From Frog Legs to Lithium: A Short History of the Battery

What happened?

In the 1780s, the Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani noticed that frog legs twitched when touched by two different metals. He concluded he’d discovered “animal electricity” — a life force stored in the tissue itself. His friend Alessandro Volta disagreed. Volta suspected the electricity came not from the frog but from the two different metals with a moist substance between them; the frog leg was just a sensitive detector.

To prove it, Volta did away with the frog entirely. In 1800 he stacked alternating discs of copper and zinc, separated by cloth soaked in brine, and produced something no one had made before: a steady, continuous flow of electricity. The voltaic pile was the world’s first true battery. (Ironically, Volta was wrong about why it worked — he insisted the current came from mere “contact” between metals, not from a chemical reaction, which is actually what drives it. And Galvani wasn’t entirely wrong either; he’d stumbled onto the real phenomenon of bioelectricity.)

From there, the battery evolved relentlessly. In 1859 Gaston Planté invented the lead-acid battery — the first that could be recharged by running current backward through it. The 1860s through 1880s brought practical “dry” cells that didn’t slosh acid everywhere, powering telegraphs, doorbells, and the first flashlights. In 1899 Waldemar Jungner created the rechargeable nickel-cadmium cell. By 1959, the long-lasting alkaline battery arrived, courtesy of Canadian engineer Lewis Urry.

Why was it strange?

The strangeness is the origin: an entire pillar of modern technology traces back to a quarrel about twitching frog legs. Galvani’s name lives on every time we say a crowd was “galvanized” into action, and Volta’s lives on in the volt. Two friends, both partly right and partly wrong, founded a field by disagreeing — and the loser of the argument built the device that changed the world.

What did scientists learn?

The deep principle Volta unlocked is that chemistry can be converted directly into a controllable electric current — and, with Planté’s work, that the reaction can be run in reverse to store energy back up. Nearly every battery since is a variation on that theme: find two materials that want to exchange electrons, put an electrolyte between them, and harness the flow. Each leap (lead-acid, nickel-cadmium, alkaline, lithium) was really a hunt for chemistries that pack more energy into less weight and survive more recharge cycles.

How does it affect us today?

The modern era belongs to lithium. In 1980 the American physicist John B. Goodenough identified a lithium cobalt oxide electrode that made high-energy lithium cells practical; Akira Yoshino built the first lithium-ion battery prototype in 1985, and Sony commercialized it in 1991. That single technology made smartphones, laptops, and electric cars possible — and in 2019, Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham, and Yoshino shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. Every device you charge overnight is running on a two-century chain of refinements that started with frog legs and brine.

Fun fact

There’s a tantalizing wrinkle to the story: the so-called Baghdad Battery, a roughly 2,000-year-old clay jar with a copper cylinder and iron rod inside, found near Baghdad. Some have speculated it could have generated a faint current — perhaps for electroplating. Most archaeologists are skeptical and think it was simply a storage vessel, but the artifact endures as one of history’s great “what if?” objects.

Sources

• “History of the battery,” Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery
• “Alessandro Volta,” Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta
• “The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019,” NobelPrize.org — https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/press-release/
• Bernard S. Finn, “Origin of Electrical Power,” National Museum of American History