Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Batteries

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why batteries are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Batteries. Known for being negative. Famous for being positive. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why batteries are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of Podcast All About Why Being Alive is More Interesting Than People Think It Is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, what a topic this week. What is your relationship to or opinion of batteries?

I'm using them right now, Alex. I got my little recorder, handy recorder, and it is being powered by batteries. You know why? You want to know why? When I plug it into the wall, for some reason, it picks up Italian radio. I don't know why. Yes. I don't know why. But I think the wiring in this house is kind of old, and it's picking up some radio stations. And so because this is a podcast that is not about faint Italian radio, I use batteries. I got rechargeable batteries, so I don't have too much e-waste.

And it's great. Just recharge those little suckers up, put them right in there, and hey, I got electricity. It's always very interesting to me. I do. I want people to really appreciate this story because I've heard it and I love it, which is that, as people know, Katie lives in Turin, Italy. And when she plugs her recorder device into the wall, there's apparently faint Italian radio. I have not heard it. I have not received like tape with the radio in it. Tape in the digital sense. Anyway, very exciting to me. I love it.

Now I feel like I need to capture it on tape so that it's clear that I'm not making it up. Also, I'm a little worried that if I try to tape it, it won't show up on the tape, which means that I'm haunted. But by the ghost of an Italian radio announcer. Yeah. Specifically a guy who reads the stocks numbers. But they're spooky stocks. It's such a perfect topic for this podcast. Thank you very much to Ryan on the Discord. Many of our topics are suggested and chosen by supporters of the show. And I love it every time there's a topic where I'm like, don't feel strongly about it.

Because that usually means it's something I'm going to get excited about researching, which I did. You know, batteries. They're a necessary inconvenience, I guess, in my life, and I use them. Great. You're a fence sitter about batteries, huh? That's true. Not going to come down one side or the other. Coward.

Yeah, I lack the bravery to take a side in the battery wars. A house divided cannot charge its batteries or hear Italian radio. But yeah, this really turned out. I'm so excited about it. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week, that's in a segment called... of fascinating numbers and statistics and this week that's in a segment called one eight seven seven stats for kids s-t-a-t stats for kids one eight seven seven stats for kids

share your stats today Folks, that name was submitted by On the Discord We have a new name for this segment Every week, please make him as silly and wacky and bad as possible Submit yours through Discord Or to That was an incredible experience Yeah, I mean

That song is almost too good and too highly rated In the classical fine art world. So maybe if we can do a sillier song next time, that'd be great. Yeah, if only it was more memorable. If only it stuck in your head better. Right. And the first number here is three. Because in general, a modern battery is made of three parts.

Ooh. And I'm right away. Okay, so I know there's a bumpy part, and then there's the flat part. And the bump, the little nipple, is the plus, and the flat is the minus. And the third part, I assume, is the juice in the middle. That's correct.

Like, there's more to it, but yes. I was being silly. I thought that was the dumb answer. We're going to get more detailed, but I want to say right away, there's just a huge variety of chemistry and engineering across batteries. It's really more of a textbook topic to get way into how that works, like more of an engineering, chemistry, college class thing. But we're going to get into the short version and explain the details of those three parts that Katie correctly outlined. It's those things, even though you're joking. Yeah. I'm shocked that I'm such a genius. I should have seen it coming, but I didn't realize I was a batteries expert.

Yeah, it's the three parts. And according to the MIT School of Engineering, the three parts are called an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. Electrolytes. Is that the same as like the electrolytes you drink in a Gatorade? It's kind of related to that terminology wise, but it's not, you're not like drinking battery parts when you have Gatorade. Yeah. Don't drink batteries. Pro tip. Because the, the anode is that negative terminal on a double A battery. That would be the flat bit. And then the cathode is the positive terminal with the bump. And then the middle chemical section is the electrolyte that can also contain

an item called a separator, which does what it sounds like. It keeps the anode and cathode elements apart from each other in a useful way. Okay, so you got your cathode, which is the little nipple. You got the, wait, the anode, and that's the flat part? Anode, yeah. Positive and negative. And then you've got the electrolyte in the middle. So how does that make my machines go? There's a lot of chemistry to it. And this is the super short version. When you have a battery, that is chemical energy in a storage device. So it's chemical energy that is waiting to be activated and turned into electricity.

