Thomas Jacob Williams - Spring Semester - 2024
Batteries today are the material basis of our modern technological ecosystem whether in our phones, laptops, headphones, or several other wireless devices so it is important to have an appreciation of batteries' developmental history and the effect it has had and the questions that it can give us going forward to create better technologies.
The term battery as we know it now was actually different from the battery defined in 1749 when “battery” was first coined by Thomas Jefferson. However, the battery Thomas Jefferson wrote about was actually two capacitors to create an electric current (1). The term “battery” today more commonly refers to chemical batteries, which was first documented by Alessandro Volta in 1800 in the so-called “Voltaic Pile” consisting of Zinc-Salt Water-Copper pattern (2). There were a few problems however with this configuration that made it impractical, such as corrosion and low voltage, and as such scientific societies in Britain at the time were experimenting to find out solutions to these problems. One of these societies called The Royal Society was pertinent to the fixing of these problems. The society itself was created in 1660 by several different experimentalists, teachers, and nobles at the time with an underlying philosophy of finding the causes of phenomena and garnering knowledge of the universe through experimentation. Through different royal charters in 1662, 1663, 1669 and the creation of one of the first scientific journals called “Philosophical Transactions” in 1752, the society then became the scientific authority for the royalty in britain which helped to garner the society’s prestige behind the scientific community. At this time, the society had their hands in all aspects of scientific study such as medicine, instrumentation, botany, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and chemistry (3). In 1836, this authority paid off in the creation of the first practical battery called the “Daniell Cell” created by a fellow of the society named John Frederic Daniell (4). John Frederic Daniell became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1813 originally working with sugar mills, which he soon after found the business life not for him, and instead joined the Royal Society to study meteorology. A few years later after joining the Royal Society he would go on to study at King’s College of London as a chemistry professor which would lead him to the works of Michael Faraday. Thereafter he would send regular letters on his experimentation in electrochemistry which would bring the founding and further perfection of the Daniell Cell (5)(6). The Daniell Cell on its creation was actually called the “constant battery” by Daniell because in its creation it was the first recorded battery to give a constant current without resistance from other side-reactions such as hydrogen forming and depositing on the surface of the metals. The two metals in the “constant battery” were the same used with Volta’s battery, i.e. copper and zinc, with instead an electrolyte of copper sulfate/sulfuric acid for cheapness and reliability without the harmful side reactions found with the more popular options for batteries or the zinc-nitric acid-platinum batteries (7). In the 19th century “constant battery” was mainly used in telegraphy due to its reliable current and later on was used to define the unit of the Volt today (8). The constant battery was however not the only useful battery that was created by the Royal Society with other notable scientists working on other experiments such as William Robert Grove, John Goodman, and Christopher Dresser. William Robert Grove being the more famous of the three being the creator of what is now known as the “fuel cell”, which was categorized in 1842 as a “gas battery” and his variation of the “constant battery” known as the Grove Cell documented in 1838. The original complete “gas battery” that Grove made in 1842 was made of two tubes one with a mixture of acid-platinum-hydrogen gas and the other with a mixture of acid-platinum-oxygen and when connected in a circuit it would produce a current and water on the combining of hydrogen gas and oxygen (9). The paper that summarizes his work on the gas battery is called “on the gas voltaic battery, voltaic action of phosphorus, sulphur, and hydrocarbons” in which different configurations of the gas battery were tested where he replaces the hydrogen with phosphorus, sulfur, and hydrocarbons which all combust with oxygen to create a voltaic current demonstrating the possibility of non-conducting metals to be used to create a electric current (10). The fuel cell itself however was not recognized at the time as practical but rather an interesting theoretical system. The fuel cell however later grew in prominence in 1958 when the Apollo project had used them for their electrical systems due to their reliability over long periods of time and low weight. They are now prominent due to their use in hydrogen gas energy storage (11). The gas battery itself was crudely documented in 1839 when Grove was tweaking the “constant battery” to create what is now known as a Grove Cell. The Grove cell was the first choice for telegraphers before the Daniell Cell which has the same exact setup as the “constant battery” but this time with nitric acid instead of sulfuric acid which allows for higher voltages and current. However it was later replaced as it also came at the cost of the emission of toxic nitrous oxide gas (12). The other two fellows, John Goodman and Christopher Dresser, which are much less known, experimented with other variations of cathodes and anodes to create interesting experimental case studies for further research. John Goodman in particular experimented with potassium as a cathode dipped in a crude oil connected with a copper wire to platinum anode in sulfuric acid. When the potassium was dipped into the sulfuric acid a current was produced. The reason John Goodman experimented with potassium was due to the high flammability of potassium which made it seem like a good candidate for a voltaic arrangement (13). Christopher Dresser on the other hand experimented with a variation of the Grove Cell using a zinc anode and a carbon cathode. The carbon cathode was obtained from pure carbon deposits of coal distillation destruction, or heating of coal so it decomposes, in which the carbon cathode replaces the more expensive platinum cathode but accordingly produces similar current (14). Both of these were just experimental designs and unlike the Grove or Daniell cell they were never made practically. Although little is documented on these two designs there are likely two reasons why they were not used. For Goodman’s design the author noted the potassium being so reactive that it popped out of its placement easily disrupting the current and causing safety hazards. For Dresser’s design although the carbon cathode could be cheap it also took the author having to scour through many different variations of pure carbon that were made during destructive distillation and would have required much more research on the manufacturing side. These two designs however both produce interesting questions and research proposals that could be elaborated upon, especially now in our need for energy storage technologies.
