10 ms·

A battery invented 120 years before its time

93 points by fpoling 6y ago

egberts 6y ago
I recall the ancient Persian having made batteries. Is that right?
- INTPenis 6y ago
  The Baghdad battery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery Am I remembering right that mythbusters saw it as a parlor trick at most?
  - goodcanadian 6y ago
    I think the key bit is under Alternative hypothesis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery#Alternative_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery#Alternative_... The artifacts strongly resemble another type of object with a known purpose – storage vessels for sacred scrolls from nearby Seleucia on the Tigris. In March 2012, Professor Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University, an expert on Iraqi archaeology, . . . stated that she does not know a single archaeologist who believed that these were batteries.
Draken93 6y ago
I would love to see a parallel universe, where electric cars obtained the upper hand. The battery technology would be developed so much further. Would we still have the problem of climate change? Would we be on the same level of development? Who knows... but it is impressive that edisons thinking machine of engineers developed this battery technology 120 years ago.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Systemic perverse effect would probably emerged in other places but maybe not at the scale and ~annoyance of CO2 atmospheric levels.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  I would love to see a parallel universe, where collective transportation obtained the upper hand. Where countryside railroads are still operating, and where roads/highways haven't consistently led to the expropriation of millions of people worldwide, and to the current car-oriented urban nightmare. See Ivan Illich for a demonstration that car-oriented urbanization is hostile and counter-productive, as opposed to what he calls "convivial tools" (empowering technologies). Would we still have the problem of climate change? Would we be on the same level of development?
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    To answer shortly to your questions. 1 - No; 2 - No. Expanded explanation. Due to economics you'd invest in a more expensive technology, using more manual labor, having less free time to think to more advance tech, which in turn leads to slower development. Using more manual labor would also, in turn, lead to less need for coal and oil demand and that would mean lesser climate change problem. My 2 cents
    - southerntofu 6y ago
      > you'd invest in a more expensive technology How can collective transportation be more expensive than cars, as a whole? Most western countries had really well connected railroads going in all the very small towns and did that for pennies compared to the overall price of car society. The overall cost of cars is not just the individual car. It's also infrastructure that caters to cars, which requires roads everywhere (otherwise your car is pretty useless), parking spaces.. etc.. While i agree with the conclusion (better for the environment, and probably for everything else), and i agree manual labor is usually (though not always) preferable to industrialized labor, i don't understand why collective transportation would require more manual labor.
      - unnouinceput 6y ago
        In cities you'd have instead of roads for cars, to cover each individual need, rolling sidewalks, going all different directions. Which means a lot of interconnected stuff to cover everything. If I want to go to my friend who is 3 blocks to the right and then a U turn and 5 more blocks to the left currently I take a car and I am there in 5 minutes. But if this society where individual cars don't exists but something else covers that highly customized needs for each individual - how you'd envision said technology? I would envision sidewalks on different levels, interconnected with elevators, and all of them on winches and trolleys and whatnot. Hence a lot more expensive technology to deploy/maintain. Or are we talking Sci-Fi and some alien technology became available to us?
- 2038AD 6y ago
  > Would we still have the problem of climate change? Probably. The electricity needs to be generated somehow and it was within the same time that Arrhenius proposed the Greenhouse effect and suggested it could help crop yields for the rising population.
- Hypocritelefty 6y ago
  Don't understand this obsession with car as a way of life. There are far better solutions already. Build cities that encourages public transport.
  - snarf21 6y ago
    People hate public transportation for the same reasons they hate traffic jams. Cars are freedom and control. It doesn't matter that driving 10 minutes to the store is the same as waiting 10 minutes for the subway. And once I'm at the store, I can go wherever, I'm not stuck by the physical nature of the public infrastructure. I will say that cities should just not allow cars in most areas. If you really want to leverage the benefits and efficiencies of cities, you have to go all in.
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      > I can go wherever, I'm not stuck by the physical nature of the public infrastructure. Yes you are. Cars are completely reliant on roads, a fact which is all too easily forgotten by drivers.
  - qball 6y ago
