Amazing Scientists: B2 - Katerina Mestheneou

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1745, I was born into a wealthy family, in Como in northern Italy. Both my parents, my mother, Donna Maddalena and my father, Filippo, came from high-class Catholic families. I was a very introverted child, and even by the age of four, I wasn’t speaking. My family thought that I was unable to speak, that I lacked the intelligence to do so. Despite this, I was sent to the local Catholic school, run by priests, and by the time I was seven, I had surprised everybody. Far from being stupid, I was really quite clever. At this time, my father died, which affected me deeply and I became even quieter and less communicative. My uncle, who took over the responsibility for my education, and the teachers at school, wanted me to become a priest. This had been the career of other members of my family and it seemed suitable for me, too. I, however, was not interested in joining the church and I refused. My family’s second career choice for me was law. I wasn’t very keen on becoming a lawyer either. When I was fifteen, I started studying natural philosophy at school. I was a good student and I also liked reading and studying languages, something I appeared to be talented in because I learnt to speak Latin, French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Russian and Greek. I liked writing poetry, too. My real interests, however, were physics and chemistry.

      I was fascinated by the way things worked and I read all the science books I could find, especially if they were about electricity, which I was really interested in. In 1763, when I was 18, I started to write letters to a French physicist, who was also a priest, called Jean-Antoine Nollet. Nollet had been doing experiments with electricity. In 1748, he had invented the electroscope – a machine that could find whether there was an electric charge present in something or not. He was also fond of demonstrating the results of his research and his lectures soon became popular. One spectacular demonstration was done in front of King Louis XV at the Palace of Versailles in France. Nollet managed to pass an electrical charge through 180 people. For this demonstration he used 180 soldiers and something called a Leyden jar. This was an ordinary glass jar which was lined with paper-thin sheets of tin – a metal, and three-quarters filled with water. At the top of the jar there was a cork through which passed a thin metal wire. The wire was attached to a metal chain outside the jar to allow the electrical charge to pass into the jar. Nollet asked the soldiers to stand in an open circle and hold hands. When he told them to, the first and last soldier each touched the jar, completing the circle. The electricity passed through each soldier at the same time with the result that all 180 soldiers jumped into the air simultaneously. The king was highly amused by this and made Nollet repeat the demonstration using priests. Nollet did many other demonstrations and experiments and news of his work spread throughout the scientific community.

      I had decided not to go to university to study when I left school. At this stage I had not yet started doing my own experiments and I really wanted to learn as much as I could from Nollet. He later became the first Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Paris. I was also in contact with Professor Giovanni Battista Beccaria of the University of Turin and I sent him a paper I wrote in Latin called On the attractive force of electric fire. Later, in 1769, it was published. I started doing my own experiments. This was a slow process and I made many mistakes. I also learnt a great deal and in 1774, when I was 29, I became Professor of Physics at the Royal School in Como.

      Ten years previously, a Swedish physicist called Johan Wilcke had invented a generator which produced static electricity. In 1775, I invented an improved version of his generator, called the electrophorus. My invention was more useful because it was able to produce a larger amount of static electricity and to produce it continuously. Later it was developed so that it could store electricity.

      In 1777, I went to Switzerland and met with a physicist and geologist called H. B. de Saussure, who helped me develop my ideas and I continued my research. I was looking at atmospheric electricity and at the instruments Saussure had developed to measure it. I was able to alter his instruments to make them more accurate so that electrical tension, as it was known, could be measured. In 1881, many years after my death, the unit of measurement was named the ‘volt’ in my honour. As more people in the science community noticed my work, more opportunities became available to me.

      The next year, my attention turned to the chemistry of gases and in 1778, I discovered a dangerous gas which was later called methane. One day when I was on holiday, in a boat on a lake, I saw some bubbles coming up through the water. The air above the bubbles smelt horrible and naturally I was curious to discover what it was. I managed to get some of the bad-smelling air back to my laboratory and found that it was inflammable – that is, that it burnt easily. As the gas had come from beneath the ground, I continued my research. It was discovered that methane was a gas that was present in mines, and because of its inflammable nature it was extremely dangerous.

      In 1779, I moved to Pavia in northern Italy where I became Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Six years later I became Rector – the head – of the university but I continued to do research. Electricity was still the subject I thought most about. Each summer in our region there were giant thunderstorms. I was fascinated by the noise of thunder and sparks of lightning and wondered if we could capture the power I was seeing and use it. Meanwhile, I started looking at frogs.

      In 1791, an Italian physicist and medical doctor called Luigi Galvani had been working on a theory he called animal electricity. He noticed one day while working in his laboratory that the leg of the dead frog he was examining moved when it was touched by a spark of static electricity from a metal instrument. The frog’s leg itself gave off tiny sparks of static and it jumped as if it was alive. Galvani suggested that it was the liquid in the frog’s leg that carried an electric current. I repeated Galvani’s experiments myself and at first I thought his suggestion was correct. However, as I looked more closely and did more experiments, I decided that he had been wrong. It wasn’t the frog’s leg that was conducting the electricity – allowing the electricity to pass through it – but the metal that Galvani had been using to connect parts of the frog. My future work on batteries would confirm my findings.

      In 1794, I received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society of London for my work on Galvani’s original research. 1794 was also the year I got married. I was nearly fifty when I met a young woman called Teresa Peregrini, who was the youngest of seven daughters. Her father was a wealthy man from my hometown of Como. Teresa’s father would not let her get married until her six sisters had got married. She was much younger than me but it didn’t matter and after she was finally allowed to marry me, we started our family. Sadly, only two of our three sons survived to adulthood.

      In 1799, I discovered the electro-chemical series, which measures how reactive different chemicals are – that is, how each chemical behaves when it comes into contact with other chemicals – and I continued experimenting. One day later that year, we had dramatic results when I created what was called the Voltaic Pile. I combined copper, zinc and cardboard with salt water which I placed on top of them. Then I attached a piece of wire to the top and bottom, through which an electric current would pass, if the ends of the wires were touching. It would become the first electric battery.

      The following year, I made the first working battery, which produced a steady stream of electricity, by again connecting copper and zinc with a wire. I sent my findings to Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Society of London, making my results available for other scientists to work on. Among others, William Nicholson and Humphry Davy developed the Voltaic Pile battery further and until the first electric generator was invented by Michael Faraday in 1870, the whole of the nineteenth century electrical industry was powered by battery.

      In November 1801, I went to France and gave three lectures at the Institut National de France, which Napoleon Bonaparte himself attended. I was made a member of the Institute, one of only eight foreigners. In 1805, Napoleon honoured me with the Légion d’honneur and, to my surprise, also gave me a considerable amount of money in recognition of my work. In 1806, I was also honoured in my own country, when I received the Cavalier of the Italian Royal Order of the Iron Crown. Then in

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