Voltian Temple

My pick for our trip to Como on Saturday was to visit the inside of the Tempio Voltiano, the museum dedicated to Alessandro Volta. Yesterday's picture is of the outside of the temple. It's a pretty small museum, but pretty nice! I always love the details from these old places. These chains around the outside of the museum had a great look.



Now, the inside of the temple has two parts, the downstairs has a lot of experimental equipment used by Volta, and the upper floor gives Volta's history. My favorite was the downstairs! I'm sharing this photo of eudiometers because I didn't know what they were... but I figured it out. It's for measuring volume change in gases. So, you get the gases in there, then, submerge the base into a liquid. And then, you do whatever to the gas. These ones looked like Volta would use a spark to ignite whatever was in there. The fluid rises (or falls) based on the chemical change leading to volume change. So, that's what they are.



There were lots of different, hard to understand experimental devices, including static generators, Leyden Jars, electrometers, and various things. One of the weirdest was the animal experiments with muscle contractions. There were lots of frog legs in weird poses attached to weird things for stimulating them with electrical currents...



Of course, the main draw is the batteries, since that's what Volta is most famous for. There were dry stacks, and lots of really great electrolyte batteries. The biggest one was 54 cells.



The temple itself did have a lovely interior, too.



So, just to answer the unspoken question, this is all here because Volta was from Como, and actually did a lot of his work there. I think he was actually born in Brunate, up on the hill...