Why Lithium Batteries SUCK

Summary

Podcast Summary

The Rest Is Science – “Why Lithium Batteries SUCK”

Hosts: Professor Hannah Fry & Michael Stevens (Vsauce)
Date: August 2, 2026

Main Theme & Purpose

This lively episode of The Rest Is Science delves into the surprisingly poor performance of lithium-ion batteries relative to the energy-dense substances all around us. Professor Hannah Fry vents about the inadequacies of the batteries powering modern tech and, together with Michael Stevens, unpacks the quirky science and complex history behind batteries—from ancient cell biology to explosive lithium chemistry. The episode is both educational and playful, using historical anecdotes, world-changing inventions, weird demos, and wild speculation about the future of energy storage.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Energy Density: Just How Bad Are Lithium Batteries?

• Energy Density Comparisons [00:39 – 03:16]
  • Firewood: ~16 MJ/kg
  • Olive Oil: ~37 MJ/kg; Butter: ~30 MJ/kg; Human Body Fat: ~39–40 MJ/kg
  • Petrol: ~45–46 MJ/kg
  • Lithium-ion batteries: Less than 1 MJ/kg
• Notable Quote [02:30]:
  • Michael Stevens: “The fat in your butt cheek is 40 times more energy dense than the fanciest lithium battery in your phone!”
  • Hannah Fry: “You would be a fool to ever go for the lithium ion. It’s pathetic.”

2. The Long-Running Oxford Battery [06:00 – 08:10]

• The Oxford Electric Bell has been ringing since 1840, powered by an ancient dry pile battery.
  • The battery will outlive the bell itself—the clapper will wear out first.
• Visual Description:
  • Resembles two melted candles in a glass cloche with a tiny pendulum.

3. How Batteries Actually Work: Volta’s Original Demo [10:02 – 16:37]

• Hannah demonstrates a homemade battery with zinc washers, copper coins, and salty cardboard, successfully lighting an LED.
  • Batteries are fundamentally about separating ions and electrons, creating a flow of electricity.
• Analogy:
  • “You go to a concert with your friend… One goes straight to their seat (ion), the other does a lap of the stadium (electron), passing through everything—the circuit!”
• Notable Quote [13:55]:
  • Hannah: “Junk from a drawer… and I just made electricity. I think that is absolutely amazing.”
• Volta modeled his pile after the way electric eels produce electricity—stacks of flat cells.

4. Shocking History: Electrocution Experiments & Frankenstein [20:08 – 24:16]

• Galvani and Volta’s work led to experiments animating dead tissue, culminating in the electrocution of the executed George Foster (1803 London).
  • Muscles twitched, fists clenched, observers were horrified.
• Historical Anecdote [21:59]:
  • Hannah: “They brought a corpse not to life, but to faux life—and in the process, created another corpse.”
• Gave rise to the term “galvanize” and inspired Frankenstein.

5. The Baghdad Battery & Ancient Energy [26:01 – 29:06]

• Discovery of a 2000-year-old clay jar (Baghdad Battery) in Iraq (1936): essentially a primitive battery with copper and iron elements.
  • Could generate about 1.4 volts—equivalent to a single AA battery.
• Loss of these artifacts in the Iraq War, and discussion of the importance of archaeological preservation.

6. The Evolution of Rechargeable Batteries [33:41 – 35:58]

• 1859: Gaston Platé invents the first rechargeable (lead-acid) battery.
• Edison’s work with alkaline batteries and early electric cars: foiled by petrol’s superior energy density.
• 1980: John Goodenough develops the lithium battery.
• Quote [35:50]:
  • Hannah: “What he gave us was essentially the lithium battery, which is… sure, it’s good enough for now.”

7. How Lithium-Ion Batteries Work… and Fail [36:54 – 44:39]

• Lithium easily gives up electrons (“drama queen” behavior), making for high voltage and quick energy release.
• Despite triple the energy density of earlier batteries, still vastly inferior to hydrocarbons.
• Lithium Battery Dangers:
  • Flammable liquid electrolyte—prone to “thermal runaway” (explosive fires).
  • Fires self-oxygenate, are near-impossible to extinguish; require thousands of gallons of water per electric vehicle fire.
• Notable Quote [40:48]:
  • Hannah: “If a battery gets damaged… it can catch fire… a slow motion explosion that gets let off the leash.”

