Last year I was genuinely astonished to find that dry batteries are all fake. They aren’t sandwiches of zinc/carbon pairs as I had always imagined; instead they are wrapped packages of 1.5 volt dry cells hooked in series. This is so unutterably WEIRD that I still can’t believe it. It still seems like an April Fool.
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THIS goes way beyond Shannon info.
This is world-overturning info, and I’m not kidding.
A 9-volt battery is simply a package containing six AAAA cells wired in series. A 6-volt lantern battery is simply a package containing 4 D cells wired in series.
This is like learning that wheels are really ice cubes painted black, or rocks are really elephants wrapped in foil.
All my life I thought larger batteries were single units, made by interleaving multiple layers of zinc and copper and electrolyte. I thought they were small versions of this old battery:
I not only thought this way, I taught this way. I drew batteries like this on the blackboard when I taught electronics.
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After the shock, I spent quite a bit of time searching to see if the weird method was relatively new. Were batteries once made the PROPER way?
Just now I ran into an ad in a 1925 Gernsback magazine that shows ONE example of the logical way to build a battery, but the text verifies that MOST were made the April Fool way even then.
Text of the ad:
Heretofore, all dry “B” Batteries have been made up of cylindrical cells – no one knew how to make them any other way. The new Eveready Layerbilt is made of flat layers of current-producing elements compressed one against another, so that every cubic inch inside the battery case is completely filled with electricity-producing material.
Layer-building heightens efficiency by increasing the area of zinc plate and the quantity of active chemicals to which the plate is exposed.
SOME Eveready batteries were built the sensible way for a while, but this still isn’t reassuring!
Polistra's Mill 