battery bonanza: from frogs' legs to mobiles and electric cars - lithium ion rechargeable battery

The murderer at the beginning of the 19 th
Century London sometimes tries to commit suicide before being hanged.
If they can't do this, they ask friends to give their legs a good hard pull when they sway from the gallows to make sure they die.
They knew that the bodies they had just been hanged would be handed over to scientists for anatomical studies.
They do not want to survive and restore consciousness when they are anatomical.
If George Foster, who was executed on 1803, woke up at the table in the lab, it would be particularly indecent.
In front of a fascinating and scary crowd in London, an Italian scientist with a talent for acting put an electrode into Foster's rectum.
Some onlookers thought Foster was awake.
The charged probe pulled his body back and clenched his fist.
On his face, the electrodes twist his mouth and his eyes twitch.
The scientist modestly assured his audience that he did not actually intend to revive Foster, but added, "Who knows what will happen?
"The police are next to foster if he needs to be hanged again.
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Foster's body is being shaken.
The uncle of the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani created a word.
In 1780 Italy, Galvani found that touching the broken leg of a dead frog with two different types of metal can cause the leg to jump.
Galvani thinks he found "animal electricity" and his nephew is investigating it.
Mary Shelley's inspiring novel, Frankenstein, briefly attracted the public.
Ghavani was wrong.
There is no electricity for animals.
You can't revive the hanged body, and the monster of Victor Frankenstein is still safe in the fiction field.
But Galvani was wrong in a useful way because he showed his experiment to his friend Alessandro Volta, who had a better intuition about what was going on.
Walta realized that it is not the meat of the frog that matters that is the source of the animal.
This is because it contains a conductive fluid that allows the charge to be passed between different types of metals.
When two metals are connected
Galvani's knife hits a brass hook hanging on his leg --
The circuit is complete and the electronic flow is caused by the chemical reaction.
Volta tried different alternatives for different metal combinations and frog legs.
In 1800 he shows that you can generate a constant steady current by stacking zinc, copper and salt water
Dipped cardboard
Volta invented the battery and gave us a new word. volt.
His insight won admirers.
Napoleon made him count.
But it was not particularly practical at first.
Metal corrosion, brine overflow, short current-
Live, can't charge.
Before we got the first rechargeable battery made of lead, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, it was over 1859.
If you turn it upside down, it's big, heavy, and the acid flows out.
But it's useful.
The same basic design is still the beginning of our car.
The first "dry" cell
Familiar modern batterycame in 1886.
The next major breakthrough has passed another century.
Akira Yoshino obtained a patent for lithium in 1985
Later, the ion battery was commercialized by Sony.
Lithium is the favorite of researchers because it is very light and active: Lithium-
Ion batteries can hold a lot of electricity in a small space.
Unfortunately, lithium also has an amazing explosion trend when exposed to air and water, so some clever chemical reactions are needed to stabilize it.
No lithium-
The phone can be much slower if an ion battery is used.
Consider what cutting-
Edge battery technology appeared in 1985.
Motorola has just launched the world's first phone, DynaTAC 8000x.
It is affectionately called "brick" and weighs nearly 1 kg.
The call time is 30 minutes.
Just google: How does a company dominate search speed: Know how the right time razor completely changes the importance of the way we pay for robots: What does progress mean for workers? Technology Behind Lithium
The ion battery has certainly improved: 1990 laptops are bulky and discharge quickly.
Today's stylish ultra-portable device will last for a long time. haul flight.
Still, battery life is much slower than other laptop components such as memory and processing power.
Where is the light and cheap battery, charging in a few seconds and not getting worse because of reuse?
We're still waiting.
But there is no shortage of researchers looking for the next breakthrough.
Some are developing "mobile" batteries that work by pumping charged liquid electrolyte.
Some people are experimenting with new materials that combine with lithium, including sulfur and air.
Some people use nanotechnology in electrode wires to make the battery life longer.
But history tells us to be careful: people who change the rules of the game don't show up often.
In the next few decades, the real revolutionary development of the battery may not lie in the technology itself, but in its use.
We think the battery is something that disconnects us from the grid.
We may soon see them as something that makes the grid work better.
The cost of renewable energy is declining.
But even cheap renewable energy can cause problems.
They will not generate electricity all the time.
In the summer, you will always have a lot of solar energy, but not in the winter evenings.
When the sun is not bright and the wind is not blowing, you need coal, gas or nuclear energy to keep the lights on, so why not run all the time?
A recent study in the South
The eastern Arizona power grid weighed the cost of cutting electricity against the cost of carbon dioxide emissions and concluded that solar power could only provide 20% of the electricity.
Arizona is sunny.
In order to make better use of renewable energy, the grid needs a better way of storing energy. One time-
When you have excess energy, the solution for the honor is to slope the water and then-
When you need more
Let it flow back through the hydro plant.
But this requires a clear outline of the terrain.
Can the battery solve the problem? Perhaps.
This depends to a certain extent on the extent to which regulators have driven the industry, and also on the speed at which battery costs have fallen.
Elon Musk wants them to come down as soon as possible.
The entrepreneur behind electric car maker Tesla is making a huge lithium
Ion battery plant in Nevada
Musk claims this will be the second.
The world's largest building, after 747 of Boeing's buildings.
Tesla bet that it can significantly reduce the cost of lithium
Not through technological breakthroughs, but through economies of scale.
Of course, Tesla's vehicles need batteries.
But it is also one of the companies that has provided battery packs for homes, businesses and power grids.
If you have solar panels on your roof, the batteries in your home will allow you to choose to store the rest of the day
Time and energy at night
Instead of selling it back to the grid.
We still have a long way to go from the world where power grids and transport networks run entirely on renewable energy and batteries.
But in the competition to limit climate change, the world needs something to inspire it to act.
The biggest impact of Alexander Walta's invention may have just begun.
Tim Harford wrote in The Financial Times column of undercover economists.
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