8. Battery Alternatives—The Future is Open [44:49 – 47:56]

• Battery Research & Alternatives:
  • Sodium-ion batteries: Safer, cheaper, less flammable.
  • Liquid air batteries: Storing energy by liquefying air for later release.
  • Rust (iron oxide) batteries: Iron rusts (absorbs energy); later unrusted to release it.
  • Bio-inspired batteries: Hydrogels mimicking electric eels, potentially to power implants using body ions.
• The real limiting factor isn't energy production (solar, wind are plentiful), but energy storage and transfer.

9. Humorous Speculation: The Cyborg Poop Problem [44:39 – 48:31]

• What if devices were powered by body fat or butter—“energy dense” fuels—requiring users to “feed” their phones and deal with “cyborg feces”?
• Notable Quote [45:14]:
  • Michael: “But why? Then our devices are going to poop then?”
  • Hannah: “I would take a bit of poop, would I? If your phone was like, ‘it’s time for me to go for a poop,’ maybe I would…”

10. Concluding Thoughts: The End of Lithium Batteries? [48:31 – End]

• Lithium-ion batteries are a “caged explosion”—useful but living on borrowed time.
• Safer, denser, and more sustainable battery tech is needed and actively sought after.
• Speculation: In the future, people will look back and marvel at the inconvenience and danger of today’s battery tech.
• Notable Quote [51:29]:
  • Hannah: “You don’t want to put a lithium battery inside a human.”
  • Michael: “But I’ll be a battery if I need to be.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [02:30] Michael: “The fat in your butt cheek is 40 times more energy dense than the fanciest lithium battery in your phone!”
• [13:55] Hannah: “Junk from a drawer… and I just made electricity. I think that is absolutely amazing.”
• [21:59] Hannah: “They brought a corpse not to life, but to faux life—and in the process, created another corpse.”
• [35:50] Hannah: “What [Goodenough] gave us was essentially the lithium battery, which is… sure, it’s good enough for now.”
• [40:48] Hannah: “If a battery gets damaged… it can catch fire… a slow motion explosion that gets let off the leash.”
• [45:14] Michael & Hannah: “But why? Then our devices are going to poop then?” “I would take a bit of poop…”
• [51:29] Hannah: “You don’t want to put a lithium battery inside a human.”
  Michael: “But I’ll be a battery if I need to be.”

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Key Timestamps

• 00:39 – 03:16: Humorous takedown of lithium batteries’ energy density
• 06:00 – 08:10: Oxford Electric Bell—the world’s oldest running battery
• 10:02 – 16:37: Live demo: homemade Voltaic pile battery lights an LED
• 20:08 – 24:16: Animating corpses with batteries, inspiration for Frankenstein
• 26:01 – 29:06: The Baghdad Battery—ancient energy storage
• 33:41 – 35:58: History of rechargeable batteries
• 36:54 – 44:39: How lithium-ion batteries work and why they’re dangerous
• 44:49 – 51:29: Imaginative alternatives: sodium batteries, liquid air, rust, and bio-electrics
• 48:31 – End: Looking toward a lithium-free battery future, with wit and optimism

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Overall Tone & Style

• Playful, witty banter: The episode is lighthearted and irreverent, filled with analogies, jokes, and asides.
• Deeply informative: Historical, scientific, and technical background provided in an accessible way.
• Optimistic about the future: Despite Hannah’s “rant,” both hosts recognize the enormous potential and excitement in battery research.

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Takeaway

Lithium-ion batteries are a marvel of modern engineering, but also a huge disappointment when measured against the natural world’s energy density and safety. The search for a new, safer, and more efficient way to store energy is the next great scientific frontier. Until then, handle those “caged explosions” with care—and maybe dream of cyborg poop or farting phones as a sign of progress!

