Question

How did Alessandro Volta discover the methane gas?

Answer 1

Hint: Alessandro Volta was an Italian physicist and he was a pioneer of electricity and power. He was born on 18 February 1745 and died on 5 March 1827. He is credited with discovery of the electric battery and methane gas.

Complete answer: Alessandro Volta read a paper written by Benjamin Franklin of the United States and the paper was on ‘flammable air’. After reading this paper he did his research and went on to discover the methane gas. It was between the years of 1776 and 1778 that Volta was studying the chemistry of gases.

He found methane at Lake Maggiore in November 1776 and by the year 1778 he managed to isolate methane. He also devised many experiments one of which was the ignition of methane by an electric spark in a closed vessel.

Electric capacitance was also studied by Volta and it basically means separate means to study both electric potential (V) and the charge (Q), and discovering that for a given object they are proportional. This is called Volta’s Law of Capacitance. For this work the unit used for electric potential has been named after him and is called volt.

The chemical formula of methane is CH4 which means one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen. It is an economically attractive fuel as there is an abundance of methane on Earth. However capturing and storing it poses many challenges.

Note:German chemist August Wilhelm Von Hofmann was the one who coined the term ‘methane’. The name was coined in the year 1866 and it was derived from methanol.