There is an autumn evening in 1800, on the shores of Lake Como, when everything truly begins. The air is damp, the wind carries the scent of wet leaves and wood burning in fireplaces, and inside a dimly lit room Alessandro Volta, fifty-five years old, with the steady gaze of someone who already knows where he is going even if no one else is following yet, patiently stacks discs of copper and zinc separated by small layers of felt soaked in saltwater. He is not conducting just any experiment: he is forcing a boundary that until then had seemed impossible to cross. He is taking something that belonged to the sky—to lightning, to storms, to fear—and bringing it down to earth, into the hands of man.
In that silent gesture, everything is already there. The voltaic pile is not merely an intellectual victory over Luigi Galvani and his “animal electricity” trapped in frogs: it is the opening of a door that no one will ever be able to close again. Volta does not simply release a form of energy: he makes it controllable, transportable, replicable. Above all, he makes it usable. It is the decisive shift that transforms a natural phenomenon into a lever of civilization.
And from that moment on, it is not history that accelerates: it is humanity that shifts gears, often without even realizing it. Every action we now consider normal—scrolling a screen, charging a phone, entrusting a decision or an answer to an algorithm—has its roots in that intuition. Every watt that powers a device, every kilowatt-hour that moves an electric car, every gigawatt that sustains a data center stems from that principle. Volta did not invent a machine: he invented the invisible fuel of the modern world.
When, in 1879, Thomas Edison lights the first stable light bulb in Menlo Park, he does not create electricity: he brings it into homes, theaters, and factories, turning it into a global infrastructure. This is not a technical detail—it is a paradigm shift. Energy ceases to be a phenomenon and becomes a system.
A few decades later, Nikola Tesla breaks the mold and understands that producing energy is not enough: it must travel far, efficiently, and at scale. Alternating current is not just a technical solution; it is a vision—more ambitious, more modern. It is the clash between two ideas of the future. And from that clash, the electric world we know is born.
The line continues, strengthens, and passes through decisive figures like John B. Goodenough, who made the lithium-ion battery possible. That is where another silent but decisive leap occurs: electricity ceases to be a fixed infrastructure and becomes portable, personal, everyday. It enters our pockets, our routines, our lives.
In 2007, Steve Jobs holds up a thin rectangle of glass and changes the world. Without that direct descendant of Volta’s pile, the iPhone would have remained an idea. Elon Musk takes an even bolder step: he scales that invention from our pockets to cars, homes, and energy networks. Tesla is not just a car—it is proof that a paradigm can be replaced. That even the most entrenched systems can be challenged, if someone has the vision and determination to do it.
But the most fascinating point comes now. Volta’s portable energy made artificial intelligence possible. In the massive data centers of OpenAI, Google, and xAI, thousands of chips work non-stop, consuming the energy of entire cities. Every answer a model generates, every image it creates, every complex reasoning it performs is born from a continuous flow of energy. Artificial intelligence is not just code—it is energy transformed into thought. Without the stability and portability that Volta taught humanity, those models would not exist.
And it does not end here. The next frontier—quantum computing—pushes this invisible chain even further. Qubits, as fragile as quantum snowflakes, exist only at temperatures close to absolute zero and require millimetric energy control. A single imperceptible fluctuation, and they collapse instantly. Without the precision and continuity that descend from that first pile, quantum computers would remain theoretical.
In the coming years, when these systems simulate molecules for new drugs in minutes, solve cryptographic problems that protect the world, and optimize global energy networks in real time, they will still rest on that intuition from 1800.
If you look at this line as a whole, you realize it is not a random sequence of innovations, but a relay race across centuries. Volta, Edison, Tesla, Goodenough, Jobs, Musk, and the pioneers of quantum computing are running the same race: seeing beyond the present and building what others cannot yet see.
And that is precisely why it makes deep and perfect sense that today, in Como—the city of Volta—the Italian Government and Undersecretary Alessio Butti are launching the “Centro Nazionale Volta.” In 2027, the bicentenary of his death, it will open in a historic villa, entirely dedicated to quantum computing and artificial intelligence. A hub that will bring together the University of Insubria, businesses, and national research centers: not just theory, but applied research serving both the territory and the nation. The place of origin becomes, once again, the laboratory of the future.
Every revolution has a silent root. Alessandro Volta never spoke about startups, never pitched, never raised capital. And yet, he built the greatest invisible infrastructure in human history. The unit of electric potential bears his name not for celebration, but out of necessity.
So perhaps it is worth pausing for a moment, precisely when everything is moving so fast. To lift our eyes from the screen, step out of the speed of the present, and return in our minds to that room overlooking the lake, to that man stacking metal discs in silence—without seeking applause, without knowing that he was igniting not just a light bulb, but the entire future of humanity.
Alessandro Volta did not simply invent a battery: he made everything that came after possible.
Everything else—everything else—is nothing more than a consequence of his genius.
