The Battery

Posted by Clara Marshall on March 11th, 2020

The Battery: How Portable-Power Sparked a Technological Revolution is a good book to introduce people to the history of electric batteries. Not too technical or period specific, the book traces electric power evolution and its portable applications from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. Although the book fixes on the history of electric power, its principal emphasis is on battery development. I just wish the author had stuck to the topic.

The first few chapters discuss the developments in science which showed how electricity could be generated and stored. There is a drawing of a Leyden jar and discussions of Ben Franklin’s experiments with a kite. Finally we get to Galvani who showed how chopped frogs’ legs could jump if sparked with electricity. This lead to the first battery by Alessandro Volta who discovered dissimilar metals could create electricity. Alternating pieces of silver and zinc separated by wet cards created electricity. In 1800, this became known as the voltaic pile.

Soon the book turns to Michael Faraday, the bookbinder’s apprentice who became one the most prominent scientists of the 19th century. Faraday’s work on electrical power is important in the history of batteries, but Schlesinger felt he deserved an entire chapter. This is my one complaint of the book: historical characters close to the author’s interest get an inordinate amount of attention. I would’ve preferred to hear more about how John Daniell came up with his “constant battery” in 1836. At least the author gives Joseph Henry (who was a contemporary of Faraday) some credit for his work on electromagnets.

Schlesinger spends a lot of verbiage on the history of the telegraph, Morse codes and transatlantic cable before returning to the reason for including them in the book: the need for portable batteries to power these systems. He does quote extensively from this 1880’s battery manual:

“In renewing this battery the zincs should be scraped and well cleaned with a stiff brush, the porous cups thoroughly washed, and the old solution contained in them thrown out, with the exception of about one third of the clear portion, which should be returned, otherwise the battery will require some hours to recover its full strength. The copper deposit upon the zincs is valuable, and should be preserved.”

The book returns on track by discussing the 19th century battery giant, Gaston Planté. Considered the inventor of the rechargeable wet cell battery, Planté spent 30 years on his goal of a reusable battery. I must give credit to the author for summing up how a rechargeable battery works with these precise few sentences:

“Very simply, when a battery discharges, it releases electrons from a metal and through the negative electrode to external circuitry that powers a device and then back into the positive electrode. During normal use, a battery’s negative pole becomes oxidized, sending off electrons, while its positive pole gives up oxygen. When a storage battery is recharged, the positive pole is oxidized and the negative pole reduced, shedding the positively charged ions it accumulated during use.”

The same chapter discusses the work of Alexander Gram Bell on the telephone and Thomas Edison on using batteries to power lights. Although it’s not widely known, Edison thought storage batteries were a waste of time. Most of his development work took place on primary (non-rechargeable) nickel iron batteries. Again, the book goes a little off track looking at the many charlatans who thought electricity was the cure for all ills.

At the end of the 19th century the German chemist Carl Gassner hit on the idea of the “dry cell” battery. Schlesinger details how the Nation Carbon Company in Cleveland, Ohio adapted Gassner’s idea into the modern cylindrical battery so many of us use in our daily lives. Here was a battery perfect for the consumer market: it provided steady power and didn’t leak. National Carbon would later buy another company, known as Every-Ready, which made flashlights. This is where the popular battery name originates.

The book runs off the track again for another few chapters discussing electrical development. Perhaps a better name for this book would’ve been The Electricity. Schlesinger’s style is up-beat and he enjoys writing about people such as Marconi and Edison. But, uhm, vacuüm tubes? Can we stick to the subject?

A good example is Samuel Ruben, the self-taught inventor who came up with the trickle-charger, a device used to keep automobile starter batteries charged during long periods of inactivity. Ruben worked on the alkaline manganese battery which is still widely used today. But the book gives him only a few pages.

The Battery really doesn’t get back into the subject until the Lithium ion battery in the 1970’s. Most of the chapters before this decade concern themselves with electricity, electronics, and transistors. There is a sense of wonder in what he writes about. I didn’t know anything about Texas Instruments production of the first transistor radios until reading about it in the book. The Battery concludes with a look at the many types of batteries under research and where they are headed. And from first paragraph of the epilogue:

“Predictions far into the future are always dangerous. This is painfully evidenced by the legions of baby boomers who have grown to middle age and beyond still waiting for the arrival of flying cars and personal jet packs promised in the magazines of their youth.”

As a book on batteries, it’s wanting. But as a general history of electricity, this book is excellent. It’s just too bad the author couldn’t keep the focus to make it an extraordinary piece of writing. The book’s style does make me want to find more books by the same author. It’s a very readable book as he writes with an entertaining style. Just wish he’d spent more time on batteries in particular and less on electricity in general.