Batteries Explained

The word “battery” derives from the Latin verb battuere, meaning “to beat” or “to strike”.

Later on it was used to describe heavy artillery guns “battering” an enemy target.

And then it just became an array of anything that made a lot of smoke, noise or light.

In his research lab, Benjamin Franklin linked a series of connected glass energy-storage containers (known as Leyden jars).

Because Leyden jars produce highly visible, bright sparks when discharged, the lineup of jars and their simultaneous discharges resembled a coordinated row of military cannons firing together, so Franklin called it a “battery”.

Leyden jars were electrical accumulators (capacitors), not generators. They had to be charged externally using machines that used friction to create static electricity. They dumped all their stored energy in one sudden, explosive spark. They could not provide a steady, controlled stream of electricity to power an ongoing circuit, so they weren’t what we would call an electrical battery.

Later on, the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani, with a focus on dead frog’s twitching legs, believed animals generated “animal electricity.” Alessandro Volta thought Luigi was an idiot.

To prove his point, Volta invented the Voltaic Pile. He stacked alternating discs of zinc and copper and separated them with cardboard soaked in saltwater (an electrolyte).

For the first time in history, a chemical reaction produced a continuous, steady current of electricity instead of a single spark. This was the first true electrical battery but it was known as the voltaic pile, not a battery.

English-speaking scientists (such as William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle) noticed that Volta’s device was still fundamentally an array or “battery” of individual cells linked together to create electrical power, and called it a battery, which is where the modern term derives from.

So although Franklin first used the word “battery” in electricity, it was for a capacitor not a battery. And the chemical battery was so named, ironically without any reference to Franklin’s efforts.