🔬 Volta announces the first battery (1800)
The unit "volt" is named after him.
Where: Como, Italy
📅 On This Day: March 20
March 20, 1800: Volta announces the first battery. On 20 March 1800, Italian scientist Alessandro Volta wrote to the Royal Society in London to announce his invention. His "voltaic pile", a stack of zinc and copper discs with cloth soaked in salt water between them, was the first battery to give a steady flow of electricity.
✨ More events on this day
- 1985 🏅 Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the Iditarod, a sled dog race of more than 1,800 kilometres across snowy Alaska.
- 1999 🎨 Legoland California opened in Carlsbad, the first Legoland park outside Europe, with whole cities built from millions of toy bricks.
- 2015 🚀 A total solar eclipse, the March equinox and a supermoon all happened on the same day, a rare treat for sky-watchers in the far north.
🧠 Question of the day
Where does the word "volt" come from?
- The name of a city
- The sound of lightning
- Volta's name
Show the answer
Answer: Volta's name
🐾 World day: World Frog Day
Frogs can breathe through their skin, so they show us whether water and air are clean.
Questions
What happened on March 20?
March 20, 1800: Volta announces the first battery. It happened in Como, Italy.
In the game, the "Today on Earth" panel shows this story on its day, with a question to answer and a place to fly to.