21 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT BATTERIES
THEY can be big, they can be small, they can be round and they can be square… but they’re no use when they’re flat. They’re batteries, and these handy little tins of electricity have been making our lives easier for longer than most of us care to remember. We take them for granted every day, but how much do we really know about these oh-so-handy pocket power stations? Here are …
1 ON DECEMBER 25TH 1836, 8-year-old Dennis Daniell opened a Christmas present from his uncle – a remote control monster truck. Unfortunately, there were no batteries to operate the toy. And that’s not surprising, because they hadn’t been invented yet!
Luckily, Denis’s dad, John Frederick Daniell, was a professor of Chemistry, and when he saw his disappointed son’s tears, he immediately popped into his laboratory and invented the world’s first “voltaic cell”. This primitive battery, which consisted of an earthenware and copper pot filled with sulphuric acid, copper sulphate and a zinc electrode, powered the monster truck perfectly well. Unfortunately, Dennis tried to drive it along the back of the sofa and it tipped over, spilling the corrosive acid onto his mam’s best cushions. As a result, the truck and its revolutionary power source were put in the back of the garage and forgotten about for the next hundred years.
2 THE ELECTRIC EEL (Electrophorus electricus) is a fish that can deliver a powerful shock to any angler unfortunate enough to land one. Each 6-foot eel contains enough electricity to start 300 Ford Fiesta 1300E cars, or power every transistor radio in Lincolnshire for the entire duration of Ken Bruce’s Popmaster every day for a whole year.
3 THE ELECTRICITY in batteries comes in two forms – Volts and Amps. In a normal household plug, the electricity is about 13 Amps and 240 Volts, making it suitable for running televisions and vacuum cleaners etc. But batteries only contain about 9 volts and fractions of an amp, which scientists refer to as a “milliamp”. This means they are ideal for torches, mobile phones and ladies’ neck massagers.
4 AND WATTS , so that makes three.
5 IN CLASSIC 70S sitcom Fawlty Towers, health inspector Mr Carnegie is offered a tin of crackers in the dining room, only for Manuel’s pet rat ‘Basil’ to poke its head out and look left and right. The realistic animatronic rat, built by the BBC’s special effects department, was designed to run on a 9V PP3 battery, but during recording it was discovered that the battery was flat. Thinking quickly, actress CONNIE BOOTH turned the electrical motor that operated the rat by hand, and the hysterical studio audience was none the wiser. The episode went on to win a BAFTA for Best Animatronic Rodent in a TV Situation Comedy, with the award presented by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
6 THE SMALLEST batteries in the world are the ones used to power the digital watch of the world’s smallest man Calvin Phillips. These are so tiny that they only contain enough power to run the tiny watch for 20 minutes, meaning that Phillips has to go to Timpsons in the precinct to get a new one fitted dozens of times every day.
7 MODERN CARS run on clean batteries that can be recharged at one or two motorway service stations dotted around the country. By contrast, the old-fashioned tow trucks that come out to take these eco-friendly cars to the next charging point run on outdated and polluting diesel fuel.
8 CHANCES ARE your TV remote control runs off two AA or AAA batteries, and there’s nothing more frustrating than them running out of juice just as Mrs Brown’s Boys is about to start. But don’t throw those flat batteries away – simply take them out and warm them up by rolling them in the palms of your hands and they’ll work for a few more minutes, long enough to turn the telly off.
9 BATTERIES are an important tool in the fight against crime. The ones in a policeman’s walkie talkie allow him to call in reinforcements if he happens upon a ‘blag’ taking place, and they also power the tazer that he uses to bring a heavily armed assailant to his knees. Whats more, the batteries in his torch let him peer into vehicles parked in unlit lay-bys to see what the couples inside are getting up to, and the ones in his phone allow him to take pictures of the action and show them to all his colleagues back at the station.
10 NOT ALL BATTERIES are made of metal and electron-liberating chemicals. Battery hens, for example, are made out of live chicken and a few scruffy feathers.
11 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL condition termed navitasnavis phobia is an irrational fear of batteries. Upon seeing a battery, sufferers typically display a variety of symptoms including sweating, shaking, shortness of breath, panic attacks and knocking knees. Well known navitasnavis phobes include crisps pundit GARY LINEKER, crime writer IAN RANKIN, and soul singer GLADYS KNIGHT and two of the Pips.
12 IN CONTRAST, people who exhibit a pronounced love of batteries are known as navitasnavis philes. Upon seeing a battery, these people experience a sudden, heightened sense of euphoria, possibly including sexual arousal and, in severe cases, spontaneous ejaculation. Well- known navitasnavis philes include newsreader HUW EDWARDS, mock schoolboy JEANETTE KRANKIE, Hungarian premier VIKTOR ORBAN , and Human League frontman
PHIL OAKEY and one of the girls.
13 WHEN he was a guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, former Prime Minister SIR JOHN MAJOR chose as his luxury item “four eternal batteries that never ran out” so he could listen to Test Match Special when castaway on his island. Unfortunately, Major forgot to include a radio in his request, so the batteries were never used.
14 WITH COUNTLESS mobile telephones, Gameboys and transistor radios, Japan is truly the home of the hand-held electronic gadget. But according to D:Ream’s PROFESSOR BRIAN COX, nobody knows for certain how many batteries there actually are in the Land of the Rising Sun. “There could be millions, or even billions of them. The truth is, we just don’t know,” he told his fellow scientist PROFESSOR JIM AL-KHALILI, who also didn’t know.
15 IF YOUR mobile phone goes flat while you’re in a fruit shop, don’t panic. Simply buy a lemon, stick two wires in it, and voila!
16 CONVERSELY, if you’re at a party and there are no lemons for your gin and tonic, simply take the battery out of your phone, drop it in your glass, and voila!
17 GET A PAIR of 1.5V batteries and connect them together in series, and you’ll end up with 3V. However, wire them up in parallel and the voltage will remain the same, 1.5V. “It’s probably something to do with the way they’re connected together, or they might of got the wires the wrong way round or something. The truth is, we simply don’t know,” admits the late Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist PROFESSOR RICHARD FEYNMAN, speaking via former footballer and TVs Most Haunted psychic DEREK ACORAH.
18 ACCORDING to physicists, when a battery is connected in a circuit, current flows out of the titended (or ‘positive’) end and back into the flat (or ‘negative’) end. “Or it might be the other way round. The truth is, I just don’t know and I can’t be arsed to look it up,” says American TV boffin NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON.
19 AS WELL as the famous electric eel, several other animals also generate electrical current, including the Black Ghost Knifefish, the Torpedo fish and the Electric Ray. However, out of the estimated 400,000 types of plants on the earth, not a single species is able to generate a volt of electricity, including the Red Oak, the Bee Orchid and the Blue Barrel
Cactus.
20 CUMULONIMBUS storm clouds are effectively giant, floating batteries that charge themselves up by rubbing against the sky. During storms, electricity comes out of them in the form of lightning and thunder, and it doesn’t stop until they go flat.
21 PROFESSOR Brian Cox’s Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN consumes 1000 Gigawatt Hours of electricity during an average year. If it was powered using ordinary AA batteries – each providing 1.2 Watt Hours, it would require 8.3 x 1011 batteries to function. “That’s enough batteries to fill 37 Albert Halls,” said the former D:Ream synth-stabber. “And checking that we’d put them all in pointing the right way round would take fucking ages, so we just plug it in the mains
instead.”