1 Giuseppe: Out of the way! I can save your friend!
2 Ishmael: With wires running to the pizzeria fuse box?
3 Ishmael: You’re going to zap him? That’ll never work!
4 Giuseppe: I’m a direct descendant of Luigi Galvani! Italians invented reanimating life with electricity!

Luigi Galvani was a late 18th century Italian physicist who experimented with electricity, in particular its application to biology. He discovered the connection between nerve impulses and electricity. He showed that electricity from lightning could make the muscles of detached (and dead) frog's legs contract and twitch. He then replicated this effect using different metal probes, demonstrating that biological electricity could be generated by chemical reactions, a property now known as galvanism in his honour. This led to the invention of the galvanic cell, or essentially the chemical battery, a device which Galvani's rival Alessandro Volta then developed further.

As Wikipedia so eloquently puts it (my emphasis added):

A year after Galvani published his work (1790), Alessandro Volta showed that the frog was not necessary, using instead a force-based detector and brine-soaked paper (as electrolyte).