Abstract

The invention of the first source of electric current by Alessandro Volta, an account of which he communicated in two letters to Sir Joseph Banks in London in 1800, was the outcome of nine years' experimentation. When material was being collected for the Edizione Nazionale of Volta's works , the Secretary of the Dutch Academy of Science discovered some correspondence between Volta and van Marum. The letters dated from 1788 to 1795, and two of them, written in 1792, reported some experiments in which the elements which were later to make up his Couronne de tasses and the Pile were constructed. The question that could be asked is: ‘Why did Volta take so long to do the simple operation of connecting these elements in series to form his Artificial electric organ?’. This is the enigma, and I propose in this paper a possible solution to it