals, and by the mere
combination of metals, silver, platinum, zinc, lead, iron, he produced
electric sparks.
After Volta they tried to increase electricity by pouring all kinds of
liquids--water and acids--between the metals. These liquids made the
electricity more powerful, so that it was no longer necessary, as
before, to rub in order to produce it; it is enough to put pieces of
several metals in a bowl and fill it with a liquid, and there will be
electricity in that bowl, and the sparks will come from the wires.
When this kind of electricity was discovered, people began to apply it:
they invented a way of gold and silver plating by means of electricity,
and electric light, and a way to transmit signs from place to place over
a long distance by means of electricity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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