In the late 1700s, an Italian physiologist by the name of Luigi Galvani noticed that a frog’s legs twitched when an electric machine discharged just at the moment when one of his assistants touched the nerve of a dissected frog with a scalpel. Galvani eventually invented the first frog galvanoscope when he realized that he could make the leg of a frog twitch by connecting a metal circuit from a nerve to a muscle. This replica of a frog galvanoscope (which uses fake frog legs) was used by the museum in it early history to demonstrate this principle.

Galvani used his experiments to argue for something he called “animal electricity”, a vital life force that existed in all living things. Galvani’s work even had an influence on Mary Shelly’s novel, Frankenstein. But Galvani was eventually opposed by another Italian scientist, Alessandro Volta, which led to a heated debate between the two. Volta argued that there was no such thing as animal magnetism and that instead, the electricity came from the contact between two metals that made the frog legs twitch. When Volta published his results in 1800, he also described a new invention of his based off this principle, something known as the “Voltaic” pile – better known as the battery today. You could say that Volta was “galvanized” in inventing the first electrochemical battery.