Discovery of Current Electricity
Time and again, the history of creative discoveries and invention has shown that outsiders to the field make significant breakthroughs with astounding insights. After all, one of the inventors of the sewing machine was a poet and the other was a cabinet maker; the inventor of cotton gin, which revolutionised the cotton industry was a teacher; and the type-setting machine was invented by a watch maker. Similarly, Mendel, the discoverer of laws of genetic was a monk; so were Kepler and Copernicus. And Einstein was working as a clerk in the patent office, when he thought of the Theory of Relativity. It is not surprising that the discovery of current electricity was not made by a physicist, but by a physiologist.
Luigi Galvani, the discoverer of current electricity, was a physiologist. One day, while experimenting on frogs, he noticed that the muscles of the frog's legs twitched at intervals. These frogs were hanging from an iron balustrade, and there seemed to be no known reason why this should happen. Curious to know the reasons for this twitching, he performed experiments and found that the twitching occurred only when one leg was in contact with iron while the other with a piece of copper wire which joined the iron end. From this observation, he not only developed galvanometer based on his understanding of electric current, but also created a new verb "to galvanise" in the English language.
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