Title of a letter to the editor of the Wall St Journal Friday. People have been saying this ever since Alexander Volta demonstrated the first battery back in 1799 (Ben Franklin’s time) Volta’s battery had electrodes of copper and zinc and used salt water as the electrolyte. It wasn’t very powerful and I don’t remember ever reading about things being powered by Volta’s battery. It was a piece of laboratory apparatus used to demonstrate “current electricity” as opposed to static electricity which involved rubbing dry things together, creating hundreds of volts and virtually no current flow. Volta’s battery would make a frog’s leg twitch, but I never heard of it doing any else.
Since Volta’s time, invertors have created the lead acid battery (used to start cars), the carbon zinc dry cell (used in flashlights) the alkaline battery (a better flashlight battery), the nickel cadmium battery, the silver zinc battery (only ever used in the F106 fighter plane due to outrageous cost) and finally today’s lithium batteries used in battery cars. And there was an Edison battery whose chemistry escapes me now. The letter’s author, an MIT professor who ought to know better, called for yet better batteries.
We have been hearing this complaint about batteries for better than 200 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment