In 1786 an Italian anatomist, Luigi Galvani, found that the legs of a dismembered frog twitched when touched by certain metals and concluded that the frog generated electricity, Galvani's fellow countryman and a physicist, Allessandro Volta, came to a wiser conclusion. Volta determined that the metals did the generating. His "Voltaic Pile", a stack of copper and zinc disc with brine-soaked cardbord or cloth between each pair, produced the first steady source of elecric current.
Those dancing frog' legs were not the first connection made between animals and electricity. In the 1st century phiny, the elder noted that certain fish - in particular the electric ray, ortorpedo - could give the spear fisher man a nasty shock. Volta compared his invention with the electric eel's structure of living batteries and its capacity for recharging after delivering its shock.
The modern battery is simply a refinement of the Voltaic pile.
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