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Frog's-leg galvanoscope. The frog galvanoscope was a sensitive electrical instrument used to detect voltage [1] in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It consists of a skinned frog's leg with electrical connections to a nerve. The instrument was invented by Luigi Galvani and improved by Carlo Matteucci.
A good supply of live frogs was kept to hand by the researcher ready to have their legs prepared for the galvanoscope. Frogs were therefore a convenient material to use in other experiments. They were small, easily handled, the legs were especially sensitive to electric current, and they carried on responding longer than other animal candidates ...
André-Marie Ampère, who gave mathematical expression to Ørsted's discovery, named the instrument after [1] the Italian electricity researcher Luigi Galvani, who in 1791 discovered the principle of the frog galvanoscope – that electric current would make the legs of a dead frog jerk.
Galvanism: electrodes touch a frog, and the legs twitch into the upward position [1]. Galvanism is a term invented by the late 18th-century physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to refer to the generation of electric current by chemical action. [2]
Experiment De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari Late 1780s diagram of Galvani's experiment on frog legs. Luigi Galvani was born to Domenico Galvani and Barbara Caterina Foschi, in Bologna, then part of the Papal States. [6] The house in which he was born may still be seen on Via Marconi, 25, in the center of Bologna. [7]
The electromagnetic galvanometer was available at the time, but frogs' legs were still used by Bird because of their much greater sensitivity to small currents. In the experiment, the frog's leg was almost completely severed from its body, leaving only the sciatic nerve connected, and electric current was then applied from the body to the leg ...
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The frog's leg, as well as being a detector of electrical current, was also the electrolyte (to use the language of modern chemistry). A year after Galvani published his work (1790), Alessandro Volta showed that the frog was not necessary, using instead a force-based detector and brine-soaked paper (as electrolyte).