2. Electrochemical Mechanism

The letter is part of Volta’s correspondence with the Dutch physics Van Marum, who had a powerful scrubbing electric machine in Rotterdam. Unfortunately, Van Marum, unlike what he did with previous letters, did not make it public. The letter was only disclosed in 1905 when J. Bosscha published the correspondence Volta-Van Marum.

Faraday checked the chemical effects not only produced by the electricity obtained from the pile, from the friction machine or from the batteries of condensers—which called “voltaic electricity” or “common electricity”—but also the effect of the “animal electricity”, of the “thermoelectric” (Seebek effect) and of the “magneto-electric” one (by induction).

Pietro Pedeferri wondered a lot of time why Faraday proposed in 1833 to call Volta-electrometer and then in 1838 Voltameter, the instrument he developed to determine the charge circulated through the measurement of the chemical effects produced, since Volta was at that time was accused (as, moreover, happens today: read for example what the former president of the Senate Pera wrote on Volta in his book “The Ambiguous Frog”, Princeton University Press) to have always disinterested in the correlation between the circulated charge and the chemical effects, indeed the chemical effects “tout court”. In light of the priority just mentioned, it is clear that Faraday could not find a more suitable name, even if he could not know it. In fact, the English scientist could not know the content of the letter that Volta had written to Van Marum that will be disclosed only in 1905. “And I do not even think—Pietro Pedeferri said—that when, in 1812 in Milan, Faraday, still very young and unknown, took part with Davy at the meeting with the almost seventy, very famous and acclaimed Volta, the inventor of the pile may have talked about this with him.