---
title: "History of electrochemistry"
chunk: 3/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_electrochemistry"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:33.437403+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In 1800, English chemists William Nicholson and Johann Wilhelm Ritter succeeded in separating water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. Soon thereafter, Ritter discovered the process of electroplating. He also observed that the amount of metal deposited and the amount of oxygen produced during an electrolytic process depended on the distance between the electrodes. By 1801 Ritter had observed thermoelectric currents, which anticipated the discovery of thermoelectricity by Thomas Johann Seebeck. In 1802, William Cruickshank designed the first electric battery capable of mass production. Like Volta, Cruickshank arranged square copper plates, which he soldered at their ends, together with plates of zinc of equal size. These plates were placed into a long rectangular wooden box which was sealed with cement. Grooves inside the box held the metal plates in position. The box was then filled with an electrolyte of brine, or watered down acid. This flooded design had the advantage of not drying out with use and provided more energy than Volta's arrangement, which used brine-soaked papers between the plates. In the quest for a better production of platinum metals, two scientists, William Hyde Wollaston and Smithson Tennant, worked together to design an efficient electrochemical technique to refine or purify platinum. Tennant ended up discovering the elements iridium and osmium. Wollaston's effort, in turn, led him to the discovery of the metals palladium in 1803 and rhodium in 1804. Wollaston made improvements to the galvanic battery (named after Galvani) in the 1810s. In Wollaston's battery, the wooden box was replaced with an earthenware vessel, and a copper plate was bent into a U-shape, with a single plate of zinc placed in the center of the bent copper. The zinc plate was prevented from making contact with the copper by dowels (pieces) of cork or wood. In his single cell design, the U-shaped copper plate was welded to a horizontal handle for lifting the copper and zinc plates out of the electrolyte when the battery was not in use. In 1809, Samuel Thomas von Soemmering developed the first telegraph. He used a device with 26 wires (1 wire for each letter of the German alphabet) terminating in a container of acid. At the sending station, a key, which completed a circuit with a battery, was connected as required to each of the line wires. The passage of current caused the acid to decompose chemically, and the message was read by observing at which of the terminals the bubbles of gas appeared. This is how he was able to send messages, one letter at a time. Humphry Davy's work with electrolysis led to conclusion that the production of electricity in simple electrolytic cells resulted from chemical reactions between the electrolyte and the metals, and occurred between substances of opposite charge. He reasoned that the interactions of electric currents with chemicals offered the most likely means of decomposing all substances to their basic elements. These views were explained in 1806 in his lecture On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity, for which he received the Napoleon Prize from the Institut de France in 1807 (despite the fact that England and France were at war at the time). This work led directly to the isolation of sodium and potassium from their common compounds and of the alkaline earth metals from theirs in 1808. Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery of the magnetic effect of electric currents in 1820 was immediately recognised as an important advance, although he left further work on electromagnetism to others. André-Marie Ampère quickly repeated Ørsted's experiment, and formulated them mathematically (which became Ampère's law). Ørsted also discovered that not only is a magnetic needle deflected by the electric current, but that the live electric wire is also deflected in a magnetic field, thus laying the foundation for the construction of an electric motor. Ørsted's discovery of piperine, one of the pungent components of pepper, was an important contribution to chemistry, as was his preparation of aluminium in 1825. During the 1820s, Robert Hare developed the Deflagrator, a form of voltaic battery having large plates used for producing rapid and powerful combustion. A modified form of this apparatus was employed in 1823 in volatilising and fusing carbon. It was with these batteries that the first use of voltaic electricity for blasting under water was made in 1831. In 1821, the Estonian-German physicist, Thomas Johann Seebeck, demonstrated the electrical potential in the juncture points of two dissimilar metals when there is a temperature difference between the joints. He joined a copper wire with a bismuth wire to form a loop or circuit. Two junctions were formed by connecting the ends of the wires to each other. He then accidentally discovered that if he heated one junction to a high temperature, and the other junction remained at room temperature, a magnetic field was observed around the circuit. He did not recognise that an electric current was being generated when heat was applied to a bi-metal junction. He used the term "thermomagnetic currents" or "thermomagnetism" to express his discovery. Over the following two years, he reported on his continuing observations to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, where he described his observation as "the magnetic polarization of metals and ores produced by a temperature difference." This Seebeck effect became the basis of the thermocouple, which is still considered the most accurate measurement of temperature today. The converse Peltier effect was seen over a decade later when a current was run through a circuit with two dissimilar metals, resulting in a temperature difference between the metals. In 1827 German scientist Georg Ohm expressed his law in his famous book Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet (The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically) in which he gave his complete theory of electricity. In 1829 Antoine-César Becquerel developed the "constant current" cell, forerunner of the well-known Daniell cell. When this acid-alkali cell was monitored by a galvanometer, current was found to be constant for an hour, the first instance of "constant current". He applied the results of his study of thermoelectricity to the construction of an electric thermometer, and measured the temperatures of the interior of animals, of the soil at different depths, and of the atmosphere at different heights. He helped validate Faraday's laws and conducted extensive investigations on the electroplating of metals with applications for metal finishing and metallurgy. Solar cell technology dates to 1839 when Becquerel observed that shining light on an electrode submerged in a conductive solution would create an electric current. Michael Faraday began, in 1832, what promised to be a rather tedious attempt to prove that all electricities had precisely the same properties and caused precisely the same effects. The key effect was electrochemical decomposition. Voltaic and electromagnetic electricity posed no problems, but static electricity did. As Faraday delved deeper into the problem, he made two startling discoveries. First, electrical force did not, as had long been supposed, act at a distance upon molecules to cause them to dissociate. It was the passage of electricity through a conducting liquid medium that caused the molecules to dissociate, even when the electricity merely discharged into the air and did not pass through a "pole" or "center of action" in a voltaic cell.