7 ms·

That's not the price of batteries in general, that's the price of Li-Ion batteries. Were Li-Ion batteries mass produced in 1991?

by cm2187 5y ago

reportingsjr 5y ago
The first commercial/mass produced lithium ion batteries came out in exactly 1991 as a matter of fact! They were used in a Sony camera.
elihu 5y ago
The other commenter says that they were first introduced as a commercial product in 1991. According to Wikipedia, they were preceded by two years by the first commercially-available nickel-metal hydride cells in 1989, so that would be an interesting point of comparison. Also nickel-cadmium and lead-acid have been around for a very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_b...
- stormbrew 5y ago
  I remember a lot of stuff having NiMH for a long time throughout the 90s, seemed like it took LiIon a lot longer to catch on.
  - taf2 5y ago
    We raced electric RC cars in the 90s (really my dad and brother - I mostly just liked the smells and ideas). But I know my brother said to win they always had to have fresh as new batteries and as I recall they were NiMH
    - paulmd 5y ago
      Yes, performance of a battery declined over time, just as "battery health" declines on your phone today, for the same reasons. Mostly due to surface oxidation of the electrodes iirc. Lithium-ion was never a good idea due to the fire hazard (in a crash they would just straight up explode, not even just cause a raging uncontrollable fire like LiPo, just boom) and Lithium-polymer could not support the necessary discharge rates (which I believe was also true of li-ion at the time too...). Early LiPo packs were only rated to like 0.5C or 1C peak discharge - this means, for a 2 amp-hour pack, 1C would be a discharge rate of 2 amps. Even then the packs did not really do well at their rated discharge rates - NiMH packs were far more tolerant of abuse in terms of discharge rates, in some cases you could push well beyond the rated spec and they would take it for a year or two's worth of sessions. I was an "early adopter" on electric R/C airplanes back in the day (this would have been like 2000-2004) and the early stuff I used was mostly repurposed stuff from electric cars. The changeover to 4/5 or 2/3rds sub-C cells was a big deal at the time, the first "good" packs I owned were something called "HeCells" around 1800mAH or 2000 mAH, I also used KAN 1100mah cells. What I finally settled on at the time were these Sanyo "1950FAUP" cells which were extraordinary performers - we could push those cells to 70-80 amps peak discharge and they would take it. So in terms of the way LiPos are rated today[0], that is 40C discharge. This would only be doable for short periods, but it is necessary for launch and climbout (when the motor is running flat-out and the wing is basically stalled). Without the ability to sustain those currents it becomes very difficult to launch. Even still we did not "taxi" them like a normal airplane (or a normal model airplane), just wasn't enough power to get off the ground without a paved strip. We typically expected about 10-15 minutes of flight time if you were flying normally, maybe 8-10 if you were really hotdogging it. So that means we averaged about 6C over the course of a flight (higher during climbout, less during cruising). Another unsung miracle is how much motor technology has improved over the same period. My early motors were, again, repurposed brushed motors from Graupner's electric car lineup. We later moved onto some brushed Kyosho "magnetic mayhem" car motors that could push even higher levels of current. There was a Czech company called "Mega" who was an early mover on small neodymium brushless motors and that was a big deal at the time, they were far more powerful and far more efficient. Nowadays you don't even think about it, they're just a commodity, but at the time even a small brushless motor would run you about $130 or so! [0] (tangent but it's kinda weird that NiCd and NiMH cells have traditionally been specced in amps but LiPo cells are specced in terms of "C discharge", obviously it's trivial to move between the two if you know the capacity of the pack but there's a definite difference in "style" of how the discharge rates are represented here...)
  - pixelpoet 5y ago
    Likewise, and I was quite perplexed as a kid why The Secret of Nimh had no mention of batteries.
xkjkls 5y ago