So it's chemical energy that is waiting to be activated and turned into electricity. And so when you insert a battery into a device, that device is designed so that the battery is now completing a circuit. And that is usually attached to what is called a load, the technical term. And so, for example, if our load is a light bulb, we turn on the light bulb by initiating reactions in the battery. Like the battery does a series of what are called electrochemical reactions. Interesting. Okay, so you have electrochemical reactions, you have some chemical. How do chemicals cause some kind of electrical reaction? Yeah, so what happens is two processes all at once. What happens is the battery has the anode do a reaction where it loses electrons, and then the cathode does a reaction where it gains electrons. And then there's also a chemistry

and elements term called an ion. An ion is a molecule or atom that has lost or gained an electron. As the anode loses electrons, you have electrons and you have ions. And so the ions move through the battery's electrolyte, and then the electrons move on a separate path through the whole rest of the circuit and the device. And when the electrons do that across the whole rest of the device, they do what I think of as turning on and powering the device. They follow that path in a way where they're guided to make the device do what you think it'll do. That's really interesting. That actually sounds a lot like how the brain works. You have these ion channels along neurons where you have like, because you know,

when your brain is, I guess it kind of is a little bit like a battery in that it's using chemicals, which are the neurotransmitters. You have these electrical impulses happening in your brain. And that is like the firing of the neuron. So yeah, you have these like ion channels that basically depend on the differential in terms of electrons for the flow of electricity. Yeah, yeah. Then we'll talk later about animals and biology in particular, helping people understand batteries because yeah, there's a lot of electricity in a different way in us. And then a lot of things in nature and the world and then also engineering our circuits.

We love a circuit. We're like, great. Something happens in a loop and then that's existence. It's really cool. It's like a hug, but electrical. Yeah. but electrical yeah yeah when and knowing the again very broad strokes of how a battery works that explains a lot of the other things about them for example we know that batteries can become dead right they a regular battery can run out of charge yeah that's because a battery is stored

chemical energy doing a bunch of reactions so a dead regular battery is just a battery that ran out of reactants and stopped doing the reactions. And I don't know what to do with them because I got a big pile in my closet. I know I'm not supposed to throw them out. I know I'm not supposed to throw them out in the regular garbage. I believe I once saw a battery recycling thing

at, I think it was like a cell phone store. I have to find out if that's true. But in the meantime, I've just accrued a massive pile of AA, AAA batteries that are inert. It's probably not good that I have that pile, but I don't know what to do. As long as you don't throw it away, I think you can keep piling, you know, until you figure it out. Yeah, keep the pile. I read a lot of pretty detailed things about battery recycling, and the gist is recycle them. They're full of things that just shouldn't go into a landfill, and then it's different

everywhere how the recycling works. So folks, Google your setup, and shout out to anybody like me or Katie with an e-waste sack that they feel like they should do something with immediately, but they have not yet. I mean, how many of us just have big bags of electronic waste that we don't know? It's just in a limbo. We don't know what to do with it. We don't want to throw it out because we don't want to contribute to a landfill. We're hoping someone recycles it and turns it into something useful, but we don't know who that person is. So we don't know where to bring it. Yeah. And I kind of hope that person is a robot, like a science fiction robot. That would just be appropriate thematically, you know?

Just goes door to door like, do you have batteries? I am building a friend please please give them to me i will eat them yum yum yeah and and also with rechargeable batteries that we mentioned it turns out there is a one sentence explanation of how that works because if you know how a regular battery works, where it's this cycle going on, a rechargeable battery can do that reaction in reverse and send the ions and electrons back. It's more complicated than the words I just said, but that's the gist, is a rechargeable battery can do this cycle both directions. Oh, interesting.

both directions. Oh, interesting. So you kind of, it's like you've got a, an hourglass of electrons and that's kind of how a normal battery works. With a rechargeable battery, you can force those, the sand back through to the beginning of the hourglass. Is that, is that good? Is that a good analogy? It's a pretty good analogy. Yeah. The only significant difference is that a rechargeable battery's reactants and materials degrade as it's used over and over and over again. And so eventually it wears out just through degradation. And hourglasses, I feel like, just work forever. But otherwise, it's a pretty good metaphor. Yeah. I don't know. I use my hourglasses hard. I slam those suckers down. Got little micro fractures in them that build up over time.

One of these days, it's just going to shatter sand everywhere. I take my boggle extremely seriously. Very hardcore boggle. Your neighbors hear huge crashing sounds from upstairs.'re like ah katie's playing taboo again oh boy holy cow so that's good i can still feel good about using rechargeable batteries because they they last at least they're not indefinite but they last longer than just a one-use battery yeah and as far as i could find, they're equally recyclable. And so, you know, they cost more,

and I think that's why people don't just use them for everything all the time. But otherwise, yeah, they're great. They're also harder to find. I didn't, like, find them in my grocery store or little local shops. I had to order them online, which I think is a bit of a barrier. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And then also, as we look at all forms of battery, basically everybody listening to

this uses at least one of two kinds of rechargeable battery a lot, because one kind is the lead acid battery, and that's the chemistry for the rechargeable battery in typical cars, you know, like a car battery for a gas powered car. And then the other famous kind of rechargeable battery is a lithium ion battery, which is in most consumer electronics, most electric vehicles. And it's also the huge batteries for storing renewable energy. Interesting. That's a modern battery that we'll talk about a lot at the end of the show.

