The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution - Paperback

"Henry Schlesinger is playful and intelligent and obscenely well read." -- Richard Zacks, author of The Pirate Hunter

"Henry Schlesinger's fascinating and superbly researched history of the battery is the story of civilization as we know it." -- Michael Belfiore, author of The Department of Mad Scientists

Henry Schlesinger's The Battery is the first popular history of the technology that harnessed electricity and powered the greatest scientific and technological advances of our time. If you like Wired Magazine and popular science books, you'll love the "hidden history" of The Battery.

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An eye-opening history of the technology that harnessed electricity and powered the greatest scientific and technological advances of our time.

What begin as a long-running dispute in biology, involving a dead frog's twitching leg, a scalpel, and a metal plate, would become an invention that transformed the history of the world: the battery. Science journalist Henry Schlesinger traces the history of this essential power source and demonstrates its impact on our lives, from Alessandro Volta's first copper-and-zinc model in 1800 to twenty-first-century technological breakthroughs. Schlesinger introduces the charlatans and geniuses, the paupers and magnates, who were attracted to the power of the battery.