Volta

Aus: Wendy Giardina, Personal Etymologies 

We should really know who Volta was because his name is all around us in Basel: on tram stops, squares, and street signs. Voltastrasse 16 was Jim’s first address, temporary housing provided by his employer when he started working in Basel in 1983. It was a furnished one-bedroom apartment on a block of low-slung buildings in a modest workers neighborhood. My husband Jim could walk to his office in the Hochhaus, a blocky, high-rise with letters across the top, in the middle of the factory site. 

The apartment was carpeted, had clean kitchen cupboards and modern appliances, and was wonderfully insulated. It was while we lived there that we realized all Swiss windows opened in exactly the same way, either tipped at an angle or opened fully, depending upon the manipulation of the handle. There was proper bathroom caulking, good water pressure and temperature control. It was not like the drafty house Jim and I shared in Fontainebleau, with its precarious electric water heater looming overhead when you were in the shower. The gray damp cold of winter crept through French windows, but in Switzerland, the gray damp cold stayed outside. 

There were house rules too; dense pages of them, single spaced, in German, explaining such things as: there should be no noise between noon and 1:30pm or after 10pm, including no taking of showers or flushing of toilets. No shaking tablecloths off the balcony. The shared laundry area could be used (only) between 8am and noon on Mondays—the time slot assigned to Jim’s apartment. In Switzerland what is not forbidden is mandatory, they say only half jokingly. 

That was all years ago, in the 1980s. We moved away and when we came back in 1993, I would, from time to time, ride the tram past Voltaplatz, recognizing the post office and a pizzeria that was still there; searching, but never seeing the old apartment. There was major construction in the area for years. Buildings, streets, and whole neighborhoods were torn up, making way for a new urban design envisioned by the pharmaceutical industry. The building Jim used to work in still stands, but it is now surrounded by more ostentatious buildings. There is a new name on his old building. 

Alessandro Volta was an Italian physicist and chemist. He devised an early electrical battery, which came to be known as the voltaic pile, and was the first to isolate methane. In 1777 he traveled through Switzerland and wrote about some of the cities he visited, including Basel. Perhaps next time I’ll get off the tram at Voltaplatz to see if I find any traces.