Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was a Lombard physicist known especially for the development of the first electrical cell in 1800. He was born in Como in Lombardy, Italy. Volta worked on the electrophorus that makes a static electric charge in 1775. Volta also studied what we now call capacitance, developing separate means to study both electrical potential V and charge Q, and discovering that for a given object they are proportional. This may be called Volta's Law of Capacitance, and likely for this work the unit of electrical potential has been named the volt. Around 1791 he began to study "animal electricity". In this way he discovered Volta's Law of the electrochemical series, and the law that the electromotive force of a galvanic cell. In 1800, he invented the voltaic pile, an early electric battery, which made a steady electric current. It is credited as the first electrochemical cell.