History of Storage Batteries Part One

It can be quite confusing figuring out the early history of batteries, because most pioneers explored science in lonely isolation. Several of them even worked in parallel without ever knowing what the other was doing. We decided to help close the gap by presenting a short history of storage batteries. Although we can’t promise this will be 100% complete, because some records have been lost in time.

Part One of Our History of Storage Batteries

We skip over theories of Baghdad batteries, electric light bulbs in ancient Egypt, and thoughts of Maya electric water pumps. That’s because we resolved to write about developments where we have some documentary evidence. And so we begin with the world’s first capacitors for storing energy.

Two early European scientists, working independently, develop similar methods to momentarily induce electricity in the mid-1700s.
Pieter van Musschenbroek’s design uses a glass jar of water, with a brass rod standing inside. While Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist prefers to use a wire, or a nail in his version of the leiden Jar.
Englishman John Walsh develops an interest in electric fish, able to stun their prey in 1772. Italian scientist Luigi Galavani opens the next page in the history of storage batteries in 1786, when he tinkers with twitching frogs’ legs.
Galvani thinks he has discovered ‘animal electricity’. However, he has actually made a battery where the animal is the electrolyte, separating iron and copper electrodes.
Galvani’s pal Giuseppe di Volta realizes the iron and copper are actually producing the electricity, and not the twitching frog leg.
He experiments with piles of copper, brass, silver, zinc, and tin discs in 1799, separated with a cloth soaked in saline or sulfuric acid solution. Stored electricity has arrived in his voltaic pile!

Time to a Take a Break and Catch Up With Ourselves

We pause at this point in the history of storage batteries to take a virtual break, because we have dashed through some 50 years in a flash. We’ll be back shortly to remember the next batch of battery pioneers, to whom the world owes so very much.