Luigi Galvani
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The physician who saw dead frog legs twitch at the touch of dissimilar metals in 1780 and called it animal electricity.
His explanation was wrong and his observation was not, which is the useful shape of the story. Volta disputed the theory - arguing the twitch came from the contact of two metals rather than from anything in the animal - and that disagreement is what drove him to build the pile. A mistaken interpretation of a correct experiment produced the first steady current, and the word galvanic survived attached to the idea he got wrong.
Also known as: galvani, animal electricity, galvanic