counterpart of precisely that animal organ which Galvani had in mind
when misinterpreting his own discoveries! That Volta himself realized
this is clear from the concluding words in his letter:

'This apparatus, as it resembles more the natural organ of the torpedo,
or of the electrical eel, than the Leyden Phial or the ordinary
electric batteries, I may call an artificial electric organ.'

This new method of producing continuous electrical effects had
far-reaching results, one of which was the discovery of the magnetic
properties of the electric current by the Dane, Oersted - once again a
purely accidental discovery, moving directly counter to the assumptions
of the discoverer himself. About to leave the lecture room where he had
just been trying to prove the non-existence of such magnetic properties
(an attempt seemingly crowned with success), Oersted happened to glance
once more at his demonstration bench. To his astonishment he noticed
that one of his magnetic needles was out of alignment; evidently it was
attracted by a magnetic field created by the current running through a
wire he had just been using, which was still in circuit. Thus what had
escaped Oersted throughout his planned researches - namely, that the
magnetic force which accompanies an electric current must be sought in
a direction at right angles to the current - a fortuitous event enabled
him to detect.

These repeated strokes of chance and frequently mistaken
interpretations of the phenomenon thus detected show that men were
exploring the electrical realm as it were in the dark; it was a realm
foreign to their ordinary ideas and they had not developed the forms of
thought necessary for understanding it. (And this, as our further
survey will show, is still true, even to-day.)