Leapin' Lexical Inventions - 11 March 2009

<p>Martha explains how experiments with dead frogs and live wires led to the invention of the battery, and inspired a couple of familiar English words.<br> <br> I had to change the batteries in my flashlight the other day, and that makes think, as it always does, of Luigi Galvani. No, really, it does. Let me explain: Galvani was an 18th-century Italian physician and physicist whose experiments accidentally paved the way for modern batteries.<br> <br> The focus of his research? Galvani experimented with dead frogs and live wires. In 1791, he published a paper describing how he'd touched a...