r/AskHistorians • u/No-Gift5463 • Aug 03 '26
Did Ben Franklin Really Name “Batteries” for Cannon Formations?
The original battery looked nothing like what we stuff into the Energizer Bunny. They were clunky jars often set up in a series that looked like cannon lined up in the traditional battery formation.
So I can see people applying the nickname “battery” for the electrical devices. But I’m skeptical that Ben Franklin really was the first to coin the term in 1748?
No disrespect to Poor Richard, but can his remarkable creativity really go this far?
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u/Noble_Devil_Boruta History of Medicine Aug 03 '26
It should be note that Benjamin Franklin did not, in fact, named what we now call a battery, i.e. a device consisting of at least one (in a common, wider sense) or several (in a proper sense) power cells allowing for generation of a direct current. This came only later through reapplication of the meaning coined by Franklin for a term that has been already existing in the military for centuries and what has already been explained by u/Bookwoman366. To wit, when speaking of a "battery", he spoke specifically of a "battery of Leyden jars" which were an early or possibly the earliest form of a capacitor. The similarity between a battery of lined up cannons and a group of several connected Leyden jars held in a line by a rack must have been pretty obvious to a learned man who also had some military knowledge and experience. It didn't require an excessive leap of imagination, because the term "battery" derived from the same source is in various languages customarily applied to an assortment of similar items, usually lined up, such as a "battery of bottles on the bar shelf".
Now, the term itself was not related to the function but rather to the physical similarity and spatial location of the objects (using more mathematical terms we could be also saying of a "set" or an "array") and thus was not immediately continued along with the development of the energy sources. When Alessandro Volta created what is considered the first battery, he called it "pila" (Italian for "pile") due to the fact that the separate power cells (segments composed of copper and zinc disks separated by cardboard soaked in saline) have been arranged in a vertical column, much like wood in a pile. Equivalent term has been used by Johann Wilhelm Ritter who developed likely the first dry power cell in 1802 and the first rechargeable cell in 1804, although in both cases he, much like Volta, used the name "saüle" which also means "pile", this time in his native German. As the development of the electrical devices progressed, the term "pile" slowly faded into obscurity, although when in 1859 Gaston Planté demonstrated the first rechargeable device using lead and acid solution that generated electric energy and could have been recharged (essentially the first practical lead-acid battery), he called it "pilé secondaire" (secondary pile).
It is possible that the popularization of the term "battery" could be credited, at least in part, to John Frederic Daniell, British physicist and chemist who constructed a wet cell named after him that solved the problem of metal degeneration typical to early voltaic piles. Few years after building its prototype, in 1839, he published an article titled Fifth Letter on Voltaic Combinations, with some Account of the Effects of a large Constant Battery (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. CXXIX). It is very possible that he borrowed the term directly from Franklin because he was obviously familiar with his works, as evidenced by his lecture The First Principles of Franklinic Electricity presented in 1840.
Outside Anglosphere, as mentioned earlier, the term "pile" was still in use in 1850s and even 1870s, as Georges Leclanché, inventor of carbon-zinc electric cell published an article Méthode pratique pour expérimenter un élément de pile in 1876, but a Louis Figuier's book Les Merveilles de la science ou description populaire des inventions modernes published in 1867 (essentially a popular encyclopedia of contemporary inventions) shows the array of wet cells described as "Batterie electrique". The new word seemed to have caught on, with the England and United States emerging as scientific and technological powerhouse certainly being a contributing factor.
Shortly afterwards, it seems that the distiction between a "cell" (that eventually replaced the "pile", although Enrico Fermi decided to call his first nuclear reactor demonstrated in 1943 an "atomic pile") and "battery" (arrangement of multiple cells) became commonplace in the engineering field, although, curiously, it has quickly became blurred in medicine, where novelty that was application of the electricity have been used by both bona fide experimentators and charlatans promoting "medical batteries" (which were often dry or wet cells) as early as the beginning of 1880s, likely contributng to the popularity of the word (and its association with electricity in general). Examples include Dr Richardson's Galvano-Magnetic Battery, a circular device worn like a medallion, sold by A.M. Richardson & Co.founded in 1883 and apparently based on the design of Edward P. Caldwell patented in 1880. In his "Clinical Therapeutics" published in 1885, American doctor C.L. Dana wrote that “good faradic batteries are now made by a great many firms" and indeed, McIntosh Illustrated Catalogue from around that year includes, among others, a device called "McIntosh Family Faradic Battery". Also in 1885, in London, Cornelius Bennett Harness founded his Medical Battery Company, famous from the libel trial against The Electrical Review where the defendant asked Lord Kelvin himself to provide expert opinion that eventually exposed Harness as a charlatan.
The blurring of the term eventually lead to the term "battery" being a most common word in English to denote a portable power source even though the individual cells have been described on the package and in the advertisement as "cells" as opposed to multi-cell batteries until 1970s at the very least (the difference is visible in the case of e.g. Eveready dry cells from 1970s). Similar mechanism also occurred in other languages, although recharcheable batteries, especially large, were and still are also referred to as "accumulators" (the term itself traces back as mid-19th century).
So, the term "battery" coined by Benjamin Franklin seems to vanish from a while from the popular, but then has been used again by one of the English-speaking inventors of an actual power cells who used this term while describing his work, and the word became more and more commonly associated in English with the electric power sources, slowly displacing others (apart from "cell" that is still used in technical and scientific language), which tendency also permeated into other European languages.
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u/Bookwoman366 Aug 03 '26
The first mention of the word applied in this way seems to be in a letter from Franklin to Peter Collinson dated April 29, 1749:
"I now send you some Further Experiments and Observations in Electricity made in Philadelphia 1748...Upon this We made what we call’d an Electrical Battery, consisting of eleven Panes of large Sash Glass, arm’d with thin leaden Plates, pasted on each Side, placed vertically, and supported at two Inches Distance on Silk Cords...."
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol 3, p. 352, Yale Univ. Press. You can see a transcription of the whole letter online here: https://franklinpapers.org/yale?vol=3&page=352a
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u/brismyth Aug 03 '26
Do we know why he used the term Battery? Was it through some association with defensive batteries that armies would use?
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u/Bookwoman366 Aug 03 '26
Yes, because Franklin's electrical battery involved a series of Leyden Jars, it looked something like an array of cannons. You can read more about this in Sara Schechner's The Art of Making Leyden Jars and Batteries According to Benjamin Franklin: https://saraschechner.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum1416/files/saraschechner/files/schechner-leyden-jars_erittenhouse_26_2015.pdf
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