Recharge Your Knowledge
Sunday
The first real battery was developed in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, for whom the volt is named. Made of stacked zinc and copper discs separated by brine-soaked fabric (“a salt in battery” wakka wakka), he later demonstrated the “Voltaic pile” to Napoleon and was made a count. Other devices to store electric charge had been developed before, but were essentially capacitors that discharged quickly as a shock, as opposed to the battery’s steady current from its internal chemical reaction.
Monday
Benjamin Franklin coined the term “battery” when he connected several of the above-mentioned early capacitors, known as “Leyden jars,” to amplify the shock they discharged. They reminded him of a battery of cannons working in unison.
Tuesday
Since electricity is really just the flow of electrons, a battery is fundamentally the pairing of one material with a lot of available electrons with another having far fewer. When installed in a device and connected through a circuit, the electrons flow from one material to the other, providing power for the device along the way. When all available electrons have travelled from one electrode to the other, the battery is spent until recharged. Common battery types include lead acid, nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride, and lithium ion, to name just a few.
Wednesday
Battery-powered electric cars are far older than you might expect. The first appeared in the 1830s, a quarter century before the invention of batteries which could be recharged rather than wholly replaced when spent. In the early 1900s, fleets of up to 600 battery-powered taxis were running in New York, Boston, and Baltimore, and automotive pioneers like Henry Ford, Ferdinand Porsche, and Ransom Eli Olds (of Oldsmobile) dabbled in electric cars. When US President William McKinley was shot in 1901, an electric ambulance took him to the hospital. However, in those more rural times, gasoline was more easily transported than bulky batteries, and the electricity to recharge them was more available in bigger cities, curbing the appeal of electric cars beyond city-only fleets.
Thursday
The useful electrochemical power in batteries often comes from corrosive and toxic chemicals as well as rare metals which should be recycled at the end of a battery’s life. Car batteries contain sulfuric acid, which can badly burn the skin and should be treated with extreme caution.
Friday
Batteries are at the heart of the Clarendon Dry Pile, “the world’s longest science experiment,” which involves early dry pile batteries set up in 1840 at Oxford University to ring two small bells with a suspended clapper hanging between them. The bells have been “ringing” continuously for 185 years on the same batteries – about 10 billion times – though the clapper’s movement is so minute that the ringing is nearly inaudible. The secret to this power cell’s longevity can only be studied when it stops, or else the “experiment” would cease.
Saturday
These days, thousands of individual batteries are often connected at a single site to store power generated with renewable energy, typically solar and wind. As of now, the biggest of these is in California, where 120,000 batteries connected to an enormous (46,000 acre) solar array store far more power than a typical coal power plant generates.