The Forgotten History of the Battery: From Volta's Pile to Lithium Storage

Most people have an intuitive sense that batteries store electricity, which is technically wrong but useful. Batteries store chemical potential energy in a configuration that releases it as an electric current when a circuit is closed. This is a different thing from a capacitor, which actually stores electricity, but for everyday purposes the distinction does not matter. What matters is that the battery is the technology that lets electrical energy travel without wires, and the modern world is built on the assumption that this is cheap and reliable. It was neither for most of human history.

The Baghdad battery question

The story usually begins with the Baghdad Battery, a Parthian-era clay jar with a copper cylinder and an iron rod found near Baghdad in 1936. The proposal, advanced by Wilhelm Konig and amplified by popular science writers, was that this was an ancient electrochemical cell used for electroplating. The interpretation has not held up: the jar is more likely a scroll container, the configuration would produce only a fraction of a volt, and no electroplated artifacts from the period have been found. The Baghdad Battery probably is not a battery. The story persists because it would be interesting if it were.

What this means is that the actual history of the battery begins much later, with Alessandro Volta's pile in 1800. Volta was a Pavia physicist responding to Luigi Galvani's 1791 frog leg experiments, which Galvani had interpreted as evidence of animal electricity. Volta argued that the electricity came from the contact between the two different metals in the frog circuit, not from the frog itself. To prove this, he constructed the Voltaic Pile: alternating discs of zinc and copper separated by paper soaked in brine. The pile produced a sustained electric current, which had never been observed before.

The Voltaic Pile was an immediate scientific sensation. Humphry Davy used it within years to isolate sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and barium, doubling the known list of elements. Michael Faraday's electromagnetic discoveries depended on stable current sources that only the pile could provide. The pile changed chemistry, physics, and eventually electrical engineering as a field. Volta's name attached to the volt as a unit, which is one of the rare cases where the unit names a person who actually built the relevant thing.

The 19th-century chemistry catalog

The Voltaic Pile had problems. It dried out. It produced inconsistent current. The voltage dropped as the chemistry exhausted itself, with no way to recharge. The 19th century is a long sequence of chemistry improvements to fix these problems, each named after the chemist who worked it out.

The Daniell Cell (1836, John Frederic Daniell) introduced a porous barrier between the zinc and copper to prevent the chemistry from polarizing. This produced a stable voltage for hours instead of minutes. The Daniell Cell became the standard laboratory power source and the backbone of the early telegraph network.

The Grove Cell (1839, William Grove) used platinum and nitric acid to push voltage higher. The Bunsen Cell (1841, Robert Bunsen of burner fame) substituted carbon for platinum, dropping the cost dramatically and enabling the cell to be used in industrial quantities. Grove Cells and Bunsen Cells powered the early electric lighting demonstrations and the experimental arc lamps of the 1860s.

The Leclanche Cell (1866, Georges Leclanche) used a zinc anode in a porous pot containing manganese dioxide, with ammonium chloride as the electrolyte. The Leclanche Cell was the ancestor of the modern dry cell: cheap, portable, and good enough for the new application of doorbells and telegraphic call buttons. By the 1880s, Carl Gassner had refined the design into the zinc-carbon dry cell that powered flashlights and portable radios through most of the 20th century.

The recharge problem

What all of these cells had in common was that they were primary cells: once exhausted, they were exhausted. The chemistry was a one-way reaction. The cell had to be replaced or refilled, which made batteries an ongoing expense rather than a capital investment.

The breakthrough was the lead-acid battery, invented in 1859 by Gaston Plante. Plante found that a cell consisting of two lead plates immersed in sulfuric acid could be charged and discharged repeatedly. The chemistry was reversible: discharging converted lead and lead dioxide to lead sulfate, and charging reversed the reaction. The Plante Cell could be cycled hundreds of times.

The first applications of the lead-acid battery were industrial: lighting railroad cars, running early electric motors, providing ballast in the early development of automobile electrical systems. By 1900, the lead-acid battery was the standard for any application where energy needed to be stored and re-used: telegraph and telephone offices, electric submarines (the first lead-acid submarine was the French Gymnote in 1888), industrial backup power.

The lead-acid battery survives essentially unchanged into 2026. The starter battery in a gasoline car is still a Plante-cell descendant. The technology is over 165 years old and is still being manufactured at scale because the chemistry is cheap, robust, and well-understood. Lead-acid is one of the cases where the original invention turned out to be close to optimal for its application.

The 20th-century alternatives

Lead-acid had problems. It was heavy. The lead was toxic. The acid was dangerous. The energy density was low: a useful amount of energy required a battery the size of a small suitcase. For applications like flashlights, doorbells, and the new portable radios of the 1920s, the dry zinc-carbon cell was better.

