10 things I learned from the book || The Battery : How portable power sparked a technological revolution

Book Post : 24

Book Name : The Battery : How portable power sparked a technological revolution

Author : Henry Schlesinger

Genre : Non-Fiction/Science

What is it about?: It is about the history of how batteries were developed over the years. From the twitching of a frog's leg to the the nickel hydrogen batteries in the Hubble space telescope the book traces the many observations, discoveries, inventions and break throughs that lead to the batteries that we see in everyday use today. 

How I came to read it : I like to casually browse books in a library and on one such visit I saw this book and given my background in energy I had to read it. 

   

Did I like it? :  Yes I did. It starts off nicely, becomes a tad bit bland in the middle but becomes interesting once again as the military uses of batteries section comes up. I learnt a lot of new facts and trivia about batteries and the equipment they power.  

Top 10 things I learned from this book: 

1. We all the know the 'Bazooka', the rocket launcher which can be fired from the shoulder. It forms a quintessential part of so many action movies. The original bazooka was ignited by two standard sized D cells on the stock though later models eliminated the batteries altogether. Fun fact: The name 'Bazooka' was given by soldiers, after a musical instrument played by a radio comic called Bob Burns. 

2. Its not perfectly clear who invented the Walkie Talkie and is credited to many inventors including the engineering team at Motorola. I will only mention the Canadian connection here. Donald Hings, working at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company in Vancouver is said to have the invented a portable 2 way radio in 1937. 

3. Duracell was originally called P R Mallory company and it started off by manufacturing Mercury cells. This was the first new battery chemistry in over a century(better than the carbon-zinc config used in the majority of applications then). This was in the 1920s.  Sam Ruben was the one who invented the Mercury Cells. 

4. There is a law called Faraday's Law of Electrolysis which states that in order to double the output of any battery, the amount of material in that battery must be doubled. The battery industry hit this wall many times and found ways around it. 

5. World's first electric watch was released in 1957 by a company called Hamilton(this company was eventually taken over by Swatch). This electric watch was called Hamilton 500 and was priced at $175(around $1,300 today). It had a $1.75 energizer battery which was not too reliable. Elvis Presley bought a Hamilton Electric watch and so did Rod Sterling, the host of Twilight Zone. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones wore Hamilton Electrics in the 'Men in Black' movies. 

6. Sonotone Corporation, a manufacturer of hearing aids became the first company in 1952 to offer a consumer product using transistors. Transistors were mostly used in military applications till then. AT&T provided the license to Sonotone for the use of transistors. Interestingly the license provided to Sonotone was royalty free in observance of Alexander Graham Bell's devotion to the deaf. AT&T was established by Bell and his father in law. 

7. TR-55, a transistorized radio model was released by a then young 10 year old company called the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company. TR-55 was only available in Japan. The company wanted to release its next model TR-63 in the US too. For the exports the company changed its name to something that Americans can easily pronounce: Sony. TR-63 was a huge hit which ultimately popularized the pocket radios.  

8. This one is more of a fun fact. Its common that technical advances attract conspiracy theories. We are living in the age of misinformation so we are pretty used to this but the world was not short of conspiracies in the 50s too. One of these theories said that transistors were a product of reverse engineering alien technology salvaged from a crashed alien spaceship.

9.  In 1973, Sharp released a pocket calculator called Elsi Mate EL-805. It housed 5 Integrated Circuits and was less than an inch thick. It could run for 100 hours on a single AA battery. This power consumption was 1/9000 of other battery powered calculators on the market. This was chiefly because this calculator used LCD(Liquid Crystal Displays) for the first time ever. This was a big turning point. 

10. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, had six 125 pound rechargeable nickel hydrogen batteries. Scientists and engineers at that time estimated their life expectancy to be around 5 years. They lasted for 19 years!   

10 things I learned from the book || Cool : How Air Conditioning changed everything

Book Post : 23

Book Name : Cool : How Air Conditioning changed everything

Author : Salvatore Basile

Genre : Non-Fiction/Science

What is it about?: A book detailing the history of Air Conditioning right from its earliest beginnings to the modern era. As the author states there were two struggles in the story of Air conditioning: one was actually making a perfect cooling device and the other was to convince people that they needed such a device.

How I came to read it : With my recent career change to energy efficiency in buildings I wanted to read books about Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. A quick google search lead me to this book and I obtained it by making an Inter Library Loan request from the Okanagan Regional Library. Also the recent heatwaves in Canada resulting in a huge surge in demand for home ACs played a factor.

   

Did I like it? :  This was a decent read. Not overly exciting and at the same not too bland it was an okay read. It gets a bit repetitive in the middle but slowly pics up pace at the end. 

Top 10 things I learned from this book: 

1. The first proper Air Conditioning unit was invented by Willis Haviland Carrier in 1902. Yes the same Carrier which is a huge AC manufacturing company now. The first AC was built for a company called Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographic and Publishing company. The summers of 1900 and 1902 were very hot and humid and a large amount of paper stock was ruined because of it. So an Air Conditioning system was built for them by Willis Carrier (while working for Buffalo Forge) which not only kept the facility cool but also kept the humidity under control.  

2. Willis Carrier mentioned that when the problem of the above publishing company was assigned to him to solve he did not even know what Air Humidity was. Imagine Carrier, who is almost regarded as the father of AC, not knowing what Air humidity was. This only reinforces the fact that it doesn't matter if you don't know something, what matters is how you move from that point. Another modern example of this would be Elon Musk who knew nothing about Rockets. Now he has started off a revival of interest in space with his company SpaceX. 

3. In 1922 it was Willis Carrier again who invented the first centrifugal compressor, a very important piece in every modern AC system. 

4. The first Air Conditioned plane was the Boeing 247 operated by United Air Lines. It started operation in 1934 and was the first 24 hr coast to coast flight.

5. The first Air Conditioned skyscraper was the Milam building in San Antonia, Texas. For the first time 21 stories of office space were Air conditioned, a remarkable achievement at that time. It was Carrier who installed this system. This was in 1928. 

6. Fun Fact: When the 103 floor Empire State Building was built in 1931 it was the World's tallest building and it had no Air Conditioning. None at all. 

7. There was a time when theatres did not have ACs and watching a play in the summers was known to be a tough ordeal. People falling unconscious because of the heat was a common recurrence. This is the reason theatres were one of the earliest adopters of methods to try to cool the air. 

8. In those days (1800s and early 1900s) people believed that heat is something that is nature's way and it shouldn't be messed with. It took a lot of convincing by the early pioneers of ACs to change that view. ACs sort of had a 'Personal computer moment' in the early 1900s when most people believed that a personal home AC system is not needed and what use could an AC actually have for a small home. The 1950s changed all that and ACs were soon a rage. 

9. In 1911, Willis Carrier published a paper called the 'Rational Psychrometric Formulae' at a meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This is regarded as the most significant document prepared in Air Conditioning. It presented the correlation between temperature and humidity. Engineering students still learn those formulae and I did too when I was doing my Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering. '

10. A textile Engineer from North Carolina, Stuart Cramer was the first person to coin the term 'Air Conditioning'