Short battery history lesson: in 1800, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the voltaic pile which is recognized as the first chemical battery.

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With the cooperation of the Royal College of Surgeons, he subjected the still-warm body of an executed (though probably wrongly convicted) murderer to the charge of a voltaic pile battery.

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Such experiments were common topics of conversation in the Godwin household, where the philosopher William Godwin played host to scientific wizards such as Humphry Davy, who had used the voltaic pile to develop electrolysis and whose sensationally popular lectures proclaimed that science was poised to unleash powers previously unimagined, and perhaps even liberate the spark of life itself.

WSJ: Book Review: The Lady and Her Monsters