The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution

272 Pages·2010·1.69 MB·English

by  Henry Schlesinger

The Battery
How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
Henry Schlesinger
To Elisabeth Dyssegaard, Kathryn Whitenight, Jud Laghi, Charlie Scuilla, and
Melissa Suzanne, for their patience.
I’d also like to thank all of the people who helped me along the way. They’re a
diverse group, and I’m certain that I’ve inadvertently missed some of them.
However, I am grateful to the assistance given to me by Susan Hendrix, Larry
Steckler, Tracey Thiele, Dennis Klein, Janell Mirochna, Mindy Rosewitz, Wendy
Rejan, Corey Crell, and Donna Frazier Schmitt. And, of course, to Chris
Costello, for his most excellent illustrations.
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!
—Emily Dickinson
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction History in Real Time
One A World without Science
Two The Death of Superstition
Three The Tale of the Frog
Four Science, Showmanship, and the Voltaic Pile
Five Not a Gentleman of Science
Six What Hath God Wrought?
Seven Finally, Something Useful
Eight Power and Light
Nine Genius by Design
Ten Victorian Age of Discovery
Eleven Without Wires
Twelve Mass-Marketing Miracles
Thirteen What Will They Think of Next?
Fourteen Distance Dies in the Parlor
Fifteen The Endless Frontier
Sixteen See It! Hear It! Get It!
Seventeen Smaller and Smaller
Eighteen Always On
Nineteen Lab Reports
Epilogue Bring on the Future
Appendix Those Troublesome Baghdad Batteries
Selected Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Author’s Note
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
History in Real Time
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the
laws of nature.”
—Michael Faraday
This book has something of an unlikely origin. It was during the course of
working on a book about espionage that I became interested in batteries.
Because changing the batteries of a piece of spy gear in the field is often
inconvenient, if not altogether impossible, power sources are considered a
critical component when it comes to intelligence gathering. The engineers and
scientists who dream up all the fancy spy gear spend a lot of time worrying
about batteries. While surprising, it also made perfect sense. James Bond was
never seen popping into a drugstore for a couple of AAs to power up his gadgets,
but something had to power them.
The espionage book was a lengthy project, but during my downtime I began
making notes about batteries on small index cards. One slim stack of cards very
quickly turned into two, then grew into four, and soon expanded into eight. The
answer to each question seemed to prompt four more questions. Clearly there
was more to batteries than we generally realize.
A little more research revealed that there was almost nothing written about
batteries for the nontechnical reader. Of course, it’s possible to find individual
books on the chemistry, physics, history, and electronics of batteries, but these
are overwhelmingly intended for technical or scientific professionals and
academics. They are almost always very narrowly focused and, to be perfectly
blunt, pretty dry stuff. Conversely, the vast majority of breathless prose churned
out about consumer gadgets touches only briefly on the topic of batteries. All the
action is in the user interface—the display, the keypad, the speed, and the apps.
By comparison, batteries are generally regarded as somewhat dreary necessities.
Even the most diehard tech geeks I know have a hard time mustering enthusiasm
for battery technology.
THE FACT IS, BATTERIES NOT only power our current technologically advanced and
portable age, but are also largely responsible for virtually all of the early basic
scientific research that made today’s gadgets and gizmos possible. Batteries
quite literally powered much of the basic science that led to the consumer
technology they power today. Without batteries, not only would our cell phones
and other gadgets not work; in all likelihood the technology on which they are
based would not exist. This is the kind of elegant, circular dynamic that is
irresistible to a writer.
However, there is another important aspect. Since batteries are an enabling
technology, it’s impossible to understand their significance without providing
scientific, historical, and technological context. In writing this book there was
very much a sense of being let loose in history’s candy store. Pick a subject,
from home appliances to the world’s battlefields, and you’ll find batteries
powering up an increasingly sophisticated technology.
And there were more surprises. From the very beginning, literally within
weeks of publication describing the first “modern” battery in 1800, scientists
began making improvements on the initial design. The quiet, steady evolution to
increase battery power and extend life started before they even understood
exactly how they worked or the true nature of electricity.
The intent of this book is to draw together those disparate and seemingly