OK, so regular like, what's it named? Pink bunny battery. I forgot. That's a lithium ion battery. I'm like, they're not a sponsor. We're calling them pink bunny batteries. Screw them. Pink bunny battery.

This topic kind of verges on what I found with the topic of fermentation, where it's almost just too varied and there's too much information. But yeah, basically with every battery, you can just look at what it's made of. And most of them are made of a set of chemicals, in particular metal for the anode and cathode. So I don't know. Yeah, it depends on which battery you bought. It's just that those chemicals have to facilitate the passage of electrons and creation of ions. Yeah.

And we've iterated new ways of doing that over several decades now, more than a century. Cool. Yeah. And setting aside lithium ion batteries going to that lead acid battery, the next number is 1860. The year 1860, that is when French inventor Gaston Planté invented the lead-acid battery, which was a huge leap forward in battery technology because it was the first rechargeable battery built by people. But what did he even put it in?

It's not like we had little RC radio control vehicles back then. What did he use that battery for? Yeah, it's a fun thing where the first batteries were huge. We had to work towards smaller ones. So that large, heavy lead-acid battery was for vehicles starting out. And I'm going to link Car and Driver magazine for a bunch of amazing stuff about late 1800s electric vehicles that ran on lead-acid batteries. Because by the late 1800s, there were multiple models of electric car. In 1896, people held a race where two models of electric car defeated a set of gas-powered cars in sprint

races. And in the early 1900s, there was a company called the Electric Vehicle Company that ran a fleet of electric taxis in New York City, Boston, and Baltimore. So why did we kind of drop the electrical vehicle in favor of the gas-powered vehicle? Was it just hard to have a battery that size? Did it take up too much space? Was it too dangerous? It was a bunch of things. Apparently, the batteries were not fantastic. And also, in the 1910s, we developed electric starters. And that moved us toward the most of the 1900s model of a gas powered car with one electric battery just for starting it and for a few other functions. And that became what people found to be especially

the most cost effective for Henry Ford's cars. Well, dang, that's too bad we didn't go for the battery versions, you know, several thousand dead polar bears later. Oh, well. But because it was very different, like, you know, a battery still needs power from somewhere. You're still probably burning coal or whatever to get that power. But that's true. But because it was very different, like, you know, a battery still needs power from somewhere. You're still probably burning coal or whatever to get that power. But that's true. But there was a point in the early 1900s, like that first decade where it was mostly battery powered electric vehicles in a lot of cases. That electric vehicle company for their fleet of New York City taxis, they had so many taxis going, they bought up an ice rink just to use it as a warehouse for charging batteries, bringing taxis in to swap in a charged battery. It was a whole way of doing vehicles.

There's a guy on the Zamboni honking like, hey, get out of my way. I got to condition the ice. I got a Zamboni. I'm Tony Zamboni and I got to smooth the ice. But you got all your batteries in the way. And the cabbies are like, your invention will never catch on, Zamboni. Never. And that in a very limited way it did.

And another amazing number here from this prime time of early electric vehicles, it's the date September 6th, 1901. September 6th, 1901. That is the date when U.S. President William McKinley was shot by an assassin and then rushed for care in an electric ambulance. Oh, wow. An electric vehicle brought him for care because around 1901, that was common. That was how it worked. I mean, first of all, I forgot William McKinley was a president. So that's on me.

But he was an imperialist. I don't mind that. That's fine. But that's incredible that, yeah, we had a functional electric vehicle that early. I know it's like a surprise to people that like we had a functional electrical vehicle in like the 80s that kind of got killed. But the fact we had functional ones even earlier, turn of the century, taking imperialists to hospitals. That's amazing. Yeah. And it was like early enough that cars were sort of rare in general, but the president

gets nice care. And so McKinley was at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. An assassin shot him twice with a handgun and they rushed McKinley to the expo's medical tent in an ambulance powered by a battery. Wow. Expo's medical tent in an ambulance powered by a battery. Wow. I know it looked like an old-fashioned car, but in my head, the story is like a Nissan Leaf picked him up or something. You know, it's very weird to imagine, even though I'm sure it looked like cars did back then.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just imagining like if they run out of batteries, it's like, hang on, we got to flip the car open, open up the container. And then they just have like a hundred of the little pink bunny batteries. Click, click, click, click, click. Hang on. I put this one upside down.

