Batteries are one of the most important objects in our everyday lives but, as generally they are unobtrusive, users are not aware of them until they stop working e.g. the car doesn't start! This first "battery" was dated to around 250 B.C. in Baghdad, and was used in simple operations to electroplate objects with a thin layer of metal, much like the process used now to plate inexpensive gold and silver jewellery.

Batteries were rediscovered much later by a man named Alessandro Volta who was born in 1745 and died in 1827, but not before developing what would come to be the most important part of life as we know it. His experimental work resulted in the generation of electrical current from chemical reactions between dissimilar metals. By 1800, he had refined this into a stack of small disks, alternating zinc and copper with a disk of leather saturated with salt solution separating each part of metal disks. The result, later termed the Voltaic pile, generated a substantial electrical current. In his honour, the unit of electrical potential was named after him, the volt. Although large and bulky, variations of the voltaic pile provided the only practical source of electricity in the early 19th century. They were the original primary battery

In 1802, Dr. William Cruickshank, an English chemist, designed the first electric battery capable of mass production by joining zinc and copper plates in a wooden box filled with electrolyte. He also performed experiments leading to electroplating..

Then in 183, John Frederic Daniell, a British chemist and meteorologist invented the Daniell cell, which was a great improvement over the voltaic cell used in the early days of battery development.

In 1859, the French inventor Gaston Plante developed the first practical storage lead-acid battery that could be recharged (secondary battery). This type of battery was the forerunner of all lead acid storage batteries and the Planté type battery is still used where long life and reliability are required.

In 1866, the French engineer Georges Leclanché patented the carbon-zinc wet cell battery called the Leclanché cell. By 1868, twenty thousand of Georges Leclanche's cells were being used with telegraph equipment.

Dr. Carl Gassner, a German scientist, patented the first "dry" cell in 1886 with zinc as the container for the other elements as well as for the negative electrode. The electrolyte was absorbed in a porous material and the cell was sealed across the top. In America, by 1896, the Nation Carbide Company, later Union Carbide and Eveready, had produced the first consumer dry cell battery.

In 1899, Waldemar Jungner of Sweden created the first nickel-cadmium battery, the only direct competitor to the lead acid battery. The nickel-cadmium battery offered several advantages in certain applications. Even early nickel-cadmium batteries were physically and chemically robust. With minor improvements to the first prototypes, energy density rapidly increased to about half of that of primary batteries, significantly better than lead acid batteries.

The nickel-iron battery was developed by Thomas Edison in the USA in 1901, and was used as the energy source for electric vehicles, such as the Detroit Electric. The main advantage over nickel-cadmium was cost, but due to the poorer efficiency of the charging reaction and more pronounced formation of hydrogen (gassing), the nickel-iron technology soon became less relevant.

Improvements to the existing nickel-cadmium systems were achieved when German duo Shlecht and Ackermann invented the sintered plate in 1932, which allowed for higher load currents and reduced volume. This made them particularly useful for aviation applications

The major developments in the nickel-cadmium technology were completed in 1947 when French scientist Neumann succeeded in completely closing the cell. Thus the sealed nickel-cadmium battery became available and this was the predominant portable rechargeable battery until the arrival of nickel-metal hydride and, later, lithium ion batteries.

In the mid 1960’s came the development of primary alkaline cells when Lewis Frederick Urry after testing a number of materials, discovered that manganese dioxide and solid zinc worked well coupled with an alkaline substance as an electrolyte. Eveready immediately switched production to Urry's prototype. In 1980 the brand was renamed Energizer. Modern alkaline batteries, due to technological improvements, can last as much as 40 times longer than the original prototype. Alkaline cells have largely replaced the zinc-carbon primary battery.

The last major development of the lead acid battery was the VRLA battery in the mid 1970’s where the open separator was replaced by an advanced glass mat (AGM) and a low pressure vent was used. This increased the internal recombination of the hydrogen and oxygen given off to approaching 100%, thus eliminating the need to top up with water. However, this has its own problems…..

From around 1990 to the present time we have had the commercialisation of the nickel-metal hydride battery and the lithium-ion battery. However, in the area of large scale industrial batteries, lead acid and nickel cadmium still remain the predominant technologies.