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Podcast: A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over
Episode: Leapin' Lexical Inventions - 11 March 2009
Description: Martha explains how experiments with dead frogs and live wires led to the invention of the battery, and inspired a couple of familiar English words. I had to change the batteries in my flashlight the other day, and that makes think, as it always does, of Luigi Galvani. No, really, it does. Let me explain: Galvani was an 18th-century Italian physician and physicist whose experiments accidentally paved the way for modern batteries. The focus of his research? Galvani experimented with dead frogs and live wires. In 1791, he published a paper describing how he'd touched a...