    >There are far better solutions already. No, there really aren't. If mass transit was actually better, it would have condemned the car (and the horse-driven carriage before it) to being nothing more than a passing fad; "corruption to kill the streetcar" alone isn't enough of an excuse for why people overwhelmingly prefer private vehicles when given the choice. Cars return so much time by themselves that every single downside (environmental degradation aside) is worth it from a utilitarian standpoint. Let's take the biggest disadvantage of mass transit, which is its massive speed disadvantage compared to private transport (you must also account for the maximum speed that you can travel to get to it, and the maximum speed between the closest drop-off point and your destination- increasing the speed of one leg has limited value if you're still waiting half an hour for and on the bus, which in the opposite direction is why park-and-ride isn't as effective in practice as it is in theory). Assume that, with mass transit, a daily round-trip commute is extended by 20 minutes (this is being very generous to public transit). Assuming 260 working days in a year, that's 3.5 days of your life spent on nothing but waiting to get to your destination, or more precisely, ~11 working days. 11 working days is a lot of time when you consider that even European legally-mandated vacation time is only 2-3 times that (in the US, the average vacation time after 1 year of employment is 10 days). Across 40 years of career, that's 440 working days or 1.75 working years. Oh, and that's only covering the time it takes you to get to work. If you're going somewhere for fun afterwards, or going shopping, that'll be another +20 minutes (again, being generous) to your commute, and you best be home by 11 or you aren't getting home (most mass transit shuts down very early at night) unless you call a taxi ($$$). And if you want to buy more than 2 bags of groceries or some small furniture, even free shipping is still being passed on to you ($$$), driving prices even higher. Now, to be fair to the bus, rents get lower if you have fewer parking lots (commutes don't get shorter, of course- more people in an area dependent on public transit means its service gets worse). Except what actually happens is that that effect isn't enough to offset the fact that under such a regime, people will try to live as close to work as possible (to minimize the inefficiency described above or even eliminate it completely- hence why all the rich live in European city centers), which means rents don't actually go down, meaning the property owner captures the value that the commons used to provide in terms of driving infrastructure. Is it really any surprise that the class of people wealthy enough to be property owners (or afford usurious Bay Area rents), who would sacrifice the least (if not directly benefit) from a decrease in cars, are also the ones advocating the loudest for public transit?
seddin 6y ago
The Baghdad Battery dated around 200 BC which are speculated to have been used for electroplatting gold and silver jewellery. More information about these devices: http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/baghdadbatteries.htm http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/baghdadbatteries.htm
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  > electroplatting gold and silver jewellery. Electroplating requires a much higher voltage than whatever these batteries would have put out. Apologies for the meme-y video, but Electroboom explains the issues quite well regardless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFOOfqfx3s&t=5m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFOOfqfx3s&t=5m30s
  - saneshark 6y ago
    A few of them in series could increase the voltage.
    - vanderZwan 6y ago
      Already addressed in the video - another YouTuber put ten oversized versions in a series and barely got a single LED to light up.
      - unnouinceput 6y ago
        So put a hundred more in series and you get bigger voltage. If 10 of them lit a LED, which needs something like 1.5V then 100 of them would give you 15V. Car batteries are 12V or 24V, depending on the car model/size, so 100 or 200 in series and you get that covered.
- himinlomax 6y ago
  It's not even clear they were actually batteries. It's possible and plausible, but at the moment we have no way to confirm they were used as such, and may never do.
- 6y ago
VSerge 6y ago
I would be curious to hear more about how these scientists, or other teams, might improve the energy efficiency of this nickel-iron battery. I found the reference links on the wikipedia page for Nickel-iron batteries are yielding interesting information for a first look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery For example the article below, where the use of graphene and carbon nanotubes is described as improving the speed of charge and discharge by several orders of magnitude (though graphene production is still an area of research rather than a mature industrial process from what I understand). https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2012/pr-ultrafast-edison-battery-062612.html https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2012/pr-ultrafast-edison-batter... A simple search also yielded this patent, assigned to the US department of energy in 2016, but I am not sure how relevant it is. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150086884A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150086884A1/en
Synaesthesia 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery Very interesting.
bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
I’ve seen these in the wild in off grid setups on the internet that consider the lifespan of Lithium batteries too short.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  I was thinking that this might be a great choice for DIY powerwalls. Right now the favorite seems to be LFP. But even as they have gotten close to the price of lead acid, they're still expensive if you want a decent size battery to be an emergency backup for grid power. But a quick search suggests that demand for these is too low to offset the potentially less expensive construction, so they are really overpriced for the capacity.
culopatin 6y ago
I’m waiting for the comment that explains why we can’t use this now
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  I don't think it is an issue of can't. These batteries offgas hydrogen, meaning they are not good for portable electronics and they have a poor charge and discharge efficiency, meaning they are not as good for excess energy storage. At 65%, even something like compressed air might be more viable. They do seem to be extremely durable however.