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to the Rest Is Science. I am Michael Stevens.

[B]

And I'm Hannah Fry. And today, Michael, I just, to be honest with you, I just, I just want to rant about lithium batteries for 45 minutes. Is that all right? You okay with that?

[A]

Oh, I would love that. I, I, what is there to rant about? I know so little about them. I thought they were great.

[B]

No, they're pathetic. They're pathetic. And actually we could do a lot better. That's, that's essentially what I'm going to be doing this time. I tell you what, let's, let's start off right. You're in, you're in a room, you've got, you got a few things going on around you. See if you can point out the most energy dense thing in the room. So I'm not talking about nuclear, you know, I'm not talking about like fusion or fission here.

[A]

I'm talking about like, what's the most massive thing? There you go. That's the most energy. You mean energy we could get using traditional means?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I've got firewood. Okay.

[B]

Which is pretty good. You burn that, you get, you're getting 16 megajoules per kilogram, which is good. It's a good start. Pretty decent stuff there.

[A]

Okay, I don't really have a benchmark here, but let's just compare it to something like I've got fire starters, wax soaked with petrol. With gasoline. Not really, really, it's just some hydrocarbon, I don't know which one, but it's very, very volatile.

[B]

Well, tnt. Tnt. Not quite as good as wood. In terms of the amount of energy you get per kilogram, you're getting about 4.6. Your, your lighter fluid, if that's up there with the petrol. I mean, that is, that's pretty good. You're getting sort of 45, 46. I don't know if you've got any oil there, any cooking or butter maybe?

[A]

Yeah, I've got olive oil, I've got butter, they're all great.

[B]

37 for olive oil, slightly higher, by the way, than for butter, which is 30 megajoules per kilogram. Your body fat, actually anything that you're storing in your belly, that's great, that stuff. 39, 39, 40 or so. Not yours specifically, Michael. Anybody's.

[A]

Anybody's. Anybody's. Anybody. How do you know my fat could be special?

[B]

Well, maybe it has been infused with petrol because that would pump it up a bit. Petrol is pretty phenomenal in terms of its energy density. All of these, by the way look absolutely gigantic compared to lithium batteries, right? Lithium ion batteries, you're getting less than one megajoule per kilogram. Right. If you had the choice between a slab of butter or human body fat and a bit of a lithium ion battery, you would be a fool. You would be a fool to ever go for the lithium ion. It's pathetic. Michael, I did realize.

[A]

Where is human body fat?

[B]

Human body fat is about 40, 39, 40.

[A]

The fat in your butt cheek is 40 times more energy dense than the fanciest lithium battery in your phone.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

But I mean, obviously I can't just liposuction my belly and then put it into a machine to charge my phone, but I can very easily plug a battery in and out of something.

[B]

I mean, okay, you. You could. It just wouldn't be. It wouldn't be very sustainable, right?

[A]

Oh, that's true too.

[B]

Yeah. You know, I think replenishing, I mean, it'd be quite a fun way to live, right? Eat as much as you can, lipo the foul all the time.

[A]

I was just thinking, why can't our bodies be the power bank? And so at night I'm like, oh, I gotta charge up my power bank. And I'm just like eating ice cream drizzled in olive oil.

[B]

And I think I'm gonn this on the list. I'm going to put this on the list of alternatives for lithium ion batteries, which we're going to come to at the end. But the thing is, is that the energy density of this totally pathetic invention. I'm going hard. Isn't even. Isn't even anywhere close to the problems that it has. Maybe I'm overselling that slightly. I just don't like it. All right, and that's what this episode is about. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.

[A]

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this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability various 18

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How about setting a calendar reminder for next year? Meta Glasses available in more than 20 styles. You know that there's a bell in Oxford that has been ringing twice a second since 1840?

[A]

Oh yes, I did. But you can't really hear it.

[B]

No, it's very quiet, I agree, but it's going, it's still going. It's this battery that nobody has ever replaced. And think about this, right? This has been, this bell has been ringing 1840. That's before the invention of the light bulb, before the invention of the electric light. An electric bell has been ringing non stop continuously.

