This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in IMAGES, April 28, East Bernard Express, East Bernard, Texas.
Changing batteries twice this week in my portable knee, shoulder, and neck vibrator triggered my awareness of how dependent we are on batteries and battery power. That awareness didn’t even include my wife and I re-charging the batteries every night in our iPhones. Nor the need for batteries for our eight flashlights.
While my wife uses her iPhone as a flashlight, I use the four mini-flashlights of the eight for finding midnight snacks, checking to see if burglars are breaking in, etc. My minis use Double-A batteries. Since our blood pressure monitors and my portable radio, and the portable vibrator all use Double-A’s, I can’t imagine what folks did in the old days before Double-A’s were available (they were first produced in 1907).
I remember when electricity came to the farms in Dime Box in the 1940’s, but somehow I guess I thought human beings always had battery power. Yes and no.
Primitive batteries existed as early as 250 BC, when the Parthians (living in present-day Baghdad) made clay jars, filled them with vinegar, inserted a copper cylinder inside, and had an iron rod sticking out the top. However, that would not have helped Europeans and Americans who lived in the 1600’s and 1700’s. You see, Alessandro Volta, an Italian, created the first modern-day battery in 1800.
Before the dynamo and the generator were invented, batteries were our main source of energy.
To avoid confusing my readers, though, I must point out that battery power is a form of electricity. “Mains electricity,” a more powerful form of energy, was necessary, because “battery electricity” has its limitations.
Batteries can be as small as a peanut and as large as 21,528 square feet. A giant battery can light up a whole city, but re-charging would be constantly necessary.
Electricity was first used in the 1870’s, when most of it was generated by steam turbines using fossil fuels. To provide energy for a city like Houston, you would need steam turbines, whether generated by fossil fuels, solar, wind, nuclear, or some other source. A Double-A battery, as wonderful as they are, won’t light up even a little town like East Bernard,
I suppose our forebears, long before they had batteries or electricity, would have had to use portable oil lamps or torches as flashlights. No doubt that’s why tallow tree berries were such a valuable commercial commodity in Texas before the mid- to late- 1800’s.
It seems to me that the only battery flashlight we had when I was growing up in Dime Box in the 1930’s and 1940’s required a “D” battery. We must have ordered the batteries through the Sears and Roebuck catalog because I’m not sure rural general stores carried them. We were not allowed to use the flashlight unless there was an emergency.
A few years ago, I bought Double-A batteries in packages of a dozen; then one by one adding devices, I now purchase them in packages of 24, and I still run out! We have to have his and hers bp monitors, battery pencil sharpeners (all the electrical outlets are plugged full), several portable battery fans (those rascals eat up batteries fast), nose hair and ear hair trimmers, and two razors and a beard trimmer (at least they’re re-chargeable), and a portable CD player (to play polka music when I do my daily walking). All the non-re-chargeables take double-A’s.
It’s rare that I use a “D” battery anymore, but life without my Double-A’s would be unthinkable!
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.