Let us, then, go back a hundred years and examine what would have been the state of mind of an erudite amateur who had read and understood the chief publications on physical research between 1800 and 1810.
Let us suppose that this intelligent and attentive spectator witnessed in 1800 the discovery of the galvanic battery by Volta.

He might from that moment have felt a presentiment that a prodigious transformation was about to occur in our mode of regarding electrical phenomena.
Brought up in the ideas of Coulomb and Franklin, he might till then have imagined that electricity had unveiled nearly all its mysteries, when an entirely original apparatus suddenly gave birth to applications of the highest interest, and excited the blossoming of theories of immense philosophical extent.
In the treatises on physics published a little later, we find traces of the astonishment produced by this sudden revelation of a new world.
"Electricity," wrote the Abbe Hauey, "enriched by the labour of so many distinguished physicists, seemed to have reached the term when a science has no further important steps before it, and only leaves to those who cultivate it the hope of confirming the discoveries of their predecessors, and of casting a brighter light on the truths revealed.
One would have thought that all researches for diversifying the results of experiment were exhausted, and that theory itself could only be augmented by the addition of a greater degree of precision to the applications of principles already known.

While science thus appeared to be making for repose, the phenomena of the convulsive movements observed by Galvani in the muscles of a frog when connected by metal were brought to the attention and astonishment of physicists....

Volta, in that Italy which had been the cradle of the new knowledge, discovered the principle of its true theory in a fact which reduces the explanation of all the phenomena in question to the simple contact of two substances of different nature.

This fact became in his hands the germ of the admirable apparatus to which its manner of being and its fecundity assign one of the chief places among those with which the genius of mankind has enriched physics." Shortly afterwards, our amateur would learn that Carlisle and Nicholson had decomposed water by the aid of a battery; then, that Davy, in 1803, had produced, by the help of the same battery, a quite unexpected phenomenon, and had succeeded in preparing metals endowed with marvellous properties, beginning with substances of an earthy appearance which had been known for a long time, but whose real nature had not been discovered.
In another order of ideas, surprises as prodigious would wait for our amateur.