[A]

Can you describe this? Because I saw it a while ago. But it's, it is a very old, like one of the earliest batteries ever made. And it's running a bell and it just keeps clanging the bell. And it's been clanging it since before the light bulb was invented.

[B]

Also, by the way, it's not going to run flat in our, in, in our lifetimes. It's got this little.

[A]

Oh, we know that.

[B]

This little 4 millimeter clapper on it that will physically wear out before the battery dies. Right? The battery is going to outlive the bell that it, that it rings. This is this incredibly slow release of, of electricity that this dry pile, very old style battery is, is releasing. The thing about it, let me get a pict it out for you. So people aren't completely sure exactly what's going on inside of it. So it sort of looks like, kind of looks a bit like two melted candles really that are inside of this cloche, this glass cloche, and has a sort of pendulum that swings between them, and as it does so, it moves the charge from one side to the other, essentially gets charged in one direction and charged in the other direction going back.

[A]

Oh, so when the ball hits one of the bells, the charge gets switched to the other bell and then.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

I see. And I had never heard the word clotch. Cloche, Cloch, Klosh. I'd never heard that before. I would call that a bell jar. Now. I just don't know. My vocab might be. Might be limited, but, yeah, it looks really. It looks really cool.

[B]

It might be mine. It might be mine. Michael. Cloche is a thing where, you know, when you go to, like, really, really fancy dinners and they have, like, a metal bowl backwards, like upside down over your food?

[A]

No, when I go to fancy dinners, the crust of the pizza is stuffed.

[B]

You need to hang out more with the King, Michael.

[A]

Okay, that's right. That's right.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Let them know I'm available.

[B]

But I really like this idea. I really like this idea that actually, right. At the earliest. Earliest days of people sort of playing around with electricity and trying to work out what it was doing, this sort of, like, novelty item was. Was purchased and then ended up in. In this corridor at Oxford. But it's the slowest. The slowest fight that a battery has basically ever made. And as we go through, we're gonna. We're gonna get through to the fastest release that a battery has ever made, which is. Which is the record held by lithium, because, boy, can it release so fast when it wants to. Let me. Let me go back in time a little bit, because that was the 1840s that that particular bell was created. But actually, the story about batteries goes back a little bit further to the 1780s in Italy. And there was this guy, he's called Luigi Galvani, and he is messing around, like, dissecting frogs, and what he does is he hangs these dead frogs on a railing. And then he sees that they start kicking, and he's sort of like. He sort of has them maybe on some foil, and there's like, maybe some lemon juice around. Or he's doing all these different experiments, but every now and then, even though these frogs are dead, he sees their legs starting to twitch. So he's like, okay, well, look. Well, I know what's going on here. Clearly living creatures have this. This spark inside them, this. This animal electricity. Right? That must be what's going on here. And he's got this Friend, he's called Alessandro Volta. And Alessandro Volta is like, no, hun, I don't, I don't think that's what's going on at all. I think it's, I think it's the metal that's touching the frog leg, that's, there's something going on with the metals. It's just that the leg itself is just telling you there's electricity there. There's kind of nothing else going on. So what he does. I've got a demo for you. You ready?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What he does plays around with loads of different, loads of different setups and he comes up with this thing this way to reliably create electricity.

[A]

Oh, neat. You really do have a whole demo for us. Oh, okay. I thought they're all coins. We've got, look at this, some copper coins and some washers.

[B]

Yes you do. Okay, so these are zinc washers, Right. So basically what this is, it's sort of bluntly the stuff you would find in, in your drawer downstairs. Right? You've got some zinc washers and some copper coins. Okay. And then I also here have some water that I have dissolved salt into. Okay. So I've like soaked salt water, some brine, basically. I maybe frankly put in a bit too much salt, but that's fine. And then I've got these like little bits of cardboard that I've soaked in the brine. Ah, okay. So what he did, right, and he, there was a lot of experimentation for this, but essentially what he did is he started layering these things together.

[A]

Okay. So you have a piece of aluminum foil you've put down on your table. And then on top of that you've put a zinc washer. On top of the zinc washer you put a copper coin.