93 points by fpoling 6y ago

egberts 6y ago

I recall the ancient Persian having made batteries. Is that right?

INTPenis 6y ago
The Baghdad battery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery Am I remembering right that mythbusters saw it as a parlor trick at most?
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  I think the key bit is under Alternative hypothesis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery#Alternative_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery#Alternative_... The artifacts strongly resemble another type of object with a known purpose – storage vessels for sacred scrolls from nearby Seleucia on the Tigris. In March 2012, Professor Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University, an expert on Iraqi archaeology, . . . stated that she does not know a single archaeologist who believed that these were batteries.

Draken93 6y ago

I would love to see a parallel universe, where electric cars obtained the upper hand. The battery technology would be developed so much further. Would we still have the problem of climate change? Would we be on the same level of development? Who knows... but it is impressive that edisons thinking machine of engineers developed this battery technology 120 years ago.

agumonkey 6y ago
Systemic perverse effect would probably emerged in other places but maybe not at the scale and ~annoyance of CO2 atmospheric levels.
southerntofu 6y ago
I would love to see a parallel universe, where collective transportation obtained the upper hand. Where countryside railroads are still operating, and where roads/highways haven't consistently led to the expropriation of millions of people worldwide, and to the current car-oriented urban nightmare. See Ivan Illich for a demonstration that car-oriented urbanization is hostile and counter-productive, as opposed to what he calls "convivial tools" (empowering technologies). Would we still have the problem of climate change? Would we be on the same level of development?
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  To answer shortly to your questions. 1 - No; 2 - No. Expanded explanation. Due to economics you'd invest in a more expensive technology, using more manual labor, having less free time to think to more advance tech, which in turn leads to slower development. Using more manual labor would also, in turn, lead to less need for coal and oil demand and that would mean lesser climate change problem. My 2 cents
  - southerntofu 6y ago
    > you'd invest in a more expensive technology How can collective transportation be more expensive than cars, as a whole? Most western countries had really well connected railroads going in all the very small towns and did that for pennies compared to the overall price of car society. The overall cost of cars is not just the individual car. It's also infrastructure that caters to cars, which requires roads everywhere (otherwise your car is pretty useless), parking spaces.. etc.. While i agree with the conclusion (better for the environment, and probably for everything else), and i agree manual labor is usually (though not always) preferable to industrialized labor, i don't understand why collective transportation would require more manual labor.
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      In cities you'd have instead of roads for cars, to cover each individual need, rolling sidewalks, going all different directions. Which means a lot of interconnected stuff to cover everything. If I want to go to my friend who is 3 blocks to the right and then a U turn and 5 more blocks to the left currently I take a car and I am there in 5 minutes. But if this society where individual cars don't exists but something else covers that highly customized needs for each individual - how you'd envision said technology? I would envision sidewalks on different levels, interconnected with elevators, and all of them on winches and trolleys and whatnot. Hence a lot more expensive technology to deploy/maintain. Or are we talking Sci-Fi and some alien technology became available to us?
2038AD 6y ago
> Would we still have the problem of climate change? Probably. The electricity needs to be generated somehow and it was within the same time that Arrhenius proposed the Greenhouse effect and suggested it could help crop yields for the rising population.
Hypocritelefty 6y ago
Don't understand this obsession with car as a way of life. There are far better solutions already. Build cities that encourages public transport.
- snarf21 6y ago
  People hate public transportation for the same reasons they hate traffic jams. Cars are freedom and control. It doesn't matter that driving 10 minutes to the store is the same as waiting 10 minutes for the subway. And once I'm at the store, I can go wherever, I'm not stuck by the physical nature of the public infrastructure. I will say that cities should just not allow cars in most areas. If you really want to leverage the benefits and efficiencies of cities, you have to go all in.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    > I can go wherever, I'm not stuck by the physical nature of the public infrastructure. Yes you are. Cars are completely reliant on roads, a fact which is all too easily forgotten by drivers.
- qball 6y ago
  >There are far better solutions already. No, there really aren't. If mass transit was actually better, it would have condemned the car (and the horse-driven carriage before it) to being nothing more than a passing fad; "corruption to kill the streetcar" alone isn't enough of an excuse for why people overwhelmingly prefer private vehicles when given the choice. Cars return so much time by themselves that every single downside (environmental degradation aside) is worth it from a utilitarian standpoint. Let's take the biggest disadvantage of mass transit, which is its massive speed disadvantage compared to private transport (you must also account for the maximum speed that you can travel to get to it, and the maximum speed between the closest drop-off point and your destination- increasing the speed of one leg has limited value if you're still waiting half an hour for and on the bus, which in the opposite direction is why park-and-ride isn't as effective in practice as it is in theory). Assume that, with mass transit, a daily round-trip commute is extended by 20 minutes (this is being very generous to public transit). Assuming 260 working days in a year, that's 3.5 days of your life spent on nothing but waiting to get to your destination, or more precisely, ~11 working days. 11 working days is a lot of time when you consider that even European legally-mandated vacation time is only 2-3 times that (in the US, the average vacation time after 1 year of employment is 10 days). Across 40 years of career, that's 440 working days or 1.75 working years. Oh, and that's only covering the time it takes you to get to work. If you're going somewhere for fun afterwards, or going shopping, that'll be another +20 minutes (again, being generous) to your commute, and you best be home by 11 or you aren't getting home (most mass transit shuts down very early at night) unless you call a taxi ($$$). And if you want to buy more than 2 bags of groceries or some small furniture, even free shipping is still being passed on to you ($$$), driving prices even higher. Now, to be fair to the bus, rents get lower if you have fewer parking lots (commutes don't get shorter, of course- more people in an area dependent on public transit means its service gets worse). Except what actually happens is that that effect isn't enough to offset the fact that under such a regime, people will try to live as close to work as possible (to minimize the inefficiency described above or even eliminate it completely- hence why all the rich live in European city centers), which means rents don't actually go down, meaning the property owner captures the value that the commons used to provide in terms of driving infrastructure. Is it really any surprise that the class of people wealthy enough to be property owners (or afford usurious Bay Area rents), who would sacrifice the least (if not directly benefit) from a decrease in cars, are also the ones advocating the loudest for public transit?

