Project Introduction

Alessandro Volta was an interesting guy living in interesting times. Like many other “Gentlemen Physicists” of the time, he had an interest in doing experiments and the financial means to pursue them. And, like many of his contemporaries, he wandered between fields of science as his interests waxed and waned. Thus, we have the guy who’s credited with advancing the study of electricity also being credited with the discovery of methane.

Turning towards my own history with methane, I wrote my PhD dissertation on its detection and quantification. I also spent several years pursuing a laser-based methane detection instrument at Ball Aerospace. I flew all over the country in small airplanes, mapping methane basins to find natural and manmade methane plumes. Then I’d go back to my desk and write data processing code to pull results out of the hundreds of GB of data I’d collected. I wrote a few papers, attended some conferences, and networked with experts. Then I was tapped to lead Ball’s MethaneSat team for the Environmental Defense Fund. I built the team, built models, ran studies, iterated design/cost/manufacturing/contracts and so on. Ultimately, we won the space-based passive spectrometer competition and Ball is hard at work getting it ready to fly.

One night I was reading more about methane history, wondering if there was a good book that went into the people and places behind methane. I found Wikipedia’s entry on methane and it mentioned Benjamin Franklin’s influence and linked to Alessandro Volta’s acknowledgement of Franklin. The only problem was that the letters were in old Italian. I searched all over for an English translation but came up empty. There are, though, some contemporary French translations. I figured I’d create a translation using Google Translate as a side project.

This ended up being more work than I thought. Google’s translation of the old Italian is clunky. The words map, but the meanings often don’t map as well. To mitigate some of my incorrect translations from wonky phrases, my plan is to go back through and compare to the French translations.

This all takes time, though, as my other problem is that I only have images of his letters, not text that I can copy and paste. I tried optical image-to-text conversion, but the images aren’t the best quality and the fashion back then was to write “s” to look a lot like a “f”, but with the horizontal hatch mark only halfway across or not at all. The only thing that’s been consistent is for me to manually type what I see, check for typos, then copy and paste the result before moving onto the next sentence.

I’ve enjoyed the process; it’s kind of like breaking a code. What will this sentence say? What is he thinking now? And I’ve learned about things like phlogiston and how, in a tiny way, he invented and optimized the first methane rocket engine.

Hopefully somebody else who’s searching for something like this finds these translations and finds some use. Or at least a smile.