[B]

And now I'm going to place a little bit of brine soaked cardboard on top.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And then essentially you repeat this process. Right? Because that is that those three together fundamentally all you need to create electricity, which feels insane to me. These are just stuff that you would find in a drawer and you can use them to create electricity. However, it's not going to be bright enough to actually see it as electricity unless I just create a few more. So hang on, that's not very good.

[A]

Can you tell me how this creates electricity or do you want to wait until you.

[B]

So, okay, it turns out that what is happening here is that the salt water, the brine is physically dissolving the zinc. It's like actually corroding it. And the way that it's doing that is that all of the zinc that's at the surface that's touching the brine, it releases two electrons, and. And then the zinc ion escapes into the solution, right into. Into the brine. Okay, so what happens is you have this little zinc atom that goes off in two different directions. Half of it, the ion goes into the salt water, and the other part, the electrons go up into the copper, which is sort of the easiest place for them to escape. So, like, you kind of got this sandwich, right? So this sandwich, this bit of zinc is sandwiched between some salt water on the bottom, which is where the. Where the ion goes, and then a bit of metal on top, which is where the electrons go. So what you're doing is essentially like you are. You're taking a single atom, you're breaking it apart. Part of it's going one way, part of it's going the other. Now, no one really cares what direction the ion itself is going in, but the electrons. Electrons moving through a conductor, I mean, that's. That's literally electricity, right?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

So if I continue with this right now, I really hope this is going to work. It did work when I tried it earlier, but I don't know whether. Cross all your fingers and toes. Okay. And if it.

[A]

Okay, so you've got the stack done, and you've got. There's a zinc washer on the bottom, but there's a copper penny on the top.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Now hopefully. Oh, my gosh. If this works, Michael, I'm going to be so excited.

[A]

Okay, so now you have some wires attached to a little, tiny light bulb.

[B]

I do. A teeny, teeny tiny little led. Now I'm really hoping that this is going to light up.

[A]

You're touching one wire to the very top copper coin and the other wire to the aluminum foil at the bottom.

[B]

Oh, no, it's not enough. Did you see it?

[A]

No, I didn't. It's behind your hand.

[B]

It worked. It worked. It worked. Really? Oh, look at that.

[A]

I can see that little flicker.

[B]

You know what? I'm going to turn this. I'm going to turn my light off. Very dark now, but here we go. There it is.

[A]

It's like a reddish orange. Very faint little ember, almost looking light, but it's coming from the led.

[B]

Okay, so I'm off, and now I'm on. I'm off, and now I'm on. Come on.

[A]

That is so cool.

[B]

Come on. That's the coolest thing. It's.

[A]

I didn't know it was so easy.

[B]

It was junk from a drawer And I just made electricity.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Come on. I think that is absolutely amazing.

[A]

What kind of LED was that? Like, how if I wanted to do this at home, what kind of LED do I need to get?

[B]

It's an LED that I stole from my daughter's, like, Practice Electricity Play with Electricity kit. So it's just anything, anything. And the LED isn't even special. Right. It's just, this is just the way that I know that there's electricity there. You could use a frog's leg if you want to. Anyway, I think that is maybe nerdily, maybe I got too excited just because I was so worried it wouldn't work. And then it did. But I think that's really phenomenal. That actually it really demonstrates how electricity is just this chemical reaction, right? It's just something that happens when you move electrons around. And that's literally all it is, right?

[A]

That's.

[B]

That's literally all it is. Yeah.

[A]

So. So which way is the electricity flowing? Which way are the electrons flowing in your battery?

[B]

So the electrons are going up because you have zinc and then copper on top, and the ions are going down.

[A]

Okay? The zinc ions go down, the electrons go up. Now when they reach the top, there was a copper penny on top. Then why do they continue moving through the wire? Why aren't they happy to just stay on the top? Copper?

