English

[The Temple] [Alexander Volta] [Airs and gases] [Electrometry] [The Pile]

The realization of the Pile puts Alexander Volta in a crucial knot of the development scientifìc and technical: the impulse given to the science is already evident in the immediate applications (in the study of the electrochemical composition of the subject) and in the contextual birth of the electrochemistry.

The Pile is universally considered the maximum realization of Volta.

The prototype of this device, that him same it defines instrument elettromotore, he is set to Como in end of 1799 and announced with a autographs letter some March 20 th 1800 addressed president of the Royal Society in London to J. Banks.
The Pile is described you as her junction of two metals followed by a damp conductor, repeated more times, that is a long chain of these three kinds, in the same order.

The realization of the pile is not to case but it is the amazing result of years of studies and experimental searches around the theory that Turns same had developed on the contact among two dissimilar metals, among which a passage of electric position manifests him.
The joining of different metals, intercalated by damp layers that assure the communication between a couple and the other and they prevent the contrary action of it it would be, for Volta, enough to justify its operation.
Only subsequently, with the development most suitable electrochemical models, the phenomenon will adequately be described, attributing elettrolitica to the solution the unknown essential function to Volta.
With the pile it makes him available the electric tide, a phenomenon that in kind it produces only him in consequence of the action of the man. The electrochemistry will specify the essential function of the solution (of the damp element voltiano) in the pile, without contradicting the theory of the contact of Volta.