An excellent description of just how Volta made his electric pile and what he was able to accomplish with it experimentally in the laboratory, is to be found in the numbers for January and February, 1900, of the Stimmen aus Maria-Laach--a literary and scientific periodical published by the German Jesuits. This article on Alessandro Volta, by Father Kneller, S. J., was written shortly after the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Volta's invention of the electric pile, when there had just been a fresh sorting over of Volta's documents, and contains a very full set of references to the biographical material for Volta's life. Father Kneller says: "Before this, no one thought for a moment of any possibility of the practical application of electricity. But all at once the whole situation changed. After eight years of observation and experiment, Volta accomplished one day, at the beginning of 1800, in his laboratory at Como, the construction of an instrument which was to revolutionize the study and the practical applications of electricity. He made a pile composed of a large number of equal-sized copper and zinc discs. On each copper disc he placed one of zinc, and then on this a moistened piece of cloth, and continued the series of alternate discs and cloths in this order until he had a rather high column. This was an apparatus as simple as possible and from which no one but Volta could possibly have promised any results. The inventor, however, knew what he was about. "As soon as he had connected the upper and lower metal plates by means of a wire, there began to flow from the zinc to the copper a secret something, which by the application of the ends of the wire to muscles caused them to twitch; which appeared before the eye as light; applied to the tongue, gave a sensation of taste; caused a thin wire to glow and even to burn between carbon points; produced a blinding light; decomposed water into its constituents; dissolved hitherto unknown metals out of salts and earth; made iron magnetic; directed the magnetic needle out of its path; inclosed wire coils caused new electric currents to be set up; to say nothing of the awful spectacle which occurred when, under the influence of the electric current, the bodies of executed criminals again gave movements of the limbs, their thoraxes really heaved and sank as if they really breathed, and even a dead grasshopper was caused to spring and apparently to sing again.