Salvá’s electric telegraph based on Volta’s battery

Contemporary of such important figures as d’Alembert, Buffon, Franklin, Kant, Betancourt or Goya, Francisco Salvá y Campillo was also a prominent Enlightenment scientist who shared with all of them his passion for knowledge and his support to the empiricism and to the scientific method. Five years before Samuel Thomas von Sömmering demonstrated his electro-chemical telegraph to the Munich Academy of Sciences, Salvá proposed a very innovative electric telegraph based on Volta’s pile, for generating an electric current, and the electrolysis of the water, for detecting such a current flow. Salvá presented his electric telegraph to the Academy of Sciences at Barcelona, Spain, in 22 February 1804, and left his thoughts written in a not very well known essay titled: ‘Second Report about Galvanism as applied to Telegraphy’ which will serve as the basis for this paper.