A Salt And Battery

Electricity is fascinating. Yet, if I had to guess, it's probably right up there near the top of the list of things taken for granted by most of us. Next to air, I can't think of many more things my kids panic more about when it's out. Maybe Mac 'n Cheese. Electricity has that same mystique to it, as to how those boxes of Mac 'n Cheese keep appearing in the cupboard. We keep having to point out our first world problems to our children. And we have the added irony of reminding two of ours that they were, in fact, born in Africa and things like Mac 'n Cheese, air-conditioning and electricity aren't staples there. As any good thinking father would do, I saw this as a teaching moment. And like any father, I wanted to start with the basics, which I will share with you now...

As soon as I said electricity, I'm sure you immediately conjured the images and works of Alessandro Volta, James Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla, the giants in the field (the electric field  -- dads can't help tying everything together). Seeing the look of confusion on the kids' faces, I wrongly surmised their confusion about the lack of mention of Joseph Swan and the subsequent friction between he and Edison that would heat up an incandescent patent war over the invention of the light bulb. No... No... Nikola Tesla didn't invent the car. And neither did Elon Musk. What are they teaching you at this school!? He bought his way in. (Funny how law suits can change history... Different story.) I can already tell that I'm losing some of you. Even the kids in the peanuts cartoons SEEMED to understand the adults! 

Let me reassure you that there is relevance to my wheelchair story, with these men's work, and even Elon Musk and the Tesla Motor Company. Pay attention kids! This is important!

I'll fast forward over the electrifying battle between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla over whether Direct Current (DC) or Alternating Current (AC) was the best way to deliver electric power to homes and light their new light bulbs. Suffice it to say that the battle raged, lines were drawn, tempers charged, families divided, ballads were written by the eponymous group AC/DC... In the end, obviously, it was determined that AC was easier and safer to deliver the power over long distance to homes, but that it was too difficult to use it power the iPhone. So DC is used in pretty much every single gadget you have. We'll wave our wand and recite the magical incantation "abra-ca rectifier circuit" and voila, AC becomes DC. Well okay, there's a little more to the spell than that. But you try and work in step down transformers, voltage dividers and regulators into a spell! Now I can power my wheelchair and tablets that let me talk... And drive it as far as the power cord lets me. Ummm... This is where Elon Musk enters the picture. Stay with me, this part is a game changer. 

Although being named after the great Nikola Tesla, I believe the founders of the Tesla Motor Company  were beat to the punch for the more apropos name, by a concept car that never made it into production by Toyota. You see, one of the core technologies that Tesla (the car company) focused on, was the battery. In 2004, well  before Teslas were hip, and even before Musk could call himself a co-founder, Toyota came out with probably the first hybrid supercar. What did they call it? You guessed it! The Toyota Alessandro Volta! Take the Toyota emblem off the front and you'd swear you're looking at a Ferrari. So now you see, right!? Not quite yet? Alessandro Volta is the one who essentially invented the battery. To be fair, he wanted to call them "voltaic piles". Despite his reassurances that these were not a raging case of hemorrhoids, no toy companies wanted to put "piles not included" on their packaging, even after the wet electrolyte soaked discs were replaced by dry thin foils. Every dog owner out there knows that a dry pile is waaay better than a wet pile. So there you have it, kids. You can draw almost a straight line from Volta... Ehhh, skip around Maxwell for the moment... Through some other fascinating pioneers and Swan, Edison and Tesla (Nikola). Next time you pick up a AA battery and see 1.5 Volts, you now know who to thank! Guess what the word "volt" is in Italian? That's righ... Well no, bad example. It's just "volt", but it's pronounced like Volta! Sometimes Italians, American-ized their names when coming to America. That's why I am convinced that John Travolta is a distant relative. I could be wrong on that one. But dads are rarely wrong.

So what about James Clerk Maxwell? I'm glad you asked, sharp eye! I need him to introduce another unsung hero of mine, Paul Dirac. You've probably heard of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, even if you're a little fuzzy as to why. Just a teensy bit of physics here. Newton is the father of what we call classical mechanics or classical physics... Not the music. What goes up must come down and apples falling out of trees kinds of stuff. You know... Gravity? One of the fundamental forces of nature... Yes, like Taylor Swift. I have got to have a discussion with your teachers. Einstein wondered what would happen if the apples, or t swift, were moving near the speed of light. This was special relativity and threw Newton's ideas for a loop at certain speeds. He also worked out what happens to that apple as a consequence of the earth not being flat, as it were, nor standing still itself in relation to the apples, and how much longer it was until lunchtime or the end of school. Yes, Einstein figured out why time slows down at school. Space and time are connected. This was his theory of relativity, more generally. Maxwell, on the other hand, dealt with another, much stronger, fundamental force. In fact, he worked out how electricity and magnetism relate to each other, essentially unifying them together! But much like Newton, he was still thinking in classical terms. It was Paul Dirac that did to Maxwell what Einstein did to Newton. Dirac introduced the relativistic nature of particles to electromagnetism. OK. Maybe just a bit more physics. You can't really appreciate what Dirac did without diving into the mathematics behind his formula, Maxwell's equations, and the sheer beauty of quantum mechanics. Hold on to your hats kids! 

Just kidding... Ok kids, run along now. And, You're Welcome!

Long story short, ;-) I needed new batteries for my chair.