The beginning of the nineteenth century brings us at last to the question: who invented the battery? The short answer is that in 1799, an Italian named Alessandro Volta, created the first device recognizable as the modern battery.

The long answer is all of the history of electricity that you’ve read up to this point, as well as the work of Luigi Galvani.

To understand how Volta made his discovery, it’s necesssary to understand the state of the electrical theory in the late eighteenth century. The theory had been limited to electrostatics before Benjamin Franklin’s experiments revealed current electricity. In explaining the origin of electricity, scientists followed their national prejudices. British scientists adhered to the single fluid theory advanced by Franklin. The French, additionally influenced by the physics advances of Pierre Simon LaPlace (1749-1827),  adhered to Coulomb’s two-fluid theory. The Italians opposed Coulomb’s theory. But in the late 1700s, the revolutionary experiments of Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), a physician, anatomist and professor at the University of Bologna, would bolster the world’s knowledge of current electricity, creating a platform that Alessandro Volta would build on.

Galvani and his wife Lucia were dissecting frogs near an electrostatic generator when they noticed that as Lucia placed the scalpel into particular muscles, they contracted violently. This observation spurred Galvani to investigate, and he soon found that two metals placed in contact with the frog’s muscle would cause it to twitch. Galvani termed his discovery “animal electricity,” and published a work in 1791 detailing his experiments (De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius). To explain animal electricity, Galvani hypothesized that the frogs’ legs contained a sort of electric fluid, which was retained after death. Thus Galvani discovered current generated by a chemical action, or galvanic current.

(Galvani’s work inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, in which dead flesh is reanimated using lightning; the term galvanism originally referred to this process but has fallen out of use. Galvani’s name now survives in the word galvanization: the process of electroplating metals, typically steel, with other metals, usually zinc and chromium, to prevent corrosion.)

When Alessandro Volta read Galvani’s work, he was unsatisfied by Galvani’s explanation for the electricity’s origin. Volta was well-positioned to comment; he had already experimented extensively with electrostatics and he had improved and popularized an electrostatic generator operating through induction, the electrophorus. (Volta is often credited with inventing the electrophorus, but it was actually invented in 1764 by Swedish scientist Johan Carl Wilcke.)

Through repeating Galvani’s experiments, Volta realized that electricity was only produced when two different metals were used in the circuit, and that some metal combinations produced more twitching than others—an important discovery in the creation of the battery.

Volta paired different combinations of metals and tested the electrical charge produced between them with an electrometer. He discovered the following combinations:
POSITIVE    NEGATIVE
Zinc                Copper
Lead               Silver
Tin                 Gold
Iron                Graphite

Through further experimentation, Volta realized that fluid facilitated the electrical flow. Volta then placed a piece of tinfoil and a silver coin on his tongue and noticed a sour taste; he tried it again with a silver spoon and a copper wire and got a similar result. He even placed a metal on his forehead and another in his mouth and claimed that he saw a flash in his mind. Based on the experiments with placing the metals in his mouth, he realized that a liquid would improve conductivity. He tested a number of liquids before choosing a strong solution of saltwater, brine, and soaking cardboard discs in it. He then stacked zinc and copper pairs between cardboard discs, producing the voltaic pile—the first battery. The year was 1799.

The famous couronne de tasses, or “crown of cups” experiment, was Volta’s next battery form. The first version was a series of cups filled with brine daisy-chained together with alternating pieces of zinc and silver. The second version consisted of a voltaic pile connected to a cup of brine to keep the cardboard discs moist. Finally, the third version connected two voltaic piles with two cups of brine.

Volta’s pile showed the dramatic difference between galvanic and static electricity. Unlike electrostatic electricity and lightning, there was no flash of power. The galvanic electricity of the voltaic pile was low voltage but high amperage. These terms were not yet in use; Volta said that the pile had low electrical tension but high current. In contrast, frictional electricity has high voltage and low amperage.

Volta himself was unsure of the source of the voltaic pile’s power and reverted to the fluid theory; he theorized that the metal combinations were somehow freeing static electrical fluid which then traveled through the whole pile.

In 1801, Volta gave a series of lectures and demonstrations in Paris, where he was assisted by Napoleon Buonaparte himself, who was at that time a member of the Institut de France. Volta was awarded a special gold medal and a pension, the first of many honors.

Scientific thought dating back to Aristotle was heavily focused on reasoning and thought experiments; hence the name “natural philosophy.” The scientific method as we know it today did not exist until thinkers like Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Sir Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon outlined its steps. Natural philosophy advanced to the scientific method known today with the advent of empiricism; the process of observing a problem, hypothesizing an answer and conducting experiments to test the hypothesis finally allowed science to move beyond its medieval stagnation.

