In the late eighteenth century, a fierce debate erupted in Italy between Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta over the nature of electricity. Galvani, a physician, noticed that the legs of a dissected frog would twitch when touched with a metal scalpel during an electrical storm. He hypothesized that animals possessed a unique form of 'animal electricity' that flowed through the nerves and muscles. Volta, a physicist, was skeptical. He argued that the electricity did not come from the frog, but from the contact between two different metals in a moist environment, with the frog's leg acting as a mere conductor. This interdisciplinary conflict led Volta to invent the first battery—the voltaic pile—which used alternating disks of zinc and copper separated by brine-soaked cardboard to produce a continuous current. While Volta's invention proved that electricity could be generated without biological tissue, Galvani's observations were not entirely wrong. His work laid the foundation for the field of electrophysiology, eventually leading to the discovery that the nervous system does indeed use electrical impulses to transmit information. The Galvani-Volta debate shows that scientific progress often comes from the tension between two competing interpretations of the same phenomenon, where the 'loser' of the debate still provides the foundational insight for a new field of study.