Through looking at the past accomplishments of the royal society it is clear that batteries were integral for the information golden age of today, the practicality of space travel, and the furthering of sustainable development. It also highlights the need to not neglect past research, as while it may be less rigorous than now, it can lead to clues for new technologies and possibly prevent unnecessary work. Overall, this article only scrapes the surface of the hallmark of electrochemistry research in Britain at the time and there is more to be discovered.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(1) Allerhand, A. Who Invented the Earliest Capacitor Bank (“Battery” of Leyden Jars)? It’s Complicated [Scanning Our Past]. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2018, 106, 496–503. https://doi.org/10.1109/jproc.2018.2795846.
(2) Finn, B. S. Origin of Electrical Power. Powering The Past: A Look Back. National Museum of American History, 2002. https://americanhistory.si.edu/powering/past/prehist.htm (accessed 2024-04-10).
(3) Tinniswood, A. The Royal Society and the invention of modern science; Head of Zeus, 2019.
(4) Williams, T. A picture of a letter from John Frederic Daniell to Michael Faraday on the constant battery(first page), March 15th, 2024.
(5) Bettany, G. T. Daniell, John Frederic. Dictionary of National Biography 1885-1900. Wikimedia foundation, 2020. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Daniell,_John_Frederic (accessed 2024-04-27).
(6) Williams, T. A picture of a letter from John Frederic Daniell to Michael Faraday on the constant battery(first page), March 15th, 2024.
(7) Williams, T. A picture of a letter from John Frederic Daniell to Michael Faraday on the constant battery(first page), March 15th, 2024.
(8) Jayson, J. S. The Daniell Cell, Ohm’s Law, and the Emergence of the International System of Units. American Journal of Physics, 2014, 82, 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4826445.
(9) Grove, W. R. XXIV. On Voltaic Series and the Combination of Gases by Platinum. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1839, 14, 127–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/14786443908649684.
(10) Williams, T. A picture of the unpublished manuscript(first page) "On the gas voltaic battery. Voltaic action of phosphorus, sulphur, and hydrocarbons”, March 15th, 2024.
(11) Cohen, M.; Brown, M.; Gary, K. Fuel Cell Origins: 1880-1965 https://americanhistory.si.edu/fuelcells/origins/origins2.htm.
(12) Grove, W. R. XXIV. On Voltaic Series and the Combination of Gases by Platinum. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1839, 14, 127–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/14786443908649684.
(13) Williams, T. A picture of the unpublished manuscript(first page) “On a new and practical form of voltaic battery of the highest powers, in which potassium forms the positive element”, March 15th, 2024.
(14) On the Application of Carbon Deposited in Gas Retorts as the Negative Plate in the Nitric Acid Voltaic Battery. Abstracts of the Papers Communicated to the Royal Society of London, 1851, 5, 928–929. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspl.1843.0227.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank UAH Honors College for providing the funding for this trip, the archivist Rupert Baker and picture librarian Katherine Marshall for allowing me to use images of old documents, and Reagen Grimsly for teaching this class.
