English Translation of Alessandro Volta's Methane Letters

Translating old Italian to modern English, one sentence at a time

I was looking into the history of methane (for fun) when I found a blurb on Wikipedia saying that Volta discovered methane due, in large part, to the influence of a letter from Benjamin Franklin. I had heard of his influence before and even mentioned it in my dissertation. I wanted to know more about Volta, though, so I followed the link Wikipedia provided where Volta acknowledges Franklin's guiding influence. I was surprised to find that the link pointed to seven letters from Volta where all the text is late 1700's Italian. I'm sure they must have been translated to English at some point, but I spent a lot of time looking and came up empty. I figured I'd have to do the work if I really wanted to read his words, so I started down the path. It's slow going and I translate as I have time, but so far I've found that Franklin's influence is highly over stated, Volta documented the first simple methane rocket engines, he was amazingly accurate with his flammability ratios, and there used to be a belief in something called phlogiston.