Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Batteries

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

The odds are quite good that somewhere around you right now as you listen to me speak these words, is a battery.  Whether it is in your smartphone, earbuds, automobile, smoke detector, or laptop, batteries have become ubiquitous in the modern world.  The origins of chemical batteries go back thousands of years before people knew what electricity was or what they could do with it. The future of batteries looks even brighter as more devices will require more and better batteries. Learn more about batteries, how they work, and how they have developed over time on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The odds are quite good that somewhere around you right now, as you're listening to me, speak these words, is a battery. Whether it's in your smartphone, earbuds, automobile, smoke detector, or laptop, batteries have become ubiquitous in the modern world. The origins of chemical batteries go back thousands of years before people even knew what electricity was or what they could do with it. The future of batteries looks even brighter, as more devices will require more and better batteries. Learn more about batteries, how they work, and how they've developed over time on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone

unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us. Every week on the ThruLine podcast, from NPR. Everyone listening to this, I'm sure, is familiar with batteries. You use devices that have them, you probably have had to replace them, and every so often you have to buy them or recharge them. Most people, however, don't know what's going on inside of a battery or how modern batteries were developed.

So let's start this discussion by going way back in time about 2,000 years to the city of Baghdad. In 1936, a device was discovered there, that's been dubbed the Baghdad battery. It was nothing more than a clay pot with a copper tube and an iron rod. The inside of the pot was found it contained some sort of acid, which could have been from vinegar or wine. The initial theory published about the device's purpose claimed that it was for electroplating.

It would use weak electricity to put a thin layer of metal over another metal. Other theories hold that it just created a weak current that people could touch and it could have been used for medicinal or religious purposes. These theories have been disputed, and most archaeologists don't think that the device was a battery. However, on several occasions, people have recreated the Baghdad battery and they were able to produce a weak current. And this was actually done on an episode of the MythBusters TV show, and they managed to get it to work. So if it wasn't a battery, it did actually work as a battery. And if it was a battery, then we have no evidence that anything ever came of it.

So, fast forward to the late 18th century for the next advancements in batteries. In the late 18th century, scientists were just discovering what electricity was and how it worked. Early researchers were able to store electricity in what was known as a lighten jar. A lighten jar is just a glass jar that stores and discharges electrical energy using a glass jar lined inside and out with metal foil. Technically, it wasn't a battery, but a capacitor. Capacitors store electricity in an electric field. Benjamin Franklin worked with Leiden jars, and when he hooked up multiple Leiden jars together, he called them an electrical battery. He took the name from what is a collection of artillery

that are used together in the military. The word battery, meaning multiple things working together, stuck, but it was later used to mean something slightly different from a capacitor. The first true battery was created in 1800 by the Italian electricity researcher Alessandro Volta. He created a device known as a voltaic pile. His device consisted of alternating disks of zinc and copper with pieces of cardboard soaked in brine in between the metals. His device had all of the elements that we think of today as a battery. This would be a good time to describe what a battery is and the basics of how a battery works. understand how a battery works, we have to start with the basic unit, an electrical cell.

A cell stores electrical energy chemically. A basic cell requires three parts, anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. The anode is the negative terminal of a cell, and it consists of some substance that wants to give up electrons easily. Lithium is a good example of such a substance. In Volta's voltaic pile, the anode was zinc. The cathode is the positive terminal of a cell, and it consists of something that wants to hold on to electrons. In Volta's pile, copper served as the cathode. In between the anode and the cathode is some substance which serves as an electrolyte. An electrolyte can be a solid liquid or gel that transports electrons between the anode and the cathode. In Voltus Pile, the electrolyte was salt water

that was permeated in the cardboard. When the anode and the cathode are connected, it creates a circuit and the electrical potential between the anode and the cathode causes an electrical current. That at its core is all an electrical cell is, anode, cathode, and electrolyte. And a battery is just a collection of cells in series or in parallel. Volta's voltaic pile was able to produce a constant current of electricity, which was something that you couldn't do with a lighten jar, which would expend all of its charge at once. And this allowed researchers to study actual electrical currents, not just static electrical charges. As much of a leap in technology as Volta's battery was, there were still serious limitations. Over the course of the 19th century,

many innovations were made to improve batteries. In 1836, John Frederick Daniele invented the Danielle cell, which was more stable and produced a steadier current than Volta's pile. There were over a half a dozen achievements in battery design that improved the current and voltage of batteries. However, they all shared one fundamental problem. Once the battery was assembled, it discharged, but couldn't be recharged. These are all known as primary batteries. This changed in 1859 with the invention of the lead acid battery by the French physicist Gaston Planté. The lead acid battery used a lead anode and a lead dioxide cathode immersed in sulfuric acid as the electrolyte.

And the great thing about the lead acid battery was that once it was discharged, it could be recharged by running the current the other way. The lead acid battery is fundamentally the same type of battery that can be found in most automobiles today. Further developments in battery technology have mostly involved the use of other substances as anodes and cathodes.

