The experimental set-up used by Galvani in these experiments closely resembles modern radio-telegraphic transmitting-receiving apparatus: the discharges produced by the machine are generically oscillating; they generated radio waves that, propagating, generated in turn high frequency currents in the wire E, which worked as the antenna of the receiving apparatus. The crural nerves of the frog operated as a detector, the lead shot as ground. The interpretation of the experiments in these terms is, however, recent: before the theoretical and experimental studies carried out by Maxwell and Hertz towards the end of the twentieth century, it could not make its way either in the mind of Galvani or in that of those who learned about them. 

In those days it was not generally agreed that "artificial electricity" – that produced and studied in a laboratory – and atmospheric electricity, which manifests itself, for instance, in terms of flashes of lightning, were of the same nature. "After arriving at the discoveries expounded until now regarding the force of artificial electricity in muscular contractions – wrote Galvani – it was our wish to investigate if the so-called atmospheric electricity could produce, or not, the same phenomena: that to say, whether, following the same devices, the discharge of lightning would produce muscular contractions like those produced by the spark". He carried out some experiments to reveal the possible effects.