unrelated elements to tell the story. If there are detours, it is only because the
facts uncovered were either too interesting or too much fun to leave out. As an
author, I’d like to believe this is the first book in which Wolfman Jack, Michael
Faraday, Lord Byron, and the band Metallica appear between the same covers.
1
A World without Science
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.”
—Arthur C. Clarke
In the early 1800s, the Danish curator and archaeologist Christian Jürgensen
Thomsen hit on a novel idea for classifying prehistory artifacts. By dividing
them into three categories—Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age—he was able
to make some sense of his museum’s collection and shed light on civilizations
long vanished. What he had done, of course, was create a technological time line
with each of the three classifications defined not only by materials, but also by
technical skill sets and accumulated knowledge base. Although modified over
the years, Thomsen’s three-age system has more or less withstood the test of
time.
A hundred years later, F. Scott Fitzgerald would puckishly coin the phrase
Jazz Age to define the gaudy up-tempo spree of music, money, bathtub gin, and
flappers that defined the decade-long party following World War I. Today we’re
told we live in the Digital Age, Wireless Age, and Portable Age, though we have
yet to come up with a suitable name for the current convergence of all three.
There is a certain appeal in measuring history against the steady advance of
science and technology. For one thing, it provides a welcome relief from the
tame textbook pageants of politics, personalities, wars, and dates or the sour
revisionist history in which flaws overshadow accomplishments currently in
favor. And, with few exceptions, science and technology tend to progress in an
orderly, logical manner.1 The time lines are remarkably clear, even in the ancient
world.
As far back as 600 BC, Thales of Miletus was already exploring the mysteries
of nature. Known as one of the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece and the father
of modern mathematics, Thales left no writing. All that exists of his work are
scattered anecdotes from Plato and Aristotle. But even this anecdotal evidence
shows the first tenuous, unsteady steps of scientific thought.
In a legend that uncannily parallels the stereotype of the modern absent
minded professor, Thales was said to have tumbled into a well (in another
version it’s a ditch) while contemplating the stars. And during a military
campaign against Persia, he supposedly diverted the Halys River (the present-
day Kızıl Irmak River in Turkey) by ordering a channel to be dug that allowed a
bridge to be built. While in Egypt, Thales was also reputed to have cleverly
worked out a way of calculating the height of the pyramids by measuring their
shadows on the ground at the time of day a man’s shadow is equal to his actual
height. A neat trick indeed!
Thales’ methodology was simple observation and reason. It was not science in
the modern sense of hypothesis and experiment, but rather science based on
what was immediately observable. Still, it was founded on logic and was a
significant break from the received wisdom of religious myths that permeated
ancient thought. For Thales, nature was neither random nor subject to the whim
of the gods. This was a major step forward to be sure, but painfully inadequate
when it came to understanding complex natural processes and those things either
too large or too small to be seen clearly. Even Thales faced insurmountable
problems when it came to studying simple electrical and magnetic phenomena.
For instance, amber, fossilized tree resin, was prized in the ancient world
particularly among the Greeks, who called it lektron—Greek for “gold”—to
describe its color, although the term was also used to describe silver. Imported
from Burma and traded throughout Europe as early as 1600 BC, it was used in
quantity for burial ceremonies by the Greek warrior kings.
Among its more interesting properties, amber could be rubbed to create an
electrostatic charge that attracted small pieces of straw, wheat chaff, and thin
scraps of copper or iron. Even the most careful observation alone could not
reveal the truth that rubbing transferred negatively charged electrons from the
cloth or finger to the amber’s dry surface, which then attracted the positively
charged scraps of wheat. The phenomenon, which today we call
“triboelectricity” (from the Greek word trib meaning “to rub”) states that two
materials exchange electrons when they come in contact with each other. In the
process, they form a bond as charges move from one material to the other. When
the contact is broken, some atoms keep an extra electron. For instance, when
glass is rubbed with wool, the wool acquires electrons and becomes negative,
while the glass gives up electrons to become positively charged. By applying a
very generous definition—the ability to maintain an electrical charge—amber
could also be called the first battery.