Hang on. Hold on, Mr. President. Next number here, going further back, it's around the year 1750. 1750, that is when Benjamin Franklin coined the name battery for an energy storage device. Oh, what did battery used to mean? It still means, but we don't really do it anymore, but it used to mainly mean a set of artillery. Ah, right. Like a set of cannons, especially on a fort or a ship.

cannons, especially on a fort or a ship. That's interesting. So how did he go from that to a small item filled with fluid that makes things go? Yeah, this is a mini takeaway within the numbers because takeaway number one, humans invented and repurposed the word battery before we invented electrical batteries. And Franklin coins this term because he applies it to a forerunner of batteries called a Leiden jar. Yeah, no, now this I've heard of. They're like the jars filled with some fluid. You got like a metal probe sticking out of it and people would touch him for fun, for funsies.

Yeah, it feels like sort of a stunt device. It definitely contains some static electric charge, but it feels like it's mainly for tricks and goofs. And then in the 1740s, when they were created, people were like, this is the most electricity I can put into a thing. So this is science. This is amazing. Science was measured by the amount of electricity I can put into a thing. So this is science. This is amazing. Science was measured by the amount of electricity you could put into a thing. That's why Benjamin Franklin tried to hit his kite with a lightning, because that would have made him the most science of them all. Yeah, that Franklin kite experiment is a prime example of pre-batteries electricity experiments, I'm thinking. Because it turns out that this creation of batteries, it's sort of a leap that we're about to explore, where people said, oh, I have a set of things and you activate it later.

Yeah. Before that, people use stuff like Leiden jars. And the thinking was electricity is around us. I'm going to gather electrical charge and just keep that charge going live and then use it later. It's a very different approach to I stored some chemicals that I activate later. It's let's have active electricity in some kind of box. Yeah, because he did use a Leyden jar to collect, quote, collected electric fire very copiously from some old guy named Priestley. Calling it electrical fire is also such old timey stuff. I love it. Yeah, but that's so interesting. So like the Leyden jar, you like collect electrical charge in the Leyden jar. Do you know like what is the chemical inside the Leyden jar? It's usually water and then metal foils. There's a few people who invented it in parallel and one of them lived in the town of Leiden in the Netherlands. So that's why it's

called a Leyden jar. I see. What happened is Franklin tried a sort of new use of Leyden jars where he networked a bunch of them. He figured out sort of the terminals of their charge, the positive and negative, and then linked all of them up. And when he looked at this big row of tall cylindrical jars made of glass, he said, oh, this row of cylindrical things reminds me of an artillery battery. Oh, OK. And so my set of Leiden jars, I will call this an electrical battery. Okay. Okay. That makes sense, I guess.

Thanks, Benjamin. Yeah. It is shaped like that. I can see why you picked that name. But again, it's totally different from batteries like this this is from an era when apparently people would take silk and glass and rub those together to generate static electricity and then try to put that into a jar like that was how they approached electrical storage it's it's not at all the same thing i mean i don't want to get crude but it's

kind of the same logic of like burping in a jar and then closing the jar really quick and then running up to your brother and opening the jar and be like, ha ha, that was my burp. Really? Yeah. But these lightened jars were able to hold the charge for at least some amount of time, right? They were, yeah. And it was apparently somewhat substantial as an amount of energy. Like, it doesn't do the applications that we want today, where like, I want a computer running to talk to you in another box to record this podcast and stuff. But, you know, you could put an amount of electricity in it and people valued it more for experimental purposes, but you could also do little stunts with it and use it up. Yeah. Batteries have always been sort of a black box to me. I never really bothered to understand how they work. And so I can see why they didn't make that leap that people have made for us in the modern day. Like, sure, it takes a leap to think of that.

Yeah. I mean, it's a novel technology. Of course, people are going to have fun with it and take it to parties. I feel like if anything, we're sort of becoming more and more jaded with like new discoveries and technologies. It must have been much easier to get bored back then. So as soon as someone's like, I captured Skyfire in a jar, you're going to be like, oh, yeah, give me your number. I guess they didn't have phones. Give me the number of your horse. Yeah. The next number is 50. 50 is the approximate number of years between Benjamin Franklin coining the name battery and then people actually inventing electrical batteries that we use today. Okay, so it took us a little bit of time to get that together.

