The Wonderful Machine Age: Batteries

Batteries not included. That’s okay. It’s a minor inconvenience but easily remedied. Batteries are cheap and plentiful.

However, that was not always the case. Prior to the invention of the dry cell, all we had was the wet cell and a messy affair it was. Jars of acid with metal plates suspended in them. Not something useful to power your flashlight, smoke alarm, or radio. Let alone your computer, iPod, or hearing aid. Yet the wet cell made the telegraph possible and the automobile.

The term “battery” was coined by Benjamin Franklin to describe the linked Leyden jars he used for his electrical experiments. The first true battery was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta and was called the voltaic pile. It was a stack of paired copper and zinc discs, each pair separated from the others by cloth or cardboard soaked in brine. The brine functioned as the electrolyte.

While crude, the voltaic pile provided a fairly steady and reliable current and proved valuable for conducting experiments, such as the electrolysis of water.

The first practical wet cell for commercial and industrial application was invented by John Frederic Daniell in 1836. It was used to power the first telegraph systems. Daniell’s battery provided a steadier current for longer periods of time than the voltaic pile.

Over the years many improvements were made to the wet cell. Perhaps the most significant was in 1859 when Gaston Planté invented the lead-acid battery. The significance of his invention is that the battery was rechargeable by simply reversing the current. Previous wet cells were not capable of being recharged. The lead-acid battery is the type of battery used in the first automobiles to provide current to the spark plugs.

However, the battery we all know and love, the dry cell, came into being in 1886 with Carl Gassner’s zinc-carbon battery and in 1896 the National Carbon Company began producing an improved version on a commercial scale. The convenient and portable power source sparked a wave of portable electric devices, one of the first being the flashlight (or electric torch).

The battery is something about which we don’t think twice. We almost always have spares on hand to power the host of gadgets we also mostly take for granted. In my study I have the following battery-powered devices: smoke detector, two clocks, laptop computer, lamp, flashlight, iPad, iPod, digital recorder, cassette recorder, speakers, cellphone, iPod dock, and radio.

Additionally in the house there are more smoke detectors, more clocks, remote control devices, carbon monoxide detectors, camera, more flashlights, watches, calculator, car, GPS. And I’m probably overlooking something. For those who have kids, about a zillion toys can be added to the list. And let us not forget such things as pacemakers and hearing aids.

Let’s face it, modern life would not be possible without the battery, specifically the dry cell — which was invented in The Wonderful Machine Age.

So we retro-futurists should quit winding up our clockwork mechanisms and start using batteries. They’re the future, man.