In 1600, during the very beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, an Englishman named William Gilbert made a breakthrough on the topic of electricity.

Gilbert, who later became court physician to Queen Elizabeth I, wrote a work that outlined his theories of magnetism and electricity; the treatise, called De Magnete for short, has been described as the “beginning of the science of electricity” (Baigrie 10). Gilbert explained magnetism through his belief that the earth was a giant magnet, or terrella. Importantly, he coined the term “electricity” to explain the force of attraction in “electrics”—his term for electrified objects. He was the first to include objects other than amber in the list of objects that could be electrified. He outlined a theory of electricity that would last for centuries: the force behind electric attraction was an invisible liquid, or effluvium, that responded to electrical charge by pushing the “electrics” together or apart. He describes effluvia as more like a force than a physical substance.

The mathematician and philosopher René Descartes was responsible for the next evolution in electrical theory.

Descartes believed that all natural phenomena could be explained through physical, mechanical effects; he rejected the idea of unseen forces, a component of the effluvia theory in his era, as scientifically inadequate. In 1644, Descartes published a piece asserting that magnetism is caused by mechanical actions, not unseen forces. His explanation of magnetism involved the movement of minute particles, but had many complicated and contradictory aspects.

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Robert Boyle (1627-1681), who is best known for Boyle’s law of gases, was inspired by Descartes’s theory of the “mechanization of matter.” He elaborated on and refined Gilbert’s theories of electric attraction in results he published in 1675.

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-The first electrostatic generator was invented in 1660 by Otto von Guericke (1602-1686). The generator consisted of a quickly rotating shaft with a sulphur ball on the end; it was difficult to use and therefore did not gain popularity. Guericke was the first to observe that charge could travel through a linen thread (the principle of electric conduction) and that similarly electrified bodies repelled one another, but he did not follow up on these observations. Guericke is best known for his work with vacuums, which helped to discredit Aristotle’s idea that “nature abhors a vacuum.”

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In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton’s monumental work Principia Mathematica changed existing theories of physics and mathematics. Although Newton (1643-1727) was instrumental in changing scientific thinking in his age, his experiments into electricity were modest—he trapped bits of paper under glass and charged the glass through rubbing, causing the paper bits to move. He concluded that glass could be an electric, and that “effluvia” could penetrate it effectively.

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The first precursor to the electric lightbulb can be dated to 1709, when Francis Hauksbee (1660-1713), a student of Robert Boyle, built a machine for rotating amber on wool in an air-evacuated vessel. At first he rubbed an air-evacuated ball containing mercury, but later experimented with the ball without mercury. By applying high-speed friction to the evacuated glass ball, he produced a glow within the ball bright enough to read words written in capital letters. It would be 200 years before Thomas Alva Edison made the first commercially-viable lightbulb.

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English scientist Stephen Gray (1666-1736) shook up the effluvia theory by discovering conductivity. When conducting experiments in static electricity with a glass jar, Gray noticed that the cork in its mouth was attracting bits of lint and dust. Gray wondered if the attraction power could be extended beyond the cork. Within a few days of experimentation, he found that he could transmit electricity 765 feet through a packthread and 850 through a wire. He also found that he needed to insulate the conductors from ground contact, and noticed that bends in the conductor made no difference in the transmission. He also dropped the thread off of a tower and noticed that gravity made no difference in the transmission of electricity.

Before Gray’s experiments, it had been thought that the effluvia were inseparably connected to objects, but Gray had shown that electricity could be transmitted long distances. Charles François de Cisternay Dufay (1698-1739) repeated Gray’s experiments and decided that there were two kinds of electricity: vitreous, which came from glass objects; and resinous, which came from objects such as silk, sealing wax and paper. Additionally, Dufay beat Gray’s record by conducting electricity a distance of 1,256 feet on wet packing thread.

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In 1745 the invention of the Leyden jar, the first capacitor, stimulated interest in scientists throughout the world. Dutch scientist Pietr van Muscchenbroek is usually credited with inventing the Leyden jar, although German scientist Ewald G. von Kleist independently created a similar device in the same year. (The device was named after the University of Leyden in the Netherlands, where Musschenbroek was a professor.) During Musschenbroek’s experiments attempting to isolate and trap the static electrical charge, Musschenbroek placed a wire in a cork on a jar of water, then hung the jar from a gun barrel. The gun barrel, which hung suspended from silk threads, received charge from a nearby static electricity generator. When Musschenbroek touched the jar with one hand and the jar with the other, he was surprised by a powerful electric shock.