And finding that was a very funny to me set of accidents, because takeaway number two, A very funny to me set of accidents, because takeaway number two. Humans invented electrical batteries thanks to two lucky accidents involving frogs and electric eels. Oh, you know, the best accidents involve frogs and electric eels I've found. Folks, don't go where Katie lives lives it's full of animal stuff uh listen we've got there's a town in italy where they have a snake festival where everyone just carries armfuls of snakes i'm not even kidding so if you're not into that if you're not into that i guess don't come to italy you mentioned that the other day i got a real kick out of that. Yeah. More Italy for me. I feel like Americans have so many stereotypes about Italy that the topic of Italy is kind of secretly incredibly fascinating, right? Like our stereotype of some kind of Tuscan villa where

people stomp wine is not as interesting as the snake festival. You know what I mean? That's cooler and weirder. Yeah, we got to do an episode on that. And I'm going to expense my visit to a Tuscan villa to your business account. That's right. You're welcome. Be sure to expense brown pants and a flowing white shirt for dressing the way they do. And a lute.

Let's see. Expense the lute for sure. You can expense a Captain Corelli mandolin if necessary. let's see i think expense the loot for sure yeah uh you can expense a captain corelli mandolin if necessary um let's see what else yeah because this story is about two italian scientists and they are from the late 1700s they are luigi galvani. No, come on. And Alessandro Volta. Okay. I'm over it now, but for a minute there, just like two Italian scientists, Luigi. Right. Yeah.

And Mario Mario. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess Luigi is a very common name. There's a reason that the Mario brothers have a Luigi. Mario is also a very common name here. So, yeah. But yeah, all right.

So these two scientists, they, I guess, were doing weird stuff with frogs and or electric eels? That's right. They each made a different mistake in a different animal experiment. And those changed to lead us to modern electric batteries.

Right. Did one guy accidentally like reanimate a frog? Is this where this is going? Yeah. Luigi Galvani. Oh no. It's like Frankenstein, except it was a little froggy who got hit by the lightning and then started dancing around and going, hello, my baby.

Hello, my sunshine. Right. In English. Yeah. And everything. Yeah. The thing that Galvani did in the 1780s is he was a scientist and a doctor. And so he was doing experiments involving dissecting frogs and also interested in electricity. Because in the late 1700s, everybody's like Benjamin Franklin. They think electricity is the hottest thing to talk about. Technically, it kind of is, but go on. Oh, yeah, literally, yeah. But here's one of our sources is the Whipple Museum at Cambridge

University. Here's their description of Galvani, what I consider getting lucky. They call it good fortune. Quote, while investigating the effect of atmospheric electricity on prepared specimens of frogs, Galvani and his assistants hung frog legs from an iron railing with brass hooks dangling from their spinal nerves. One hook touched the railing and the attached frog's leg kicked. Placing the legs and hooks on other metals and doing the same had a similar effect, end quote. So they were just putting up frog specimens and accidentally continued some electricity research. I'm just, the visual here is a good one to kind of like try to paint a mental picture of these frog legs and I guess the spinal nerves just dangling like drapery.

And then the little legs kicking when you attach them to metal rods. That's great. Good, I guess. Yeah, it's pretty gross. He from there said, I am the greatest electricity scientist in the world. said, I am the greatest electricity scientist in the world. I mean, if the guy had used like a wooden drying rack, he wouldn't have figured it out. Yeah, their next step was to try all kinds of other materials. And they found that wood and glass and resin did not do this. And so they got interested in metal. But then Galvani

misunderstood the discovery. He decided basically that an animal is like a network of Leiden jars. He thought that something called animal electricity is a substance in an animal and they move their body by sort of relocating the electricity from point to point. But that is sort of a set of words that sound like electricity and biological bodies, but that's not really what's happening. Yeah. And the scientist who challenges him on this and knows him personally is Alessandro Volta, who says that no, it's not this. Sounds like we're going to get a little bit of an Easter egg here. And Galvani's name became the verb galvanize instead. Both their names are down through the ages from making animal mistakes. Because Volta says, no, the electricity is not some sort of substance that was dormant inside the frog parts.

Volta says that it's a contact electricity process based on the metal, like the metal hooks that the stuff was hung on and metal tools that Galvani used. So Volta was right about that and then proceeded to be wrong about electric eels. Oh boy. It's a dangerous thing to be wrong about electric eels. Yeah, it sounds like a superhero villain origin story like he was in a vat of too many of them and terrorized rome or something yeah sure but uh we we did a whole eels episode and then we made electric eels the bonus show because they're not technically considered eels in a way we explain there they are bony knifefish. But another source here is Professor Timothy Jorgensen of Georgetown University. He says that Volta and many other scientists knew

that these bony knifefish called electric eels do have a special organ that generates electricity. It's different from that Galvani theory. It's one of the few real animal generating outward electricity things. Yes. And then Volta proceeds to mess up successfully. Here's Jorgensen quote, the fish's electric organ is composed of long stacks of cells that look very much like a roll of coins. So Volta cut out coin-like disks from sheets of various materials and started stacking them in different sequences to see if he could find any combination that would produce electricity. These stacking experiments kept yielding negative results until he tried pairing copper disks with zinc ones while separating the stacked pairs with paper disks wetted with salt water.