There's a graph there on market size, which shows the market size has grown 50,000x since 91.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  This is a sort of meaningless metric, you can adjust your time frame to make the market size arbitrarily small because it was 0 before 1991.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    Your parent specifically stated 1991 not "before 1991". I think I understand what you mean but there was also a unfulfilled requirement before 1991. Back then (I'm 50.5 years old) cells didn't explode but then they also didn't set the world alight in terms of longevity either. We had Walkmans and crappy clones that drained the shitty rechargeable cells we had at the time in a few hours. OK those things drove mechanical beasties - cassettes but cells/batteries were not particularly good before Li-Ion turned up. Do you have any idea how something as simple as an iPod becomes exciting because no mechanical spinny things means power draw is much, much lower? It also helps if the thing isn't beige or grey. Apple are no more exciting to me than any other mob: design-wise, but they did get a few things right early on: "don't look shit". As it turns out, that simple mantra means that you get to >$1T t/o. Now I own a phone that runs for around two days before charging. That doesn't sound too grand until you recall that just the GPS thing in it would have required 2U+ in a comms rack back in the day. The camera? If I kept an equivalent camera from the 1990s in my pocket then I'd be making silly jokes about it. The phone: I can stand on the top of Hay Torr and make a call.
    - eric-hu 5y ago
      Initial iPods used spinning disks. Solid state was not a factor in early iPod success. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod+Classic+Hard+Drive+Replacement/564 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod+Classic+Hard+Drive+Replace...
      - 5y ago
HarryHirsch 5y ago
They were not. In 1998, the second edition of Greenwood/Earnshaw's chemistry textbook came out, a magisterial survey of inorganic chemistry. They state that the major use for lithium is in lithium grease, but "looking to the future, Li/FeSx battery systems are emerging as a potentially viable energy storage system ... and a ... source of power for electric cars". The 1991 edition did not talk about batteries at all.
- sgerenser 5y ago
  I still remember the PowerBook 5300 series that was released around 1996 and had to be recalled due to reports of fires with their then cutting edge lithium batteries. Apple had to rerelease the product with NiMH batteries IIRC.
bluedino 5y ago
Yea, AA batteries have definitely not gotten cheaper
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  AA is a form-factor, not a chemical technology. You can get lithium AA batteries. You probably mean alkaline cells have not gotten cheaper.
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    I will second the notion that indeed AA batteries, whether Alkaline, Lithium, or Zinc Carbon, for purchase by consumer at a super-market checkout, have not gone cheaper recently. I will even venture that consumer lithium-ion batteries, such as for camera or laptop replacements, do not appear to have gone cheaper over last, say, decade. I can only assume healthy profit margin by brands (Nikon/Sony/Canon/etc, Lenovo/Sony/Dell/etc). Third party cheaper batteries are available, of dubious quality, so I suppose that may be a sign of cheaper manufacturing...
    - simcop2387 5y ago
      I'm not quite so sure about that. The prices have remained relatively stable, but the capacities have gone up. I think on a per Wh basis they may have actually gotten cheaper still. That means that you've gotten more battery life and/or more useful power in the devices that are using the batteries.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    And it's an excellent example. Technology gets better until efficiencies are maxed out and battery cell production can't be an exception. The only big outlier has been computer chips, where slowly shrinking cost per square mm (if it even sank?) was an insignificant footnote compared to the ever increasing ability to pack in more per unit of surface area. Lithium batteries have far more in common with alkaline batteries than with transistors for logical operations. Power transistors for example I would also consider closer to alkaline cells than to logic, there has surely been a lot of progress in that field which eventually brought us the miracles of HVDC, but on a far more conventional scale.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
