Energy in a Bottle

I’ve been reading a book titled "Bottled Energy" by Richard Schallenberg because I’d like to design a car that runs on single malt Scotch, but only if I get a government subsidy to buy the whiskey. Actually, Schallenberg’s book is a tour-de-force presentation of the history of battery technology, focusing on the lead-acid battery, its proponents and uses over the first century and a half or so of its existence. As he points out, one of the early obstacles to battery development was the lack of practical uses for the thing, not to mention instrumentation for measuring the output. Early researches mainly relied on putting the wires on their tongues and trying to gauge the galvanic taste/ The more advanced instrumentation consisted of the effect of the current on a frog’s leg. I got this mental picture of an automotive instrument cluster, where the indicator needles are all frog’s legs that kick out over the scale.

The idea of using batteries to drive motors for locomotion was apparently pretty widespread amongst anybody using batteries in a process that required a dynamo to charge the batteries. If the drive shaft was disconnected from the dynamo, the batteries tended to run them backwards, which would make a light bulb go off in any engineer’s head, though apparently, that took a little longer. The initial "practical" application from batteries was mainly found in telegraphy, but it eventually moved to mixed electrical lighting solutions that are similar in conception to solar systems – charge during the day (but with a dynamo) and illuminate at night. They remain with us in the form of emergency lightning.

Because of the relatively low voltages and heavy battery weights, the original attempts as locomotion with batteries seems to have been focused on a replacement technology for horses on horse-drawn trams. The economics looked promising, but the battery technology was so primitive (they failed very quickly) that none of the systems stayed in service for any amount of time. About half the payload for most of these trams was the batteries themselves, and even though they were easily hidden below the seats, it wasn’t a terribly efficient use of energy.

I have one complaint about the book, which is Schallenbergs repeated comments about how demanding battery development was. One quote, "Storage battery engineering is an inherently demanding skill requiring full-time specialization to produce a commercial product. All those companies which succeeded in the field were specialists." Aside from the fact you could say that about any technology (though it wouldn’t be so as the many great inventors and technologists of the century showed) , it appears to be a case of the author attributing a mystique to a beloved research project that just doesn’t appear to the critical reader (ahem).

At the point this comment appeared, I can only think of two companies he’d described working in battery technology that could be described as "commercially successful" and then only in a small way. There seemed to be a dearth of interest from the serious electrical engineering concerns of the day in batteries, which just weren’t viewed as that important, and many of the researchers who Schallenberg describes were essentially dilettantes. To this point in the history of the battery, it strikes me as a case of the only companies that could be bothered to keep working with the things were those who had no other products. If I change my mind by the end of the book, I’ll gladly retract:-)