End quote. That's really interesting. So he's sort of copying this animal's design. But the way that those sort of like coils work in the in the knife fish are different from how a battery works. But still, he was lucky. yeah he he looked at the shape and if you drew it on a piece of paper of a knife fish electrical organ and then happened to stack sets of metal with a wet intermediary in a way that constructed what's basically a modern battery a modern battery has metal anodes and cathodes and a wet or dry intermediary electrolyte. And other batteries came from there. Volta sort of lucked into stacking two metals that happened to form a battery. But since 1800, when he did this,

we've done 200 plus years of iterating and making better and better configurations of batteries. And it all came from animal accidents, Volta misunderstanding eels, and then Galvani misunderstanding frogs that he shocked. That's amazing. That's so interesting. Yeah, it's so interesting that we just kind of bumbled our way into this technology. And it's a technology powering the show you're hearing right now and a bunch of other stuff. And we've done two takeaways and a lot of animal tricks.

We're going to take a quick break before delving into an ancient battery mystery and the most modern batteries in the world. Like I say every week, this podcast is brought to you by you, the people who go to MaximumFun.org slash join and directly support this podcast, Make It A Thing. Additional support this week comes from an absolutely perfect partner for SIF. It's an educational toys and games company called Upper Story and their game Turing Tumble. toys and games company called Upper Story and their game Turing Tumble. And this game's about computers because for many of us, the inside of every computer is a black box. We use them every day. We don't know what's going on in there. We don't know how it does what it does. Turing Tumble gives you a peek inside that black box. And it's for everybody. It's recommended for ages eight all the way up to adult. It can be played solo. It can be played collaboratively.

As you have fun with Turing Tumble, you get to see how simple switches connected together in clever ways do incredibly smart things, which has been wonderful for me to mess around with. I got Turing Tumble and as you heard a couple weeks ago, me and Katie were joking about knowing nothing about the insides of a computer and praying to some kind of podcasting god being the way we provide you with the show. Now I understand more about the logic of computer science and the overall method of how it works, and I got to do that by using my hands and my mind at the same time. This is a super fun game.

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Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Tons more numbers for the show. The stats and numbers haven't ended. The next number is up to 2,000 years old. Wow. Up to 2,000 years old. Wow. Up to 2,000 years old. That is the age of an item that some archaeologists called the Baghdad Battery.

Oh, that's a catchy name. Yeah, the internet loves this story, and I'm linking a couple sources that are more clear-headed about it, I think. It's probably not a battery, but it's something that some archaeologists thought was a battery from 2,000 years ago. Huh. Well, why did we think it was a battery? So this was found in 1938

by a German archaeologist named Wilhelm Koenig. In the Baghdad area, he discovered an artifact made of three parts. If people remember, a battery is three parts. Wow. The flat part parts the butt the bumpy part the nipple and the juice inside yeah the words pink bunny on it yeah sure yeah pink bunny battery so the three parts are a clay jar you know very ancient great but then crate. But then inside of that was a copper cylinder. And inside of that was an iron rod. So that is two metals and a container, you know, and they dated it to about 2000 years ago. And the thing is, this item is a huge outlier. There aren't really other examples of that

exact setup in the area or in the region from that time. Koenig said, this is a battery. I found a battery from 2000 years ago. This is ancient, amazing technology. I've done it. I mean, would iron and copper together facilitate the flow of electrons? Like, are those the right materials for a battery? Apparently, it is workable for a very weak battery, but you would also need at least a little bit of wiring, and we haven't found any wiring. It's not clear that this would have done a battery type thing at the time. The big hole in this belief that it's a battery is that it could have been a container for scrolls.

Ah, okay. Remember, it's a copper cylinder with an iron rod inside. Scroll holder. The iron rod might have been the spool, and then the copper cylinder is containing the whole scroll. That might actually be what this is. Or ancient teepee. For the ancient discerning butt.

Wilhelm Kinnick would be so upset if that's the answer. If it's for wiping your butt. I'd still be an astounding discovery that like we had toilet paper much early. If anything, that would be more mind boggling than a battery that like we had cracked the toilet paper code so early. That's true. I'd be more, I'm more upset when I run out of toilet paper. Run out of batteries, I just let that thing be dead for a while, you know, whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. And another number here, this is modern times. The number is more than 90%, more than nine zero percent. That is apparently how much of the world's energy storage capacity is in a technology called pumped storage, power pumped storage hydro power i had never heard of this oh yeah no oh yeah pump sort story the pump storage hydro power yeah yeah oh yeah yeah for sure yes you want to talk to me about pump storage hydropower yeah like i try to be cool and call it by an acronym but i have to reread it a bunch first like oh yeah good old p s h yep i know a lot about that good old push push yeah yeah no i yeah i know all about that pump storage hydropower but maybe for people who don't know that, you could talk a little bit about it.

