BATTERY HEROES: FAURE Camille Alphonse Faure was the 19th century electrochemist who made the commercialization of the lead acid battery achievable, writes Kevin Desmond
The neglected hero who made the modern battery possible
He returned to Paris, one month after the opening of the 1889 Universal Expo. He exhibited one of his batteries and was awarded the gold medal To the inventor the glory. To the genius of the engineer that made the invention work, a footnote in the world’s history books. So too when one looks at the origins of the lead acid battery we automatically think of Gaston Planté and his remarkable achievement in 1859 of creating the first rechargeable lead battery. But we then tend to neglect the
www.batteriesinternational.com
work of Camille Alphonse Faure, the man who took the lead battery to the next level and made it fit for purpose. Plante’s battery, to put it bluntly, was extraordinary in conception but primitive in execution. Although they could generate large currents over extended periods of time, they were huge, heavy and difficult to move around.
Faure’s lead-acid batteries were smaller, better made and lighter. They were immediately seized upon by his contemporaries as providing the basis for electric transport. Four years after Faure’s 1880 patent was released, an Englishman, Thomas Parker, pioneered the first production electric car. Faure was born on May 21, 1840 in Vizille, a small but busy town in the south-east of France. He was a studious boy with a passion for chemistry and his parents sent him to the Ecole des Arts et Metiers at Aix, where he did brilliantly. He got a job as a draftsman first with Peyruque-Cousin in Toulon and then with J. Chrétien in Paris, and became particularly involved with the Great London Exhibition of 1862. Returning to Paris, he published a report about machine tools. Having learned English at the Philotechnical Association in Paris, on Chrétien’s recommendation, Faure returned to London in 1866. Here he worked for Debergue & Company, big English manufacturers of machine tools. He was clearly a valuable asset to the firm and was even sent to Russia on a protracted commercial mission. From around 1872, it was while examining a Leyden jar battery with nitric acid built in London by instrument manufacturers Elliott Brothers that Faure began to think about improving electric batteries. From 1874 until about 1880, he worked as a chemist at the new factory of the Cotton Powder Company at Faversham, Kent, England. While there, he and the factory manager, George Trench, took out patents for Tonite (a new high explosive) (1874), and an improved dynamite detonator (1878). Following a visit to the Paris Exposition of 1878, Faure had the idea
Batteries International • Winter 2020/21 • 85