[B]

Because they carry on moving because now the bottom has got all of the ions on it, and the ions are positively charged. So now you have, like a charge differential between the top and the bottom. So the way that I like to think about batteries, right, is like, you know, let's say that you go to a concert with your friend and you go through the turnstile together. And then you're like, okay, I am going to go straight to my seat. And then your friend goes, okay, cool. You go straight to a seat. I'm going to go a lap of the stadium. I'm going to go buy some hot dogs. I'm going to, like, go and buy some beer, and I'll come back and I'll meet you at the seat afterwards. That is literally all. That is literally all Labashary is doing. You are the ion, the kind of like the positive thing that's just going straight to the. To the end point. And the electron is going all the way around. Going all the way around. All the way around, all the way around. And I'll meet you back at the sea. I'll meet you back afterwards. Right?

[A]

That's like.

[B]

That's literally it. Yeah.

[A]

The electron's doing a circuit, but it's going to come back to you.

[B]

It's going to come back to you. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, let's get technical here, right? Maybe it's not actually you. Maybe it's another identical version of you.

[A]

Fair enough. Yeah. They probably don't have friends, but they do have affinities for a kind.

[B]

Yes. Let's imagine that it's. Let's imagine it's you and me, Michael. Right, we're off. I'll be the ion.

[C]

You can be.

[B]

Be the electron. You go off and do all of the other work. And just by virtue of the fact that you're doing this enormous, giant lap, you just so happen to be going through a kettle, like, you know, like a light bulb in that instance, whatever it might be literally anything that you like, a computer, just by virtue of you traveling through it, that is electricity.

[A]

Now, do we. Do we know for sure that it's not personal? That it's not the electrons trying to get back to their original atomic. I don't know how we would know one way or the other. I guess you could, like, remove the zinc ions and replace it with some new zinc, and then the electrons still want to get to the zinc that they can reach.

[B]

Yeah. Excuse me.

[A]

Regardless of whether they used to know each other.

[B]

Where's my original body? Thank you.

[A]

Excuse me. I told that zinc atom, that zinc nucleus, that I was going to come back. I've been trying to get there, and now I'm running a light bulb.

[B]

Exactly. I'll be back in a second. But also, don't forget, right. The speed that these electrons are moving at, it's, you know, the distance, the difference between kind of going down the pile and round is almost nothing. Right? So the way that the Volta did this, okay. I mean, this is like. I find this so crazy. This is in 1800, you guys, right? This is so early. And the way that he did it is he knew that there was a fish, a torpedo ray, a Mediterranean torpedo ray, and also the South American electric eel. He knew that they were able to create electricity because they could sort of sting their. Their pre. He realized that inside these eels, they had basically a version of this. He was sort of copying it. They have these organs that are built of these, like, thousands of flat cells that are stacked like coins. And that's what he was trying to copy, Right. It's like, okay, well, maybe this is like. In fact, he called this thing, the thing that I've just shown you, the artificial electric organ. And it's kind of basically a forgery of biology that he was trying to. Trying to create.

[A]

Right. I love that because today we think of electronic stuff as being counter to biology.

[B]

Right.

[A]

However, in its inception, electricity was a thing that came from organs.

[B]

Yes, completely. And then was also extremely closely linked to biology immediately afterwards. Because at this point, you know, Volta was like, okay, great, I've got this thing. But no one sort of didn't know what to do with it. And then Galvani, who was the, you know, the guy with the frog's legs, he was like, okay, well, I think that there's something here about sort of human flesh or dead flesh, biological matter, that kind of thing. And he was right in a way, incidentally, and we should say he was right because your nerves do run on electricity. Your nerves are moving charged ions around. I mean, the way your brain works is sort of squirty, wet computer as you've described it previously. Yeah. Anyway, so Galvani, his nephew, who was a guy called Giovanni Aldini, he knew all of this stuff was going on. He knew about Volta's battery, he knew about what his uncle had thought about flesh and electricity and stuff. So what he did is he wanted to see whether you could repeat the frog's leg trick with a dead human.

[A]

Gonna pull. Mary Shelley.