According to an amazing piece for The New Yorker by Matthew Hudson, he calls this, quote, remarkable but unsung. Because pumped storage hydropower is a technology where we use two reservoirs of water and the two just reservoirs of water, like a big container of water, but they're at different elevations and it's a round about way of storing energy. What you do, if people have heard the episode about water towers, it reminds me of this. What you do is you release the water in the higher reservoir into the lower reservoir and you release it through a turbine. So you spin the turbine and get energy. And you do that usually when our power system is overloaded or we need more energy. And then later we use electric motors to push the water back up into

the first reservoir. So it's not like infinite energy, but it is kind of a roundabout version of a battery. It's a way of storing something to generate energy. That's interesting because like the potential energy of the water that is high up is the energy storage, but you're using, so where does that immediate electricity that you need to pump the water up high, because that's the energy that you're storing. Where does that come from? Yeah, you're spending energy when you pump it. So, you know, a coal power plant or whatever. Yeah. Apparently this is odd technology because we've had it for a long time. The Department of Energy says the first facilities for this opened in the 1890s

in Italy and Switzerland. The U.S. tried it first in the 1930s, but we just didn't use it a ton because when you're running on fossil fuels, you just start burning more fuel when you want it. And now in renewable energy times, one of the big tasks of renewable energy is batteries. Like, oh, we should construct batteries out of metal and chemicals to hold energy. And this has not become a real alternative worldwide or in a primary way. But this is our other idea for massive battery storage of energy. Yeah, because energy storage, I know, is like getting really good energy storage for renewables is something that is a really important thing. My brother actually works on that. He, okay, if I try to, if I try to explain what my brother does on a podcast

and I get it wrong, I will never hear the end of it. But yeah, essentially like looking at like the way in which we store and transfer energy from renewables. If Katie's brother is listening, she was also distracted by a burst of Italian radio. She barely got those words out. That's actually very impressive that she said that. By the way, I was going to call my brother and ask about that. See if he knows with his electricity knowledge. How did they get in my walls?

And I wonder why he hangs up on me. No, no, he's a good brother. He doesn't hang up on me, even when I talk about the Italians in my walls. That's so cool that he does that. That's awesome. It's just, I feel like this fact is almost easy to gloss over, but I want to do a quick takeaway number three. The modern world has paired water reservoirs as a form of giant non-chemical batteries. Yeah, it's amazing.

The U.S. has 43 of these facilities and has room for more, according to the Department of Energy. I wish it'd be cool if they also made it like a big fountain, a decorative fountain. I know that's probably not very efficient. But you know how there's like the peeing lad of Belgium? I don't really know. But you know, all these fancy fountains and water coming out of a lion's mouth. If we just have put big statues, right? Like a barfing lion, we could have these all over the place and it'd be really pretty.

They're all that Monty Python illustration of guys playing trumpets with their butts. At last, their energy is solved. I feel like we'd get a lot more funding for renewables if we if we did that. Yeah. And one last set of numbers for the main show here, starting with the date October 8th, 1958. October 8th of 1958. That is when Swedish doctors implanted the first internal pacemaker in a human heart. In a human heart. Okay. Yeah.

So this is really, pacemakers are so interesting to me because you basically have, like our heart has an electric rhythm. We have this, like muscle movement, all our muscles in our body, like the way our muscles work involves very, very small, like, but, you know, significant, like electrical pulses. And then that's what happens with the heart, you can measure sort of these electrical pulses. So a pacemaker is something that helps regulate electrical rhythm that for some people kind of gets out of whack. It's not necessarily like restarting the heart, but it is regulating that rhythm. That's right. Yeah. And earlier, I sort of sped through Galvani's theories because explaining exactly how he's wrong is very difficult. There is forms of electricity in our bodies and when our neurons fire and stuff. And a pacemaker is a machine that sends electrical impulses to the human heart to order it to beat more regularly. Yeah. But you can't plug yourself into the wall all the time if you have a pacemaker,

first of all, because that's inconveniently. Secondly, because you'll get a tally at radio playing through your heart. So you must have some kind of battery in the pacemaker. Yeah, this is a thing I had not really thought about. And it's one of the ways batteries are a fermentation type topic. They are universal. They are all over the place. Everything that's a machine and not plugged into a wall pretty much needs a battery. And that includes stuff like pacemakers inside our bodies. And so there's an amazing story about it in a book source for this. It's called Charged, A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner,

professor at Wellesley College. He says that in 1958, Swedish doctors gave Arne Larsson, the world's first pacemaker in a person. His heart was beating too slowly and irregularly, and that changed it. But the next number here is three hours, because that is how long it took for Arne Larson's pacemaker to fail. Uh-oh. It ran for three hours, and then they needed to replace it with another pacemaker. That only lasted one week. Oh, dear.

