Looking Out: The dizzying world of powering our things
Batteries are just amazing these days, as long as they don’t blow up and burn down the house.
It seems like everything I own runs on batteries, from my toothbrush to my chainsaw. Our house is full of blinking lights on rechargers as electrons are poured into batteries.
Right now there is a charger on my kitchen counter readying a little hand-held compressor so I can check the tire pressure on our cars.
Our vacuum cleaner is blinking away in the mudroom. Phones, computers, tablets, remote controls, smoke detectors, Alexa — everything everywhere is blinking at us. It is like living in a planetarium.
“We should call this place Battery Park,” I say to my beloved wife Marsha, who, being a native New Yorker has made certain we have both visited the real Battery Park on Manhattan Island, now known simply as The Battery.
That 25-acre park in New York City is rich in history. The Castle Clinton, a fort built in the early 1800’s has been restored. It was the forerunner of Ellis Island, which along with the Statue of Liberty is visible from The Battery. Castle Clinton welcomed millions of immigrants to our shores. The Lenape Indians and later the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam occupied the area. Failed attempts to repel British ships sailing up the Hudson during the Revolutionary War included shots fired from The Battery.
Needless to say, being a person who likes to know about words, I had to find out why the cylinder we use to power a flashlight and a park in New York City share the name “battery.”
It starts with a Latin word that was moved to France after changing the spelling, as the French are wont to do. Later, the English corrected the spelling and stole the word that originally meant metal things formed by hammering.
It seems that metal things formed by hammering included weapons, which included artillery pieces, which when used together form a battery. If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t blame me. Blame the Romans, the Parisians and the Brits, then hold onto your hats for the next part.
The original electrical storage devices, invented in the mid-1700s were called Leyden Jars. They were essentially glass jars lined with metal foil inside and outside, with a wire connecting the two pieces of foil. Today, we would call them “capacitors.” Early experiments with static electricity were conducted using Leyden Jars which could deliver quite a jolt, and an even bigger jolt if several were hooked together.
When hooked together, they reportedly resembled a bunch of artillery pieces lined up to fire upon an enemy — a battery.
One could do a lot of research about possible eyesight problems and drug use that carried a much-abused Latin word through France and England to New Amsterdam, now New York, to turn metal things formed by hammering into artillery pieces and then into AA batteries.
I, for one, am not inclined to do that research. Nope. I’m too busy. My charger light just turned green so I have to quit now and go to the garage to check my tire pressure.
Ah, yes. The garage. Where blinking lights abound. My chainsaw, hedge trimmer, car vacuum, leaf-blower, weed whacker, garage door opener — they all live out there, and they all blink at me.
— Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Looking Out: The dizzying world of powering our things
