--- title: How Frog Legs Made the Oscar Statue | TIME description: This is the science behind the Oscar statues canonical: https://time.com/video/mujLDS0e/ og:title: How Frog Legs Made the Oscar Statue og:description: This is the science behind the Oscar statues og:url: https://time.com/video/mujLDS0e/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/mujLDS0e/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Frog Legs Made the Oscar Statue twitter:description: This is the science behind the Oscar statues twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/mujLDS0e/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # How Frog Legs Made the Oscar Statue > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: How Frog Legs Made the Oscar Statue [Watch (HLS stream): How Frog Legs Made the Oscar Statue](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/mujLDS0e.m3u8) (2:08)  _Published 2015-02-19. This is the science behind the Oscar statues_ --- Jul 27, 2023 5:57 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The History Behind Oscar Nominated Costume Designs](/video/8KndRSqD/) ### The History Behind Oscar Nominated Costume Designs [Oscar Dresses That Made History](/video/oIlf7uNi/) ### Oscar Dresses That Made History [The Artist Behind Obama's DNC Sand Statue](/video/NQf8RHoc/) ### The Artist Behind Obama's DNC Sand Statue --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] When you think about an Oscar as this beautiful gold structure. But it's not 100 % gold. Actually inside of it is this metal-- pewter. So how did we go from this to the gold statue? Well in order to understand that, we actually have to think about frog's legs. Back in the 1700s, there was a professor Luigi Galvani. He was a professor of anatomy. He was doing experiments on frogs. And when he was dissecting a frog with a copper clamp and with a metal scalpel, he noticed something. he noticed that the legs twitched like it was alive. He did this again. Twitched again. This was fantastic, so he wrote up his results, sent it to all the scientists in the land ,. Everybody embraced this idea of what he called, animal electricity. Now there was another professor his name was Alessandro Volta and he lived on the other side of Italy. And he was a physicist, and initially he thought that this was a, a good idea. But over time he started thinking that it wasn't the frog at all, it wasn't animal electricity it was actually the two metals. So what he did is he made a stack of two different metals, made it, a bunch of these sandwiches, put them into a jar with saltwater, connected it to a wire, and then touched a frog. The frog jumped. So what Volta created was a battery. Now you may be asking, what's this got to do with the Oscars? Well, we don't, we can't have an Oscar that's a hundred percent gold. Too expensive, but we want to form a thin layer of gold on top of the very cheap metal, so how do we do that? Well, it ends up that in a battery, we have two different metals, A and B. And electricity moves from A to B. Now, what you might not know, is that a metal, the materials, move from B to A. That is, that some of the metal of B starts to coat the A. Well that's what happens with the Oscars. The Oscars are put in this huge tank and in the liquid is microscopic gold. Electricity's connected to the Oscar and then the gold is attracted to the Oscar. That's how we get this wonderful gold statue that we know today. 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