Google’s latest doodle celebrates the birthday of Alessandro Volta, who invented an early form of the electric battery in 1799. Volta’s invention consisted of discs of different metals, including copper and zinc, separated by cardboard that had been soaked in brine.

Born in 1745 in the town of Como in what is now northern Italy, Volta was the son of a nobleman. He became a professor of physics in 1774 at Como’s Royal School before going on to work on the development of the “electrophorus”, a device that produced static electricity, the Guardian reminds. His voltaic pile, an early electric battery that produced a steady current, was developed in 1800 at a time when competing theories existed about how electricity was generated. One theory, popularised by Luigi Galvani, was that there was a special electricity in animals, which he demonstrated by connecting two different metals with a frog’s leg.

Volta came to the conclusion that it was the liquid in the frog’s leg that was important rather than the frog itself. The same effect was achieved after he replaced the leg with paper soaked in brine.

After being made a count in 1810 by Napoleon Bonaparte, Volta retired in 1819 to his estate in Camnago, where he died in 1827.