There were also batteries that used an alkaline electrolyte rather than an acid electrolyte. In 1881, the first commercial successful dry cell battery made of zinc and carbon hit the market. It didn't require a liquid electrolyte as most batteries of the time did. Throughout the early 20th century, the world became more and more electrified, and there were more and more devices and uses for electric batteries. One of the more popular batteries in use during this period was the zinc carbon battery. This period also saw the introduction of standard battery sizes. The National Carbon Company introduced the D-cell in 1898, and

and the Ever-Ready Battery Company introduced what we know as the AA battery in 1907 and the AAA battery in 1911. The main problem with zinc carbon batteries is that they didn't have a very long life. The next big innovation in batteries was one that solved that problem, the alkaline battery. In 1949, a Canadian researcher named Louis Uri was working for the Ever Ready Battery Company. Yuri was tasked with finding a way to improve the lifespan and performance of existing zinc-carbon batteries. He experimented with different materials and formulations, ultimately discovering that a

manganese dioxide cathode and a zinc anode, when used with an alkaline potassium hydroxide electrolyte, significantly improved performance. These new alkaline batteries lasted five to eight times longer than zinc carbon batteries. Alkaline batteries were a huge improvement. They're still used today and they have a very high energy density and are very affordable. However, they also had a downside. They couldn't be recharged. They had to be purchased and disposed of, and many of the early alkaline batteries used mercury, which was a big problem in landfills. What was desired was a battery that had a high energy density and was rechargeable, and ideally it should also be lightweight and affordable. A massive step towards the skull

was taken with the development of lithium batteries. Lithium is the third lightest element on the periodic table, and it also has the highest electrochemical potential of any metal. Attempts at lithium batteries began in the first years of the 20th century. However, it wasn't until the 1970s that serious research began. The first lithium-based batteries came to market in 1991 as a joint project of the Sony Corporation and the Ashikasi Chemical Corporation. These batteries were known as lithium-ion batteries, and today they encompass an entire category. of batteries. Lithium-Iam batteries were truly revolutionary. They had a host of benefits over traditional alkaline batteries. For starters, they were rechargeable, which meant you didn't have to

buy new batteries every time they ran out of charge. They also had a much higher energy density and provided higher currents for longer periods of time for items that required more current like power tools. They have low self-discharge, meaning that if they're left alone, their charge will not disappear quickly. And finally, they can be in any number of shapes and sizes. Lithium ion batteries were almost single-handedly responsible for the revolution in battery-powered wireless devices over the last 30 years. Laptops, mobile phones, power tools, electric cars, and almost any other device you can think of is reliant on some form of lithium-ion battery today. Since the release in 1991, lithium-ion batteries have continued to improve.

Energy density has increased three-fold since that time, while their costs have dropped tenfold. While lithium-ion batteries ushered in a revolution in batteries, they're not perfect. The biggest weakness is that lithium-ion batteries are a fire risk. Granted, the risk is low, but if a battery is punctured and the liquid electrolyte can escape, it can cause a fire. Another problem is that dendrites can grow inside the electrolytes. Dendrites are solid fingers of lithium that can grow slowly. If they grow large enough, they can cross from cathode to anode and cause a short circuit in the battery. Given the importance of batteries in the world's economy, more research is being done on battery technology today than ever before.

Anyone who can come up with large-scale improvements in battery technology stands to make a fortune. One such promising technology is solid-state batteries. Solid-state batteries are conceptually very simple. It replaces the liquid or gel electrolyte with a solid. Most people don't realize that their electronic devices have a liquid inside of them, but they do. Granted, the liquid isn't sloshing around and it's in very thin layers, but it's a liquid, nonetheless. Solid-state batteries have the potential to revolutionize batteries in the same.

same way that lithium ion batteries did several decades before. For starters, they would be much safer, as there's no risk of an electrolyte leaking. They would charge faster, have higher energy density, last longer, and they could operate at higher and lower temperatures. This could mean an electric car that only required half the battery size that current electric cars do, resulting in decreased prices, or alternatively, a battery of the same size that could go twice as far. Perhaps even more importantly, a car could be fully charged in just a fraction of the time that it currently takes to charge an electric car. And the same would hold true for all electronic devices that need to be recharged.

Due to the weight and electrochemical potential of lithium, future solid-state batteries will still probably be lithium-based. However, not every battery application, requires something lightweight that can charge quickly. Sometimes you just want something cheap and forego other battery attributes. One such potential technology is known as an air iron battery. As the name would suggest, an iron air battery stores energy via the oxidation of iron with air, aka rusting, and then creates electrical energy by reversing the process.

Iron air batteries are very heavy, and they don't charge quickly. but then again, they don't have to. The use case for iron air would be providing electrical storage for the entire grid or just for homes. The batteries don't have to be mobile, so weight isn't relevant. Likewise, they would be connected to a power source all of the time, so they would have plenty of time to charge up. The biggest benefit of iron air batteries is that they would be ten times cheaper than lithium ion batteries. Solid state and iron air batteries are far from the only new types of batteries being developed. There are also experiments being conducted on new substances like sulfur, which could also lead to dramatically improved outcomes.

Battery demand is expected to grow dramatically over the next few decades. This is driving new exploration and mining efforts for new sources of lithium and rare earth elements. Since the creation of the first true battery over 200 years ago, batteries have steadily gotten better and become more important. This trend only seems to be accelerating. Decades from now, we'll probably be using even more batteries that are dramatically better

than the ones we have today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day.

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