Volta and the continuous electric current

The most fundamental discovery in electrical engineering must surely have been the means of producing a continuous current of electricity. The credit for that is due to the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who announced his discovery in a paper written on March 20, 1800 to the Royal Society in London. The paper, which was written in French, was published by the Society in its Philosophical Transactions, and quickly caught the attention of men of science everywhere because Volta's experiments were easy to reproduce and the results were dramatic.