The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution [Hardcover]

Henry Schlesinger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 2010

In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky's Cod and David Bodanis's E=MC², The Battery is the first popular history of the technology that harnessed electricity and powered the greatest scientific and technological advances of our time.

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 Battery is as entertaining as it is enlightening.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Obscured by the handheld electronic devices that pervade our high-tech culture is the battery that powers them all. Technology journalist Schlesinger provides an illuminating historical account of a device whose enormous influence has been downplayed or misunderstood. The term battery is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who arranged Leyden jars in a manner akin to a battery of cannon. But possible early electrochemical batteries—the centuries-old Baghdad batteries—discovered by archeologists in the 1930s remain controversial, as the appendix details. Schlesinger (Spycraft) discusses the battery's evolution from the Italian Alessandro Volta's early 19th-century copper and zinc model through 21st-century advances in nanotechnology. In 1800 Volta constructed his famous pile of metal discs; touching each end generated a shock that could then be repeated. Yet the process remained mysterious for decades. While electric outlets replaced batteries in much of the 20th century, that process has recently been reversed, as laptop users surely appreciate. Combining enormous learning with a lively and entertaining style, this book deserves a wide general readership. 30 b&w line drawings. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

From its witty subtitle (“sparked,” get it?), to its lively writing style, to its sheer abundance of fascinating and frequently surprising stories, this is a delightful book. The author acknowledges that batteries might not be the most instantly intriguing of subjects, but think about it: without batteries—without the ability to generate power, store it, and use it later—modern scientific research and experimentation would have been nearly impossible. Pick any subject, Schlesinger says, from home appliances to the battlefield, and you will eventually be led back to batteries. And you might think a battery is a pretty simple thing, but its invention was an amazing process of insight, experimentation, and blind luck. The development of a power-storage device pretty much paralleled the evolution of science from “experimental philosophy” (the seventeenth-century term) to a rigorous, highly methodical process. Batteries might be humble, but they are also essential and indispensable to life as we know it. One might say that this book is the technological equivalent of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod (1997). --David Pitt

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Smithsonian (March 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061442933
• ISBN-13: 978-0061442933
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #875,111 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Expected more about batteries in a book entitled "The Battery", March 29, 2010

By 

C. Griffith - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution (Hardcover)

Henry Schlesinger's well-written and interesting book "The Battery: how portable power sparked a technological revolution" is in many ways more of a history of electricity and its uses than it is about batteries. Much of the text is about the uses of batteries, and the devices that required batteries, than about batteries themselves. Batteries do not make an appearance before page 38, the previous pages being devoted to the earlier history of electricity and magnetism, including the Leyden jar, a sort of capacitor which stores electricity, and also to the work William Gilbert and Benjamin Franklin. Even after batteries make an appearance, much of the text is devoted to the devices that used them, such as the telegraph, early telephones, and radios. The use of batteries for chemical research in the 1800s by Humphrey Davy is also highlighted. The author offers apparently contradictory definitions of anode and cathode- see page 77 and page 177.
The development of transistors and integrated chips reduced the power requirements for existing devices, such as radios, as well as making new devices (among the older ones, electronic watches and calculators) possible, thereby extending the uses of batteries. The last two short chapters 18, and 19, as well as the epilogue, do focus more specifically on battery and capacitor development since roughly the 1980s.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great reading as long as you are not an EE, June 1, 2010

By 

John Witzel "John Witzel" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution (Hardcover)

I thought this book was well worth the money even though the author really needed to run this past a technical reviewer before submitting it for publication; I can't believe the publisher HarperCollins didn't bother with this either. I will wait and pay more attention to others peoples reviews nexttime before I buy a technical book from HarperCollins.

Being an Electrical Engineer I found the authors credibility sink lower each time I came across another of many technical errors. At the very least I expect any technical author to know the difference between voltage and current when writing a book on batteries; I found well over a dozen different technical errors in the 300 pages.

Having said all that I also have to say I did very much enjoy the book, it was a good historical read and held my attention until the last pages. I would recommend it to others as long as they read it like a novel and not try and expand themselves technologically from it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A History of Electricity and Gadgetry, March 25, 2010

By 

G. Poirier (Orleans, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution (Hardcover)

In our society, batteries are indispensable, yet they are usually taken for granted. Few people may know that batteries have a fascinating history of their own. In this book, the author recounts the history of electricity - from the first millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century. The first two thousand years or so are covered in the first fifty pages of the book. A more detailed history is provided from about 1800 onwards. In relating this history, the author has devoted much space to the uses that were (and are being) made of electricity. Extensive discussions are included on the telegraph, the telephone, wireless communication, radio, vacuum tube technology, transistors, integrated circuits, printed circuit boards, miniaturization, military applications and a great variety of miscellaneous gadgetry. The evolution of what we now call "batteries" is told in parallel with these technological developments. However, the last couple of chapters focus almost exclusively on recent advances in battery technology, as well as astonishing information as to what the consumer may expect in the next few decades.

Since this is a book aimed at the "nontechnical reader", as pointed out in its introduction, these discussions slant mainly on the human side (social, military) rather than on the hard scientific/technical details of construction and operation, although some such descriptions were attempted. Unfortunately, where they were attempted, I found that some (but by no means all) were seriously lacking in clarity. I read some such descriptions several times in order to try (unsuccessfully) to make sense of them. That can be rather frustrating for a technically-minded reader. Perhaps these descriptions should have been either left out or abbreviated so as to give the reader a more superficial but clear and accurate idea and nothing more.

The writing style is friendly, widely accessible, lively and quite engaging. This is a book that can be enjoyed by any non-technical reader who is interested in the history of electrical/electronic technology. Readers who are more scientifically inclined can enjoy it as well, as long as they are aware of the shortcomings in some of the technical descriptions.