Alessandro Volta, now known as the inventor of the electric battery and eponym of the volt, the unit of electrical potential, was a prominent figure in late eighteenth-century science. A younger son from a family of the lesser nobility, he was born in 1745 in the commercial town of Como, in Northern Italy, at that time part of Austrian Lombardy. He received an irregular education and did not attend university. As a sometime pupil of the Jesuits, however, he developed a lifelong interest in natural philosophy, combining it with a commitment to Enlightenment culture and the notion of "useful knowledge," then fashionable among the educated classes and the public administrators of Lombardy. Having chosen the science of electricity and chemistry as his fields of expertise, at twenty-four he published a treatise "on the attractive force of the electric fire." At thirty he embarked on a...