Batteries were a remarkable invention when they arrived, and they still continue to play a significant role in our lives. They evolved parallel to the invention of practical electricity. The Chicago World Fair of 1893, heralded the phenomenon with a quarter million light bulbs lining the streets. Although the first battery was around long before that dramatic event.
The Birth of the World’s First Battery Begins
Electricity had always been around in the form of lightning, and static electricity. However, Otto von Guericke may have been the first person to create it on demand, by rubbing a large sulfur globe with feathers in 1660. But that energy was transient, because he did not know how to store it.
The next step along the road came thanks to the efforts of Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1744. That was when he produced a glass Leyden jar lined with metallic foil on both sides. At that time he and his fellow scientists thought electricity was a type of fluid. It would take some time before scientists realized von Kleist had invented the world’s first capacitor.
Luigi Galvani brought the birth of the first battery closer, almost by accident, when he conducted experiments using opposing plates of different types of metal. But it would take the sheer genius of Alessandro Volta to nudge the world closer to an actual battery.
World-Changing Discoveries of Alessandro Volta
Volta’s series of remarkable experiments began when he discovered that some fluids allowed him to conduct electricity through a series of bowls. He then researched the voltage potential of dissimilar metals, and discovered these varied when he separated them with paper soaked in salt water.
This in turn led to his construction of the first voltaic pile, which produced low voltage electricity for as long as the paper was moist. He presented his findings to the Royal Society of London in 1796. And so it was that the first battery was born, and a new era began.
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