Batteries have come a long way...

We can all remember our first experience of batteries – and it wasn’t good.

It was that moment on Christmas morning when we had unwrapped our favourite new toy. We’d then spot an anxious glance between mum and dad followed by one of them disappearing into the kitchen. Five minutes later they’d returned with a brief shake of the head in the direction of the other before calling us over with some bad news, “Batteries not included”…

“and we don’t have any in the house,”

“Bloody batteries!”

Since then our relationship with batteries has gradually improved, with the odd hiccup, often when we find an old torch or Walkman, totally unusable because of a corroded battery inside..

They allowed us to have our first mobile phone and remember it wasn’t the fact that it had two hours battery life at that time. It was “Wow! Two hours battery life.” That was regarded as revolutionary in the early days of the mobile. It’s only now when we are complaining about the battery not lasting a day, when we’d been draining it for hours on end surfing the net, watching YouTube and even making phone calls that you think back at the limitations of those early brick-like phones.

Battery development is the key to so much of what we want to achieve going forward, not least with electric cars. You can be sure that if we equate current cars to those early day mobile phones, where we will be in 20 years’ time with our cars is totally mind boggling. I’m sure we will be looking at batteries which will take us the length of the country on one charge.

That technology is also crucial in so many of our industry’s equipment whether it be hand tools or even compact tractors and the ability to work all day on one charge – or even recharge to full in a matter of minutes will be common place before we know it.

So let’s forgive the humble battery the disappointment it heaped upon us on all those Christmas mornings and delight in the fact that it is at the forefront of so much of our research and development