Relentless Visionary: Alessandro Volta

If asked to list important inventors few remember to include Alessandro Volta. Yet his is a household name more spoken than that of Alexander Graham Bell the Wright Brothers or even Thomas Edison. Thats because the terms volt and voltage can be attributed to Volta the inventor of the Voltaic pile which is recognized as the first electric battery.A product of the Age of Enlightenment--a time when ideas about reason science literature and liberty took center stage--Volta employed a very modern hands-on approach to his work. Though he had no formal education he was the first person to identify the gas known as methane and created the first authoritative list of conducting metals.Alessandro Volta saw things not just as they were but as what they could be. He was a disrupter an innovator and a visionary. Above all he was relentless. Without Voltas hunger to create and his drive to invent and discover we might not have electric cars laptops cellphones and hearing aids today.