The 20th century saw a steady catalog of new chemistries. Nickel-cadmium (1899, Waldemar Jungner) offered better energy density than lead-acid and could be cycled thousands of times. The Edison Cell (1901, Thomas Edison) used iron and nickel oxide and was even more cycle-tolerant, though heavier per watt-hour. Nickel-iron cells powered industrial vehicles and early electric trucks; the iron chemistry is currently being revisited for grid-scale storage because of its long cycle life and non-toxic materials.

Alkaline batteries (1959, Lewis Urry at Eveready) replaced the zinc-carbon dry cell with a zinc-manganese-dioxide chemistry using potassium hydroxide electrolyte. Alkaline cells held charge longer in storage, delivered higher current, and dominated the consumer dry-cell market for the rest of the 20th century. They are still the default AA and AAA cell.

Nickel-metal-hydride (1990, commercialized after years of research) replaced cadmium with hydrogen-absorbing alloys, eliminating the toxic cadmium while maintaining the cycle life. NiMH cells powered the first widely-adopted hybrid cars (Toyota Prius, 1997) and remain in use for some hybrid vehicles, though lithium has displaced them in most new designs.

Lithium

The lithium-ion battery is what made the modern portable computing world possible. The chemistry was first explored by Stanley Whittingham at Exxon in the 1970s, refined by John Goodenough at Oxford and Texas in the 1980s, and commercialized by Sony in 1991. Whittingham, Goodenough, and Akira Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development.

The advantage of lithium chemistry is energy density. A lithium-ion cell holds 2-3 times the energy per kilogram of a NiMH cell, and 4-5 times the energy per kilogram of a lead-acid cell. The voltage per cell is also higher (3.7V vs 1.2V for nickel chemistries vs 2.1V for lead-acid), so fewer cells are needed for a given system voltage.

The disadvantages are real. Lithium-ion cells fail catastrophically when damaged, overcharged, or short-circuited. The cell can enter thermal runaway, releasing the stored energy as heat and starting a fire that is hard to extinguish. The infrastructure for managing this (battery management systems, separator membranes, cell-level fusing) is non-trivial and accounts for substantial fraction of the cost of a finished battery pack.

The 2010s saw the lithium-ion cost curve drop by a factor of 10, from about $1000 per kilowatt-hour to about $100. This made grid-scale storage economic, made long-range electric vehicles practical, and changed the calculus of every product that runs on a battery. The cost decline has continued, slower, into the 2020s. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells are now competitive with nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) for many applications, with safer chemistry and lower raw material costs.

What comes next

The current research frontier is solid-state lithium batteries, where the liquid electrolyte is replaced by a solid material. The advantages are higher energy density, better safety (no flammable liquid), and faster charging. The challenges are manufacturing: solid electrolytes have been brittle, expensive to produce at scale, and slow to charge despite the theoretical promise.

Toyota, Samsung, QuantumScape, and several other companies have announced solid-state cells for production this decade. The 2026 status is that some applications (small cells for medical devices and small electronics) are shipping with solid-state chemistry, but vehicle-scale production has lagged the original timelines by years. The fundamental physics is real; the manufacturing is the binding constraint.

Beyond lithium, the research catalog includes sodium-ion (cheaper materials, slightly lower energy density, viable for grid storage where weight matters less), zinc-air (high theoretical energy density, hard to recharge), redox flow batteries (energy stored in liquid electrolytes that can be pumped, with the capacity decoupled from the power), and various exotic chemistries that work in laboratory conditions but have not survived contact with manufacturing.

What the history shows

Three observations. The first is that battery development is slow. The major chemistry families are spaced about a generation apart: voltaic pile (1800), lead-acid (1859), nickel-cadmium (1899), alkaline (1959), lithium-ion (1991), solid-state (2025+). Each took decades of refinement after first demonstration. The expectation that battery costs and capabilities will improve dramatically year-over-year is recent and somewhat anomalous: the lithium-ion cost curve from 2010-2020 was unusual, not the historical norm.

The second observation is that the chemistry that wins is rarely the chemistry that is theoretically optimal. Lead-acid is heavy, toxic, and inefficient, but it has been the dominant rechargeable for 165 years because it is cheap, robust, and well-understood. The dominance of any battery technology depends on cost, safety, manufacturing infrastructure, and supply chain as much as on energy density.

The third observation is that batteries are a binding constraint on more products than is obvious. The smartphone is fundamentally a battery-limited device. Electric vehicles are battery-limited. The grid integration of renewable energy is battery-limited. The pace at which battery chemistry improves is the pace at which large parts of the modern world can improve.

The deeper observation is that the battery is one of those technologies whose importance is invisible while it works. The expectation that a phone runs all day, that a laptop runs for hours, that a flashlight has a charge when needed, is built on a chemistry developed over 200 years of incremental work. Most people will never think about it. The chemistry will keep working until the chemistry needs to be replaced, at which point an entire industry will spend a generation switching over and most users will never know.