Both of these contemporaries were interested in Galileo's most famous invention, the Thermoscope-forerunner of the thermometer-which he developed about 1597 as a method of obtaining comparisons of temperature.
"The Introduction of Self-Registering Meteorological Instruments"
Robert P. Multhauf
Torricelli's apparatus, unlike Galileo's Thermoscope, represented the barometer in essentially its classical form.
"The Introduction of Self-Registering Meteorological Instruments"
Robert P. Multhauf
When Aloysio Galvani first stimulated the nervous fiber by the accidental contact of two heterogeneous metals, his contemporaries could never have anticipated that the action of the voltaic pile would discover to us, in the alkalies, metals of a silvery luster, so light as to swim on water, and eminently inflammable; or that it would become a powerful instrument of chemical analysis, and at the same time a Thermoscope and a magnet.
"COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1"
Alexander von Humboldt