We used a Lithium D cell in a prototype wireless product at a startup I worked at in 1989. The cells were pre-production samples. I forget the name of the company that was producing them now (I think it was a Japanese company - there were no logos on these batteries), but we were warned not to let them short out as they would go off like a 1/4 stick of dynamite. We were pretty careful with them, but we did have a unit come back from the field that had pretty much burned up, nothing but a charred circuit board left and most of the plastic enclosure melted away.
- hypnoscripto 5y ago
  How much better than the competition were they then? Did you understand why you were using such a dangerous alternative?
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Weight, I suppose. And silver+zinc was likely still more expensive.
    - neltnerb 5y ago
      I was never rich enough to own a laptop in that era, but I remember weight being the commonly espoused difference, or at least how it was marketed.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    We needed long battery life - 3 years for a small 8051-based board with a data radio (kind of like wifi in 1989) that turned on every second or so. We created a power control ASIC that kept the 8051 off most of the time - it would wake up when data was available for processing. This was a proof of concept project for the military not a consumer item.
- catblast01 5y ago
  Were these disposable lithium metal batteries or rechargeable lithium ion? They’re pretty different technologies. Both are prone to rapid discharge overheating problems though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
azernik 5y ago
This illustrates a big problem in econometrics, specifically inflation measurement ("price indexes"): when comparing the prices of equivalent (baskets of) goods and services, "equivalent" gets harder and harder to define over longer time and space intervals. The classic example is light bulbs [1]. If you use naive comparisons of like goods across years, with weighting by percentage of expenditures, to measure consumer/producer price changes from e.g. 1890-1930, you'll see: 1. decreasing weight in the basket and increasing price of whale-oil lamps over time 2. increasing weight in the basket and decreasing cost of light bulbs over time But what you won't capture is that these two goods are both providing lighting, and that the switch from one to another provides a sharp drop in the price of light that is not captured by the change in prices of either in isolation. Here it's the opposite effect, in that looking at Li-Ion battery prices in isolation overestimates the deflationary effect on energy storage prices. This problem has also popped up in the context of measuring US manufacturing output over time. Specifically, the correction factors used to deal with this are called "price deflators", and their inability to deal with the pricing and business model of computer hardware may have produced an incorrect impression that US manufacturing output is holding steady or increasing, when it's actually decreasing [2] [1] "Classic" as in used to draw the attention of the field in this important 1998 paper: https://lucept.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/william-nordhaus-the-cost-of-light.pdf https://lucept.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/william-nordhaus-... [2] https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1305&context=up_workingpapers https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
- RobinL 5y ago
  'Overestimates' because at the start of the time series people were using cheaper alternatives to the very-expensive li-ion batteries.
- oblio 5y ago
  > But what you won't capture is that these two goods are both providing lighting, and that the switch from one to another provides a sharp drop in the price of light that is not captured by the change in prices of either in isolation. I wonder if there was any way to compute light emitted per source. Then you could calculate a price per unit of light and whale-oil lamps would be obliterated by incandescent light builds which would in turn be obliterated by LED light bulbs.
dang 5y ago
Ok, we've add lithium ions to the title now. Thanks!