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Musschenbroek improved the Leyden jar with later experiments by using thinner glass jars and covering both the inside and outside of the jars with tinfoil. He switched the original wire and cork to a stronger brass wire attached to a lid made from a brass knob and varnished wood. He half-filled the jar with water and inserted a wire that had been charged by an electricity generator. Under ideal conditions, the jar could store an electric charge for several days. Musschenbroek also found that by placing multiple charged jars in a metal pan, he could increase their effects.

The Leyden jar experiments inspired scientists around the world to make further experiments in electricity. French scientist Jean-Antoine Abbe Nollet (1700-1770) tested the effects of Leyden jars on animals and plants, improving the design of the jars over the course of the experiments. But the advances in electrical theory made by American founding father Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) were more significant.

Franklin was fascinated by the Leyden jars, but in America, he was isolated from recent European discoveries. However, his isolation may have helped him develop his independent theories on the nature of electricity. Franklin and his co-experimenters built a hand-cranked electrical generator and acquired a Leyden jar in 1747, and experimented with the effectiveness of a blunt-ended conductor versus a pointed conductor in drawing a charge across a gap. Franklin and his colleagues soon determined that a spark would leap much farther to reach a pointed conductor than a blunt-ended one. This result would later guide Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod.

Franklin developed a new theory of electricity based on his experiments: he hypothesized that there was only one form of electricity. All of objects contained a quantity of “electrical fire” which was activated when an object was rubbed. He called objects that give off electrical fire “electrically negative,” since they lose electrical fire, and objects that gained it “electrically positive.” Today we use the opposite terminology—charged objects are positive and objects receiving charge are negative.

Through further experimentation with Leyden jars, Franklin noticed similarities of behavior between the electrical sparks they produced and lightning. Eager to compare lightning to the flashes within the Leyden jars, he prepared a silk kite with an iron key attached, and during a thunderstorm in July 1752, he performed his famous kite experiment. First, he observed that the kite string’s fibers were standing apart if charged; he then touched the iron key and observed the spark that flew from it. It looked exactly like the charges within the Leyden jars. He brought a Leyden jar up to the key and was able to charge it, showing that the energy within the skies and within the generator used to charge the Leyden jars was the same—it was electricity.

In 1748, Franklin was the first to use the term “battery” to describe a series of Leyden jars. (A battery that is believed to have been owned by Franklin can be seen at the Ben Franklin Tercentenary collection here.) In addition to this important contribution, Franklin invented a series of electrified novelties, such as a toy spider that jiggled its legs when brought close to a Leyden jar and a portrait of King George with an electrified crown that produced a “high-treason” shock when touched. In one grand gesture, he held a picnic in which he butchered turkeys through an electrical shock from a large battery.

While Franklin’s single-fluid theory of electricity resolved some inconsistencies within electrical theory, it left other questions unanswered. For example, why are two objects with the same charge repelled from one another? French engineer Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806) built a machine that quantified the strength of this repulsion. Coulomb’s torsion balance experiments allowed him to formulate Coulomb’s law, a key element of electrical theory to the present day. It states that the force of electrostatic attraction or repulsion is directly proportional to the product of the two charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. (Coulomb was unaware that the reclusive English scientist Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) had independently discovered Coulomb’s inverse square law, but his work would not be published until a century later, through the efforts of Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell. Cavendish also anticipated Ohm’s law, among many other findings.)

To explain the existence of the opposing or repelling forces, which Franklin’s theory left unanswered, Coulomb reverted to the two fluid-theory of electricity. However, his findings were rejected in England, America and, importantly, in Italy, where two of the fathers of the battery were at work: Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta.

It wasn’t one scientist laboring in isolation who perfected the process of “storing electricity” in an electrochemical cell. American readers may think of Ben Franklin and his kite, while will Italians may think of Alessandro Volta, who built the first battery (laying aside the question of Baghdad batteries for the moment). Each scentist contributed, but none could have done it without the foundation laid by other thinkers. As Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That could be the motto for every scientist in history.

• Electricity and the ancients

Humanity’s first encounters with electricity likely came from lightning and, strangely enough, from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian sources mention electric fish called the “Thunderer of the Nile” (possibly the electric catfish, Malapterurus electricus. Roman authors such as Pliny the Elder also knew that shocks from the fish could numb you, and that shocks could travel along certain objects. Also, Roman physician Scribonius Largus reported an early forerunner of electroshock therapy using electric fish.

The first person known to have noticed the effects of static electricity was Thales of Miletus, who lived c. 640-546 BC. He observed the strange effects when he rubbed amber on silk; bits of straw and grass were attracted to the amber. He also attempted to find the force powering the lodestone, a powerful natural magnet. Thales reasoned that only living things could act, and therefore, the amber, the silk and the lodestone must be alive. Thales’s experiments gave us a critical word in the vocabulary of electricity and atomic theory: “elektron,” which means amber in Greek.

