Special Guest Blogger: Alessandro Volta

There isn't many jobs when you can break wind with abandon but when you are working with methane you can let rip like a goodun' and nobody bats an eyelid and as i spent most of my days with the foul smelling stuff, i was passing wind like a brass section of the orchestra but it was all in a good cause because i invented batteries.
Back in the 18th century some people still suspected that the strange ghostly lights above swamps were caused by fairies but as a scientist i wasn't having any of that supernatural mumbo jumbo and visited Lake Maggiore, where i noticed bubbles after i stirred the mud beneath it. I collected some of the gas responsible for the bubbling to study in my laboratory found it was methane and as schoolboys with lighters everywhere knows, it was highly combustible.
I came up with a piece of apparatus that allowed an explosion to be sparked in a closed environment, this went on to become the predecessor of the internal combustion engine but i used it to gauge the force of gaseous explosions.
I concluded that the gas was rising up from dead fish and plants languishing in the bog which combusted in mid-air and that the ghost lights were the result of lightning mixing with the gas and was not fairies just hanging around European swamps.
As i was busy messing around with farty smelling gas my colleague, Luigi Galvani, was messing around with dissected frog legs and discovered something he named, 'animal electricity' when two different metals were connected to a frog's leg and they would twitch when he touched a steel scalpel against a specimen hanging from a brass hook and concluded that electricity was naturally present in the tissues of frogs and other animals.
I wasn't convinced so did my own experiments using different types of metal and found that the legs were not twitching because they had electricity in them but because the electric current was being transferred through it by the two different metals and discovering zinc and copper were the most effective metals, created the voltic pile, or electric battery,
I wrote it up and published a work describing a new type the electrostatic generator i had built which generated and stored an electric charge and one of my biggets admirers was Napoleon who invited me to Paris to demonstrate the pile to prominent French scientists. Duly impressed, Napoleon bestowed many honors on me including a gold medal, a pension and appointments as a cavalier, senator and count.
The unit of measurement regarding the strength of an electric current became known as it's Voltage in my honour and after becoming the chair of the University of Pavia, at the age of 74 i decided it was time to hang up my capacitors and voltaic piles and retired to a country house to spend time with my wife.
She looked after me after a stroke until i died four years later but i lived my life like one of my batteries, i was quite positive but i also had my negative side. Ba-dum-tss.