A Reflection on the Humble Battery

Garvey Year 8

Ah. The battery. If memory serves me right, this piece of the complex design of electricity, had a long and interesting journey, dating back to two people from the 1800s.

Alessandro Volta had this brainwave of creating the world’s first thing which would be later known as a battery. The creator had pushed electricity to its limits. The so-called voltaic pile consisted of alternating discs of silver and zinc separated by leather or pasteboard that had been soaked in salt water, lye, or some alkaline solution. Strips of metal at each end of the pile were connected to small cups filled with mercury. When Volta touched both cups of mercury with his fingers, he received an electric shock; the more discs he assembled, the greater the jolt he received.

Battery. Invention. New. Original. But why? Mind your own business.

Before the battery’s existence, the one and only American inventor, Benjamin Franklin, had used the term “battery” whilst doing experiments with electricity. Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment to attract electricity by flying a kite in a lightning storm was only one of many late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century experiments conducted to learn about electricity.