Battery: The Triumph of Science

The battery is one of the major inventions that took place during the early 19th century. It didn’t only provide a way to store energy but a direction that took the electrical field to a greater extent. Before it, there wasn’t an effective way to collect electrical energy and use it whenever there was a demand. In today’s world, we have numerous machines and appliances that use a battery.

In a way, battery made us took our gadgets with us without connecting it to a source of power continuously. Most of our appliances use a battery like our smartphone, laptops, speakers, digital watches, and even big transport vehicles like cars and bikes too. So it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that battery made our day to day lives simpler, better, convenient, and hassle-free.

How does the battery work?

In a battery, there are two metal rods mostly copper and zinc rods, an electrolytic solution. Zinc is an electron excess metal and it needs to lose electrons to be in a stable state while copper needs to gain electrons to reach that stage.

So one metal loses electrons and the other metal gains the electrons while the solution provides a way for the continuous flow of electrons. The flow of electrons generates an electric current. The process of losing electrons is called oxidation and gaining electrons is called reduction. So the chemistry behind the battery is oxidation-reduction reactions.

The story of its invention is quite exciting and involves two major characters Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani. Both of them were Italian and very educated and brilliant minds of their era. Volta was an amazing chemist, experimental physicist, and pioneer of electricity while Galvani was a great physician, physicist, and biologist.

Galvani was always doing one or another kind of experiment on diverse living organisms. Amphibians were the most common live animals you could then find. So for his several experiments, he used frogs and its muscles. One time he took metal rods of copper and zinc. From that when he touched the dead frog’s muscle, it twitched. He thought that there was some kind of electrical impulse generated in the muscle of frogs. He was the innovator of bioelectromagnetics.

Volta was among many scientists that duplicated and examined Galvani’s experiment many times. Somehow he was not sure about the source of generation of electricity. He analyzed the experiment carefully and determined that it was the metal rods where the current had generated.

He realized that the frog’s muscle behaved as a conductor and also the detector of the electric current. He exchanged the muscle of the frog from the experiment with a brine solution soaked paper. There was the detection of electrical current again. Volta discovered that certain solutions would help in the continuous flow of electrons and provided current and behave as conductors.

The frog’s muscle was just a conductor in that experiment. After observing and examining the experiment, again and again, he ultimately got how it worked and the possibility to store that potential. He demonstrated his experiment by making alternate layers of copper and zinc and a piece of cloth in between them rinsed in a saltwater solution.

There was a current flow in that demonstration which was the first attempt to make a battery. Volta published the results in 1791 and by 1800 he made the first battery.
And that is how the curiosity of two persons working in different fields collaborated and gave us the triumph of science, the battery. And now your curiosity will take us to a very new path and generations will remember you, and to know the light of your curiosity click here.