Batteries

These batteries are on their way to the local supermarket where there is a recycling point. It’s amazing, indeed horrifying, to see how many we collect in a short space of time.

We’re having a quiet day at home to recover from our Astra Zeneca jabs yesterday. This gave me a chance to consult Prof Google about batteries. A versatile word, derived from French ‘battre’ to beat, and applied to a variety of situations where you have a series of similar objects. Think guns, questions, psychological tests, mining, percussion, chickens…

Alessandro Volta is generally credited with inventing batteries when he developed the ‘voltaic pile’. But I like the story of his friend and rival Luigi Galvani who, with his wife Lucia Galeazzi, found that a dead frog’s legs twitched when struck by an electrical spark. They developed a theory of animal electricity which they thought was intrinsic to the animal body. Volta showed though that the electricity came not from the frog but from the interaction of metal and moist surfaces during the experiment.

Which is why there are no frog’s legs among our dead batteries.