VOLTA, Alessandro. On the Electricity excited by the mere Contact of conducting Substances of different kinds.
London: W. Bulmer & Co. for Peter Elmsley, 1800. First edition.

"The first announcement of the voltaic ‘pile’, or electric battery" (Grolier/Horblit 37b). "The voltaic pile revolutionized the theory and practice of electricity, so that within one hundred years of Volta's invention more progress was made than in the two thousand four hundred years between the tentative experiences of Thales and the publication of Volta's letter addressed to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society. ... The indispensability and ubiquity of electricity, in one form or another, in western civilization today emphasize sharply the fact that before 1800 human environment and existence were closer to life in ancient Egypt than to our own." (PMM). "This paper, in French, was sent by Volta to Sir Joseph Banks in London for communication to the Royal Society. In it Volta describes the pile of alternating dissimilar metals (silver and zinc) which, when moist, generated the flow of constant-current electricity. With this new force, water was decomposed, metal was electro-deposited, the electro-magnet was created and the electrical age was begun" (Dibner). PMM 255; Evans 35; Grolier/Horblit 37b; Dibner 60; Norman 2164; Evans 34. Translated in Ostwald's Klassiker no. 118. [The Norman copy sold in 1998 for $9,000; the latest auction record we can locate is Swann 2009, an extract in modern binding, which sold for $8,400].

Contemporary extract in old wrappers: Philosphical Transactions, vol.90, pp.403-431 with 1 folded engraved plate by James Basire illustrating the first electric battery. 4to: 270 x 214 mm. A fine and clean copy.