Today we know that electricity is the movement of subatomic particles along a current, but it was the Greek philosopher Democritus (ca. 460 BC - ca 370 BC) who laid the foundations for modern atomic theory. He hypothesized that all matter could broken down to units that could not be divided or destroyed. He called these units “atoma.” Although Democritus’s ideas were flawed—for one thing, atoms are not indestructible—they were immensely ahead of their time. It would be two thousand years before great strides were again made in atomic theory.

Did the ancient Mesopotamians invent the battery 2,000 years before the Europeans? Archeologists continue to debate that possibility based on artifacts nicknamed “Baghdad batteries.” In 1936, clay jars with iron rods encased in copper in their mouths were found near Baghdad. There are signs of corrosion on the inside of the jars, leading some to conjecture the presence of an acidic electrolyte. The original archeologist dated the jars to between 200 and 300 BC, but modern archeologists question the methodology of the dig in which the jars were found. If the jars are in fact batteries, what were they used for?

Some conjecture that priests may have shocked themselves or worshippers with the jars as part of a religious ritual. Perhaps the jars were used for medical treatment, as the Romans used electric fish. Another possibility, viewed by least likely by archeologists, is that the batteries were used to electroplate jewelry. The least exciting conjecture is that the jars could have simply been used for storage—they are very similar to jars containing scrolls that were found nearby.

• The Middle Ages

The wet compass—a magnetized needle floating in water—was developed in China around the year 1000. The first mention of the compass in Europe comes from a work by an Englishman named Alexander Neckam in 1180.

In 1269, a French scholar named Petrus Peregrinus of Marincourt wrote a letter that details magnetic laws of polarity and includes a plan to build a dry compass. Because Peregrinus placed emphasis on experimentation rather than thought, he was later celebrated as the first experimental scientist by Roger Bacon, one of the earliest practitioners of the empirical method. But until the development of the scientific method during the Age of Enlightenment, there were few further advances in the nature of electricity.

Can you image a world today without batteries? A world without the wireless power? It would be hard in today’s mobile power society, where cell phones and laptops are the norm.  This begs the question, why were batteries invented so long ago and what purpose did they serve? And what should I expect to see in the near future?

Ever since we discovered the amazing potential of electrical energy, early scientists worked towards capturing and storing it for convenient use.

The First Discovery

In 1936, German archaeologist Wilhelm Konig uncovered what he believed was an ancient battery dating back from 250 BC to AD 224 at a 2000 year old village in Baghdad. This battery, also known as the “Baghdad Battery” consisted of a 6-inch-high pot containing a copper cylinder made of a rolled-up copper sheet, which housed a single iron rod. At the top, the iron rod was isolated from the copper by asphalt stoppers. The cylinder was intentionally not watertight as to allow the iron rod to be surrounded in electrolyte solution when the entire jar was filled. Researchers believe that lemon juice, grape juice, or vinegar was used as an acidic agent to jumpstart the electrochemical reaction between the two metals.

What puzzles researchers is the fact that there was little, if any, use for electricity in those days. Since electricity barely became useful to humanity in the late 1800s, many assumptions popped up regarding the use of these mysterious jars. It is believed that the Parthians who ruled Baghdad used these jars to electroplate silver.

1800

Although the Baghdad battery could possibly be the very first of its kind, it’s not guaranteed. With this mysterious discovery aside, the first official battery was actually invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta. The voltaic pile, named after its inventor, consisted of two electrodes in the form of disks: one made of zinc, and the other of copper. The disks were stacked on top of each other separated by cardboard disks soaked with acid or salt solutions. This was a tremendously important scientific discovery because it was the first method found for generating a sustained electrical current.

1836

British researcher John Frederich Daniell developed the Daniell Cell in order to overcome the Voltaic Pile’s inability to deliver currents for long periods of time. This cell consisted of two containers; one filled with zinc sulfate, the other withcopper(II) sulfate. The zinc sulfate acted as the anode while the copper(II) sulfate was the cathode; both connected to each other with the use of a salt bridge. A zinc electrode within the zinc sulfate solution would then be used as thenegative(-) terminal while a copper electrode within the copper(II) sulfate was used as the positive(+) terminal. This battery, which only produced 1.1 volts, was used to power telegraphs, telephones, and even doorbells for over 100 years.

1859

Gaston Planté, a French physics professor at the Polytechnic Association for the Development of Popular Instruction, invented the lead acid battery in 1859. This cell, being the first battery able to recharge, was made of two sheets of rolled up lead separated by a linen cloth all immersed in a glass jar of sulfuric acid solution. The following year, Planté presented a nine-cell lead-acid battery to the Academy of Sciences.