Exactly like a Stingray

Simon Schaffer

• Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment by Giuliano Pancaldi
  Princeton, 381 pp, £22.95, June 2003, ISBN 0 691 09685 6

It is well enough known that Napoleon’s victory over the Austrian army at Marengo on 14 June 1800 had a major effect on the history of the menu. The surprising haste of the engagement left the French commissariat far behind its commander, whose hunger had to be satisfied with what his cook had to hand: a scrawny chicken butchered with a sabre, some eggs, tomatoes, oil, garlic and a few crayfish. Such is the legend of the origin of chicken Marengo. Less well known is the effect of the same battle on physics. In the scientific story, as in the culinary one, long-term outcomes were unpremeditated. Napoleon’s triumph restored French control over Lombardy, from where his armies had been expelled the previous year, allowed Pavia University to reopen, and restored that university’s greatest physicist, Alessandro Volta, to citizenship of the French-dominated Cisalpine Republic.