This message comes from NPR sponsor Barclay's Corporate and Investment Bank,

powering sustainable growth in a changing world,

powering financial solutions that transform industries,

Barclay's Corporate and Investment Bank, Powering Possible.

Hey there.

Something happened just a few seconds ago that was extraordinary.

You tapped or clicked a button to play this podcast.

You ever think about what powered your brain and body to make your finger do that?

Well, it's the same thing that's powering the device you're listening to right now.

Electricity. They don't work exactly the same way,

but our bodies and batteries have a lot in common, including a story that starts with a frog.

No, not that kind of story. This frog was dead.

In the late 1780s, all kinds of animals, including frogs, were being dissected in the lab

of an Italian doctor named Luigi Galvani to study their anatomy. One day, something wacky happened.

When one of my assistants, by chance, lightly applied the point of a scalpel to the inner,

cruel nerves of the frog, suddenly all the muscles of the limbs were seen,

so to contract that they appeared to have fallen into violent, tonic,

convulsions. This is Smithsonian Curator Lila Vechardy, reading Galvani's account of the

dead frog kicking. Galvani believed he had made a major discovery. His hypothesis can be put

in a two-word phrase, animal electricity. He thought that the frog that all animals

store electricity in their cells, like a battery. He wrote up a report with lots of beautiful diagrams,

printed just ten copies, and sent them off to scientist friends. So now we are looking at the

...