That's not the price of batteries in general, that's the price of Li-Ion batteries. Were Li-Ion batteries mass produced in 1991?

by cm2187 5y ago

That's not the price of batteries in general, that's the price of Li-Ion batteries. Were Li-Ion batteries mass produced in 1991?

reportingsjr 5y ago

The first commercial/mass produced lithium ion batteries came out in exactly 1991 as a matter of fact! They were used in a Sony camera.

elihu 5y ago

The other commenter says that they were first introduced as a commercial product in 1991. According to Wikipedia, they were preceded by two years by the first commercially-available nickel-metal hydride cells in 1989, so that would be an interesting point of comparison. Also nickel-cadmium and lead-acid have been around for a very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_b...

stormbrew 5y ago
I remember a lot of stuff having NiMH for a long time throughout the 90s, seemed like it took LiIon a lot longer to catch on.
- taf2 5y ago
  We raced electric RC cars in the 90s (really my dad and brother - I mostly just liked the smells and ideas). But I know my brother said to win they always had to have fresh as new batteries and as I recall they were NiMH
  - paulmd 5y ago
    Yes, performance of a battery declined over time, just as "battery health" declines on your phone today, for the same reasons. Mostly due to surface oxidation of the electrodes iirc. Lithium-ion was never a good idea due to the fire hazard (in a crash they would just straight up explode, not even just cause a raging uncontrollable fire like LiPo, just boom) and Lithium-polymer could not support the necessary discharge rates (which I believe was also true of li-ion at the time too...). Early LiPo packs were only rated to like 0.5C or 1C peak discharge - this means, for a 2 amp-hour pack, 1C would be a discharge rate of 2 amps. Even then the packs did not really do well at their rated discharge rates - NiMH packs were far more tolerant of abuse in terms of discharge rates, in some cases you could push well beyond the rated spec and they would take it for a year or two's worth of sessions. I was an "early adopter" on electric R/C airplanes back in the day (this would have been like 2000-2004) and the early stuff I used was mostly repurposed stuff from electric cars. The changeover to 4/5 or 2/3rds sub-C cells was a big deal at the time, the first "good" packs I owned were something called "HeCells" around 1800mAH or 2000 mAH, I also used KAN 1100mah cells. What I finally settled on at the time were these Sanyo "1950FAUP" cells which were extraordinary performers - we could push those cells to 70-80 amps peak discharge and they would take it. So in terms of the way LiPos are rated today[0], that is 40C discharge. This would only be doable for short periods, but it is necessary for launch and climbout (when the motor is running flat-out and the wing is basically stalled). Without the ability to sustain those currents it becomes very difficult to launch. Even still we did not "taxi" them like a normal airplane (or a normal model airplane), just wasn't enough power to get off the ground without a paved strip. We typically expected about 10-15 minutes of flight time if you were flying normally, maybe 8-10 if you were really hotdogging it. So that means we averaged about 6C over the course of a flight (higher during climbout, less during cruising). Another unsung miracle is how much motor technology has improved over the same period. My early motors were, again, repurposed brushed motors from Graupner's electric car lineup. We later moved onto some brushed Kyosho "magnetic mayhem" car motors that could push even higher levels of current. There was a Czech company called "Mega" who was an early mover on small neodymium brushless motors and that was a big deal at the time, they were far more powerful and far more efficient. Nowadays you don't even think about it, they're just a commodity, but at the time even a small brushless motor would run you about $130 or so! [0] (tangent but it's kinda weird that NiCd and NiMH cells have traditionally been specced in amps but LiPo cells are specced in terms of "C discharge", obviously it's trivial to move between the two if you know the capacity of the pack but there's a definite difference in "style" of how the discharge rates are represented here...)
- pixelpoet 5y ago
  Likewise, and I was quite perplexed as a kid why The Secret of Nimh had no mention of batteries.

xkjkls 5y ago

There's a graph there on market size, which shows the market size has grown 50,000x since 91.

colechristensen 5y ago
This is a sort of meaningless metric, you can adjust your time frame to make the market size arbitrarily small because it was 0 before 1991.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Your parent specifically stated 1991 not "before 1991". I think I understand what you mean but there was also a unfulfilled requirement before 1991. Back then (I'm 50.5 years old) cells didn't explode but then they also didn't set the world alight in terms of longevity either. We had Walkmans and crappy clones that drained the shitty rechargeable cells we had at the time in a few hours. OK those things drove mechanical beasties - cassettes but cells/batteries were not particularly good before Li-Ion turned up. Do you have any idea how something as simple as an iPod becomes exciting because no mechanical spinny things means power draw is much, much lower? It also helps if the thing isn't beige or grey. Apple are no more exciting to me than any other mob: design-wise, but they did get a few things right early on: "don't look shit". As it turns out, that simple mantra means that you get to >$1T t/o. Now I own a phone that runs for around two days before charging. That doesn't sound too grand until you recall that just the GPS thing in it would have required 2U+ in a comms rack back in the day. The camera? If I kept an equivalent camera from the 1990s in my pocket then I'd be making silly jokes about it. The phone: I can stand on the top of Hay Torr and make a call.
  - eric-hu 5y ago
    Initial iPods used spinning disks. Solid state was not a factor in early iPod success. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod+Classic+Hard+Drive+Replacement/564 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod+Classic+Hard+Drive+Replace...
    - 5y ago

HarryHirsch 5y ago

They were not. In 1998, the second edition of Greenwood/Earnshaw's chemistry textbook came out, a magisterial survey of inorganic chemistry. They state that the major use for lithium is in lithium grease, but "looking to the future, Li/FeSx battery systems are emerging as a potentially viable energy storage system ... and a ... source of power for electric cars". The 1991 edition did not talk about batteries at all.

sgerenser 5y ago
I still remember the PowerBook 5300 series that was released around 1996 and had to be recalled due to reports of fires with their then cutting edge lithium batteries. Apple had to rerelease the product with NiMH batteries IIRC.