seddin 6y ago

The Baghdad Battery dated around 200 BC which are speculated to have been used for electroplatting gold and silver jewellery. More information about these devices: http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/baghdadbatteries.htm http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/baghdadbatteries.htm

vanderZwan 6y ago
> electroplatting gold and silver jewellery. Electroplating requires a much higher voltage than whatever these batteries would have put out. Apologies for the meme-y video, but Electroboom explains the issues quite well regardless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFOOfqfx3s&t=5m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFOOfqfx3s&t=5m30s
- saneshark 6y ago
  A few of them in series could increase the voltage.
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    Already addressed in the video - another YouTuber put ten oversized versions in a series and barely got a single LED to light up.
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      So put a hundred more in series and you get bigger voltage. If 10 of them lit a LED, which needs something like 1.5V then 100 of them would give you 15V. Car batteries are 12V or 24V, depending on the car model/size, so 100 or 200 in series and you get that covered.
himinlomax 6y ago
It's not even clear they were actually batteries. It's possible and plausible, but at the moment we have no way to confirm they were used as such, and may never do.
6y ago

VSerge 6y ago

I would be curious to hear more about how these scientists, or other teams, might improve the energy efficiency of this nickel-iron battery. I found the reference links on the wikipedia page for Nickel-iron batteries are yielding interesting information for a first look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery For example the article below, where the use of graphene and carbon nanotubes is described as improving the speed of charge and discharge by several orders of magnitude (though graphene production is still an area of research rather than a mature industrial process from what I understand). https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2012/pr-ultrafast-edison-battery-062612.html https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2012/pr-ultrafast-edison-batter... A simple search also yielded this patent, assigned to the US department of energy in 2016, but I am not sure how relevant it is. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150086884A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150086884A1/en

Synaesthesia 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery Very interesting.

bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago

I’ve seen these in the wild in off grid setups on the internet that consider the lifespan of Lithium batteries too short.

rootusrootus 6y ago
I was thinking that this might be a great choice for DIY powerwalls. Right now the favorite seems to be LFP. But even as they have gotten close to the price of lead acid, they're still expensive if you want a decent size battery to be an emergency backup for grid power. But a quick search suggests that demand for these is too low to offset the potentially less expensive construction, so they are really overpriced for the capacity.

culopatin 6y ago

I’m waiting for the comment that explains why we can’t use this now

CyberDildonics 6y ago
I don't think it is an issue of can't. These batteries offgas hydrogen, meaning they are not good for portable electronics and they have a poor charge and discharge efficiency, meaning they are not as good for excess energy storage. At 65%, even something like compressed air might be more viable. They do seem to be extremely durable however.