I’ve always had a kind of love/hate relationship with batteries. Seems like at various times in my life, they’ve come to play an important part. When I first started work with the Federal Aviation Agency, they had a self-study program known as Directed Study, and their courses were numbered much like a college curriculum — from lower numbers to higher numbers. To give the program a try, I took the lowest numbered course — DS-1. The title of the course was “Batteries.” When they gave me the material for the course, it was more than 500 pages — I never knew there was so much information about batteries… and guess what — DS-2 was another, more advanced, course on — batteries.
I could probably easily write a book about my work experience with batteries and another book about my personal experience with batteries… maybe I’ll do that sometime.
But before I continue, let’s think a moment about how many of our household items use batteries — from our cars to remote controls and phones, just to mention a very few.
You may have heard or read that a battery is sometimes referred to an a voltaic cell. That’s because the first battery was supposedly created by Alessandro Volta in 1798. Of course archeologists will argue that batteries have been around much longer… in 1938 a discovery was made in Iraq of a pottery jar containing a copper cylinder that encased an iron rod. It’s generally believed that this was an ancient battery.
When I was a kid we used batteries mostly in flashlights — in fact, we almost always referred to them as flashlight batteries. So when I was young, we had flashlight batteries in the house and a ‘car battery’ in our car. That was pretty much it. The flashlight was invented by the founder of Eveready Battery Co., Conrad Hubert, in 1898. He called it the electric hand torch. Our ex-neighbors, from Zimbabwe, still refer to a flashlight as a torch.
The word “battery” was used by Ben Franklin to describe multiple Leyden jars, which were considered power sources during his time. He got the word from the military term “battery,” that defined a group of weapons working together.
As more and more of our everyday devices depend on batteries, they seem to be making the news more… rarely does a month pass that you don’t hear about some device exploding or catching on fire because of a battery malfunction. Recently we’ve had battery problems in phones, computers, “hover boards” and even airplanes make the news. One of the reasons is that for some reason battery technology has fallen behind other technologies and we demand short charging time and long life from our batteries… unless there’s some “breakthrough” these problems will continue.
I think I’ve mentioned before that when I was in high school, I built a radio-controlled airplane. I also built the radio equipment. The receiver in the airplane used a single tube (look that up if you don’t know what it is) that required 1 1/2 volts for the filament and and 90 volts for the “plate.” I had to use two batteries – a flashlight battery powered the filament, but the 90 volt battery was larger than the receiver that I’d built and weighed much more than the entire airplane, including the engine. Today most drones run on a couple of AA cells.
Looking around the house, most of our clocks, all our remotes, our iPads, phones, computers, a lot of my power tools and a number of lights all require batteries. And toys… it’s almost impossible to buy a toy that doesn’t require a battery of some kind.
So by now, you’re probably wondering why I chose to ramble on this particular subject today. Well, I’ll tell you — today (February 18th) is Battery Day. A day all about recognizing and celebrating just how important the humble battery is to our way of life…
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