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Tuesday 17 April 2012

Battery

A battery is made up of one or more electrical cells. Electricity is produced by a chemical reaction in the cells.



The Baghdad Battery is a 2000-year-old clay jar with a stopper made of asphalt. Sticking through the  asphalt is an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder. When filled with vinegar or other electrolytic solution, the jar produces about 1.1 volts.

The usage of the word  "battery" to describe a group electrical devices dates to Benjamin Franklin,
In 1749 Franklin used the term "battery" to describe a set of linked capacitors he used for his experiments with electricity by analogy to a battery of cannon. (He borrowed the term from the military, where a "battery" refers to weapons functioning together.)

In the 1780s, the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani discovered that the muscles of a dead frog's leg would twitch when he touched it with two pieces of metal. Galvani had created a crude circuit and the phenomenon was taken up by his friend, the aristocratic Professor Alessandro Volta, whose voltaic cells stacked in a Voltaic pile amazed Napoleon. Volta's investigations led shortly to the invention of an early battery. .

The Oxford Electric Bell is an experimental electric bell that was set up in 1840. It has been running off the same battery ever since and no one knows what the battery is made of.

When Alexander Graham Bell was working on the telephone in 1876 he spilt battery acid on his trousers. His assistant Thomas Watson, who was on another floor, heard the call through the instrument he was hooking up, and ran to Bell's room. So the first intelligible words transmitted over telephone was not "Hello its Bell ringing" but "Come here Watson, I want you".

It was Thomas Edison who developed the first alkaline storage battery in 1914.


Duracell, the battery-maker, built parts of its new international headquarters using materials from its own waste.

The Duracell Bunny promotes batteries everywhere in the world, except for the United States and Canada where Energizer holds the trademarks to a "battery bunny."

The two rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that have been installed on NASA’s Curiosity Rover, currently traversing the surface of Mars are intended to provide fourteen years of power.

Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story runs on Buy 'N' Large batteries—Buy 'N' Large is the evil corporation from Pixar's film Wally.

More than 100 toxic gases are released by the lithium batteries found in products like smartphones and tablets when they get too hot.


It would take 120,380 AA batteries to power a lightsaber.

Every Christmas Day, 400,000 Britons go out to a shop to buy batteries.

National Battery Day is observed each year in the USA on February 18th. The day serves to appreciate the convenience batteries provide to our everyday lives. 

To test if a battery is still good or not, drop it — the higher it bounces, the lower the charge.

Source The Independent 3/11/07

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