The Battery is a "popular" i.e. a semi-technical history of the battery. The battery is one of the pivotal technologies that enabled the modern technical world.
What began as a long-running dispute in biology, involving a dead frog's twitching leg, a scalpel, and a metal plate, would become an invention that transformed the history of the world: the battery. From Alessandro Volta's first copper-and-zinc model in 1800 to twenty-first-century technological breakthroughs, science journalist Henry Schlesinger traces the history of this essential power source and demonstrates its impact on our lives.
Volta's first battery not only settled the frog's leg question, it also unleashed a field of scientific research that led to the discovery of new elements and new inventions, from Samuel Morse's telegraph to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone to Thomas Edison's incandescent lightbulb. And recent advances like nanotechnology are poised to create a new generation of paradigm-shifting energy sources.
Schlesinger introduces the charlatans and geniuses, paupers and magnates, attracted to the power of the battery, including Michael Faraday, Guglielmo Marconi, Gaylord Wilshire, and Hugo Gernsback, the publisher and would-be inventor who coined the term "science fiction." A kaleidoscopic tour of an ingenious invention that helped usher in the modern world.
The book is full of interesting factoids, for example the origin of the popular expression "OK" derives from the telegraphers term "Open Key and Prepare to Transmit". It also dispatches a few myths, for example "The pony express, which still occupies a cherished place in America's mythology, was actually a financial disaster, in large part because of the telegraph. Launched in April 1860, the relay mail service that spanned a continent couldn't compete with the telegraph which opened for business in October 1861. Within weeks, the pony express, which carried a letter coast to coast in ten days, was closed down after loosing money for its backers.
Aside from the lack of technical detail, my biggest disappointment is the lack of detail regarding the technology innovations of the last 10 or so years. Non-the-less this is an interesting work that I very much enjoyed reading.
Stewart/G3YSX
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