bluedino 5y ago

Yea, AA batteries have definitely not gotten cheaper

chrisseaton 5y ago
AA is a form-factor, not a chemical technology. You can get lithium AA batteries. You probably mean alkaline cells have not gotten cheaper.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I will second the notion that indeed AA batteries, whether Alkaline, Lithium, or Zinc Carbon, for purchase by consumer at a super-market checkout, have not gone cheaper recently. I will even venture that consumer lithium-ion batteries, such as for camera or laptop replacements, do not appear to have gone cheaper over last, say, decade. I can only assume healthy profit margin by brands (Nikon/Sony/Canon/etc, Lenovo/Sony/Dell/etc). Third party cheaper batteries are available, of dubious quality, so I suppose that may be a sign of cheaper manufacturing...
  - simcop2387 5y ago
    I'm not quite so sure about that. The prices have remained relatively stable, but the capacities have gone up. I think on a per Wh basis they may have actually gotten cheaper still. That means that you've gotten more battery life and/or more useful power in the devices that are using the batteries.
- usrusr 5y ago
  And it's an excellent example. Technology gets better until efficiencies are maxed out and battery cell production can't be an exception. The only big outlier has been computer chips, where slowly shrinking cost per square mm (if it even sank?) was an insignificant footnote compared to the ever increasing ability to pack in more per unit of surface area. Lithium batteries have far more in common with alkaline batteries than with transistors for logical operations. Power transistors for example I would also consider closer to alkaline cells than to logic, there has surely been a lot of progress in that field which eventually brought us the miracles of HVDC, but on a far more conventional scale.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

We used a Lithium D cell in a prototype wireless product at a startup I worked at in 1989. The cells were pre-production samples. I forget the name of the company that was producing them now (I think it was a Japanese company - there were no logos on these batteries), but we were warned not to let them short out as they would go off like a 1/4 stick of dynamite. We were pretty careful with them, but we did have a unit come back from the field that had pretty much burned up, nothing but a charred circuit board left and most of the plastic enclosure melted away.

hypnoscripto 5y ago
How much better than the competition were they then? Did you understand why you were using such a dangerous alternative?
- nine_k 5y ago
  Weight, I suppose. And silver+zinc was likely still more expensive.
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    I was never rich enough to own a laptop in that era, but I remember weight being the commonly espoused difference, or at least how it was marketed.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  We needed long battery life - 3 years for a small 8051-based board with a data radio (kind of like wifi in 1989) that turned on every second or so. We created a power control ASIC that kept the 8051 off most of the time - it would wake up when data was available for processing. This was a proof of concept project for the military not a consumer item.
catblast01 5y ago
Were these disposable lithium metal batteries or rechargeable lithium ion? They’re pretty different technologies. Both are prone to rapid discharge overheating problems though.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

azernik 5y ago

This illustrates a big problem in econometrics, specifically inflation measurement ("price indexes"): when comparing the prices of equivalent (baskets of) goods and services, "equivalent" gets harder and harder to define over longer time and space intervals. The classic example is light bulbs [1]. If you use naive comparisons of like goods across years, with weighting by percentage of expenditures, to measure consumer/producer price changes from e.g. 1890-1930, you'll see: 1. decreasing weight in the basket and increasing price of whale-oil lamps over time 2. increasing weight in the basket and decreasing cost of light bulbs over time But what you won't capture is that these two goods are both providing lighting, and that the switch from one to another provides a sharp drop in the price of light that is not captured by the change in prices of either in isolation. Here it's the opposite effect, in that looking at Li-Ion battery prices in isolation overestimates the deflationary effect on energy storage prices. This problem has also popped up in the context of measuring US manufacturing output over time. Specifically, the correction factors used to deal with this are called "price deflators", and their inability to deal with the pricing and business model of computer hardware may have produced an incorrect impression that US manufacturing output is holding steady or increasing, when it's actually decreasing [2] [1] "Classic" as in used to draw the attention of the field in this important 1998 paper: https://lucept.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/william-nordhaus-the-cost-of-light.pdf https://lucept.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/william-nordhaus-... [2] https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1305&context=up_workingpapers https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...

RobinL 5y ago
'Overestimates' because at the start of the time series people were using cheaper alternatives to the very-expensive li-ion batteries.
oblio 5y ago
> But what you won't capture is that these two goods are both providing lighting, and that the switch from one to another provides a sharp drop in the price of light that is not captured by the change in prices of either in isolation. I wonder if there was any way to compute light emitted per source. Then you could calculate a price per unit of light and whale-oil lamps would be obliterated by incandescent light builds which would in turn be obliterated by LED light bulbs.

dang 5y ago

Ok, we've add lithium ions to the title now. Thanks!