And the next number here is 18 surgeries across 20 years. Was this on a person? Yeah. Arne Larsson needed 18 surgeries from 1958 to 1978 to update or adjust his pacemaker. And Turner says the main reason was batteries. his pacemaker and Turner says the main reason was batteries. I see. So did they, I assume they didn't know it would only last a week. Like they thought it was going to last longer. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. Cause otherwise it's pretty cruel like to just keep, keep constantly doing surgery on a guy. Yeah. And yeah, they've kept thinking they had a battery that would work a long time, but either it stopped working or lost charge or there was some other issue that threatened to

have Larson's heart backslide and slow down. The story ends positively. Oh, good. Turner says that in 1978, in that 18th surgery, Larson received a pacemaker with a revolutionary new kind of battery developed just a few years earlier, the lithium ion battery. Oh, okay. That we now use in a bunch of stuff today. Listeners are probably holding or next to something that uses one. Yeah.

Like after 18 surgeries, he's like, guys, either try a new battery or just put a zipper in because this is getting a little old yeah right just i'm imagining little advent calendar doors like just so you know come on just something simple yeah it's a little cork that you unplug and apparently that's also part of the evolution of pacemaker technology as they figured out how to put the battery part pretty close to the outside of the human body. So it's a very easy procedure now to change one of these. But that was a key step. So you go through like a little hole and just like put the battery.

God, we were talking about how hard it is to put batteries in like a normal thing, like a remote. Just a doctor, you're putting this battery in, making sure the little nipple side is on the right side of the spring. I know these batteries are not going to look like a pink bunny battery. A pink bunny battery. If I keep thinking of those little racks of AA batteries by a checkout stand at a grocery store or Home Depot, if I saw someone grab the pacemaker battery, I would let them check out ahead of me. They could go ahead. That would be fine. I would take a pass. I'm just imagining it being like installing something in your chest where it's like you have the little plastic cover that you slide off of a remote control and you just put the batteries in.

I'm sure it's more complicated. There's scalpels involved. Johns Hopkins website called it an outpatient procedure. There's incision, but it's easy apparently now. Right. patient procedure. There's incision, but it's easy apparently now. And Arne Larsson really benefited from this simple battery technology change. Switching from a mercury and zinc-based battery to a lithium-ion battery changed his life. He lived many more decades to age 86. And when they first gave him a lithium-ion battery, the engineers estimated that it would last 340 million heartbeats.

That seems like a lot. Yeah, it's a little more than a decade for a human, because we are heartbeats a lot, but still, we'll talk more in the bonus about this kind of battery. The lithium-ion battery is totally revolutionary, and the scale of what it can do is really cool. Yeah, yeah, that's excellent. It's better than, like, a surgery every week, battery is totally revolutionary and the scale of what it can do is really cool. Yeah. Yeah.

That's excellent. It's better than like a surgery every week so they can shove a new battery in. Yeah. I had heard of pacemakers, but finding out that the first guy to have one went through all this, it feels very heroic to me. It does. And I'm glad batteries supported him. very heroic to me and i'm glad batteries supported him i mean yeah we have to thank people who voluntarily you know allowed themselves to be sort of the the uh pioneers for uh surgery by

being the recipients of these medical devices yeah and you don't have to have some ancient crummy battery inside your potty anymore really good just a big pot but then if you do you can also put your scrolls there i guess that's a fun place to put your will if you're kooky but otherwise i'm not into it. Yeah. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode. Let's take a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, people invented and repurposed the word battery before we invented the object, the electrical battery. Takeaway number two, humans invented electrical batteries thanks to two lucky accidents involving frogs and electric eels. Takeaway number three, the modern world has sets of paired water reservoirs that work as giant non-chemical batteries. And a humongous set of numbers this week, everything from ancient fake batteries to

presidential assassinations to heartwarming pacemakers. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the technological miracle and explosive details of lithium ion batteries. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of 12 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows,

a dozen dozen, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include online writing by Professor Timothy J. Jorgensen of Georgetown University, plus digital resources from the Whipple Museum at Cambridge University, the Smithsonian, National Geographic, and the New Yorker. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional

land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples, also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and hey, join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There's a link in the description to join. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 94. That is about the topic of dogs

playing poker. That's right, dogs playing poker. Katie and I explore the entire history of that funny painting and the pop culture touchstone. Also, fun fact, that is one of four SIF episodes about various paintings. So I recommend those episodes. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.