BATTERY NEWS ARTICLES for Car,
Light Commercial, Leisure & Marine Batteries
| Article
Date : 02/02/2012 |
Author : 316ideas
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A Brief History of the Lead Acid Battery
In
2012 the humble lead acid battery celebrated its 153rd birthday.
The principles on which a lead acid car battery works haven't changed much
since then.
In 1859 a French physicist called Gaston Plante demonstrated the world's first rechargeable lead-acid battery.
To do so he took two long narrow sheets of pure lead, placed one, then a
sheet of rubber, then the other lead sheet into a stack. After this he
rolled it all up into a cylinder. Connecting two copper wires, one
to the edge of each sheet he then immersed the cylinder into a glass
jar of 10% sulphuric acid solution leaving the wires sticking out of the
top. Using a form of generator device Plante charged the battery
up and demonstrated its power in front of an audience.
The most important element of this discovery was that Plante had created
the first rechargeable battery after the groundwork was laid previously
by Volta, Cruikshank, Davey and Daniell.
Each generation of the
electric battery had been refined until Plante discovered how to make
them re-usable.
Plante's first prototype was quickly expanded on and replaced with a
more efficient design that resembles modern car batteries. He placed
rows of lead sheets, instead of a spiral, experimented with thicknesses
and distances between each sheet until he was happy that his new product
would satisfy the needs of commerce. The world's first rechargeable
batteries went straight to work as railway automotive lighting.
In 1881, Camille Alphonse Faure trumped Plante with a much more powerful
and reliable equivalent. His new products were to be the first electric car batteries.
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