Behind every company name, there’s a story. Volta Charging is named after Alessandro Volta, the eighteenth century physicist, chemist and— most importantly for us— inventor of the electric battery. Today is Alessandro Volta’s birthday, and as a company, we have adapted his forward-thinking vision to #DriveForward towards a more electrified future. With that in mind, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on his accomplishments and all they have meant for us.
Like most great inventions, the creation of the electric battery is an interesting story. It all began with a scientific conflict between Volta and Luigi Galvani, a fellow Italian physicist and anatomist. In 1791, Galvani was conducting experiments on the muscles of frogs and noticed that if he probed the muscles with two different metals, the muscles would twitch. He announced he had discovered a new form of electricity found in animal tissue, a phenomenon he titled “animal electricity.”
Volta disagreed, saying the animal tissue merely conducted the electric current. It was the metals in Galvani’s experiments that produced the current, not the frog parts. He set out to prove his theory, and in 1800 he unveiled the first electric battery, known as the voltaic pile— the first source of continuous, sustainable current. Immediately recognized as a world-changing invention, the voltaic pile sparked (no pun intended) a wave of new discoveries in the scientific community and led to the creation of electrochemistry just six weeks later.
221 years after Volta’s invention, we at Volta Charging are celebrating our company’s eleventh anniversary, a fitting milestone after a year of exciting announcements. We’ve formed new and exciting partnerships and made history in the charging industry. Just two months into 2021, we’ve already announced an overscribed Series D financing of $125 million, and most recently, announced a planned merger with Tortoise Acquisition Corp. II.
Through it all, we remain focused on our mission: to build the infrastructure that drives the world forward, a mission that would not be possible without the work of Alessandro Volta. Thank you for sparking the charge towards the EV revolution, Volta!
