In 1800, the man who gave his name to the volt, Alessandro Volta of the University of Pavia in Italy, invented the first electrochemical battery. Aptly named "Volta's Pile," it was the first device to produce a continuous electric current.

Source: Tempio Voltiano

Volta's battery certainly may not look like much, but it worked, laying the groundwork for the communications, computer, electronics and power engineering industries of today.

In those early days, the first real consumers of batteries (and even then, only in modest volumes) were the telegraph industry, followed, historically, by the telephone industry.

The communications industry was, perhaps surprisingly, followed by the transport industry. According to The Economist: "At the turn of the century battery-powered vehicles were a common sight on city streets, because they were quiet and did not emit any noxious fumes."

Batteries Today

Only since the 20^th century, however, have batteries become commodity items - cheap, mass-produced and readily available. They're now used in everything and anything. The Saft Group (Bloomberg Ticker - SAFT:FP), one of the world's leading high-technology battery companies, describes its markets as follows:

*JC-S is a joint venture with Johnson Controls (Bloomberg Ticker - JCI:US) - a leading manufacturer of lead-acid batteries.

The company's market segments do not even include some of the biggest areas of battery demand: mobile phones, portable computers, audio/video and power tools.

Battery technologies, too, have multiplied, with individual battery technologies for every possible use. While nickel-hydrogen (NiH₂) batteries are now the choice for geostationary satellites, silver-zinc (Ag-Zn) batteries do the job best in torpedoes. And where military radio communications and cardiac defibrillators use lithium-sulfur dioxide (Li-SO₂), such batteries are unsuitable in such applications as UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems, in which Nickel-Cadmium (Ni-Cd) batteries do a fine job.

Source: Saft

The heterogeneity of uses to which batteries are now put would be truly mind-boggling to 19^th century battery users - as would the specs of the different batteries themselves. These days, outside the consumer market, batteries are increasingly "made-to-measure."

Exploding Batteries

Over the past century, as batteries have developed, there have been any number of battles pitting different technologies against each other to create the "best" battery. Some have been high profile, others fought behind the scenes.

Among the higher profile has been that fought in the realm of portable electronic devices, such as camcorders, power tools or portable computers. Anyone who has used such devices over the past several years will have noticed that whereas, before, they used NiCd batteries, now, more often than not, these have been replaced by lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries. Indeed, as we saw in October's article Cobalt: More Than Just Blue, over the last 10-12 years, Li-ion batteries have, by value, come to dominate the market.

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