James Baquet

    Like James Watt, today’s subject has a name that became a common word related to electricity. Aloysius Galvani (Italian: Luigi Aloisio Galvani, 1737-1798) had what has been described as a “happy accident” that led to the discovery of the effect of electricity on the muscles, something called “animal electricity,” or more formally, “electrophysiology,” but historically called “galvanism.”

    The “happy accident” happened like this, in the words of the English physician Richard Fowler (in 1793):

    “He one day observed, that some frogs, hooked by the spine of the back, and suspended from the iron palisades, which surrounded his garden, contracted frequently and involuntarily. Examining minutely into the cause of these contractions, he found that he could produce them at pleasure, by touching the animals with two different metals, at the same time in contact with each other.” After some experimentation, Galvani discovered that the cause of the contractions was a form of electricity.

    Although Fowler calls this a “happy accident,” an American physician, James J. Walsh, pointed out in 1907: “Without the inventive scientific genius ready to take advantage of them, however, these accidents … would have meant nothing. … Galvani’s observation of the twitching of the muscles of the frog under the influence of electricity may be called one of the happy accidents of scientific development, but it was Galvani’s own genius that made the accident happy.”

    The phenomenon is known to every schoolchild: When a wire connected to a battery is attached to the muscles of a dead frog, his legs can be made to “jump.” The same idea was exploited by Mary Shelley for the reanimation of the monster in her “Frankenstein.”

    But we also use “to galvanize” in other senses. The first is metaphorically related to the frog experiments: When someone is “shocked” into action, we use the term “galvanize.” “The small earthquake galvanized the townspeople into preparation for a larger one.”

    The second is a process for coating steel or iron with zinc to prevent corrosion, often using electricity generated by chemical means. It is a form of electroplating, commonly used in manufacturing.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. bringing back to life

    2. in the proper way

    3. fortunate

    4. closely

    5. hanging

    6. making of goods

    7. pieces of a fence

    8. rust or decay

    9. without meaning to

    10. used to one’s advantage