[B]

Gonna pull a Mary Shelley. And Mary Shelley comes into this story in a moment, by the way, if you are sensitive of ears, sensitive of. I would just, I would just switch them up for a moment. I know a lot of people watch the, listen to this program with their kids, so just, I'll try and put it in the most kid friendly way. So this is like back in the days when obviously hangings were still an acceptable way to, to deal with criminals. So what happened was in 1803, this is in London, there was a man called George Foster who was convicted of drowning his wife in the Paddington Canal. And what they did is they, they managed to work out a way to, immediately after he was hung to take his body and then subject it to a really big electrical current. And they didn't know what was going to happen. They weren't sure whether maybe he would come alive. Right. Maybe, maybe this would be. Maybe he would sort of resurface. They genuinely had no idea what would happen. They connected up this bachelor. They had loads of people watching. And the jaw sort of started quivering, the muscles contorted, one eye opened, the right fist started clenching and the legs started moving. And everyone in the room was extremely freaked out, extremely freaked out by this. There is one person who was There actually, in an official capacity to witness what was going on. And, well, the story goes that he was so horrified by what he'd seen that he died of shock that night. He'd sort of had watched.

[A]

Oh, no.

[B]

Right. Like, watched a corpse move and it had killed him.

[A]

Right. So they brought a corpse not to life, but to, like, faux life, and in the process, they actually created another corpse.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. Apparently, there's one account that says that actually this. This particular guy, Mr. Pass, the one who passed away, he had been the person who had been responsible for getting this. This hanged man to the experiment as quickly as possible.

[A]

Right.

[B]

He was the one who had, like, dealt with the body. And yet even so, he was so horrified by what had been going on. They also, by the way, they had, like, a legal disclaimer, I guess, on all of this. They were like, what if we do bring him back to life?

[A]

What if.

[B]

What do we do about crime?

[A]

Hang again?

[B]

Well, luckily. Luckily. I'm not sure that's the right word. His sentence was that he hang until he be dead. So there's no loophole there. There's no loophole for resurrection. Right. Okay.

[A]

So if he comes back, they still need to finish the sentence.

[B]

They. They have to hang him again.

[A]

They'd have to hang him again. Man, that. That would be so shocking because especially at that time. Remind me, what year was this?

[B]

1803.

[A]

1803. Like, you're definitely gonna be thinking, okay, we can conquer death. This is Lazarus made real through the work of humans. Should we be doing this?

[B]

Should we be doing this? Can you imagine the crisis, the sort of, like, ethical, moral crisis that was going on in London around this time? Not a coincidence that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816. I have heard, actually different versions of this story that there were these demonstrations with this kind of thing, right. Like using electricity in order to reignite bodies, human or otherwise, and that she had been in the audience at one of those demonstrations. I think it's all a little bit. It's all a little bit disputed and a little apocryphal.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But what we can say for sure is that this was a big thing, a very big deal, and it was on the minds of the sort of learned classes in London at exactly this moment that you potentially could bring creatures back to life if only you had a battery big enough. Right. Or kind of strong enough.

[A]

So it didn't bring this man back? No. It maybe looked like he started moving again. But what was their immediate conclusion? If they had more power, could they do it or I don't know.

[B]

I don't. Honestly, I don't know is the answer. One thing I will say is that you know the word galvanize.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Okay, so this comes from Galvani and the word means spurring someone to suddenly take action, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like electrocuting something into being almost.

[A]

I know, I love that. I love also thinking of Volta and Galvani hanging out and being like, dude, our names, like, come on, Galvanize volts. We're destined for this voltage.

[B]

Come on, come on, we can do this. I know.

[A]

Ahistorical.

[B]

It's like, what is it called? Nominative determinism. I do like the idea that the names existed before them and then they decided to live their lives according to it.

[A]

Oh, I know, I know. There's a lot of little jokes like that. Oh, it reminds me of the one where it's like Jesus is hanging out with Judas and Judas is like, oh, I gotta go man, but I'll see you at the last supper. And Jesus is like, at the what? And Judas goes, oh, I mean, just the regular supper.

[B]

I like that. I like that a lot. That's a really good joke. That's very good. Okay, here is, here's the thing. Okay, so. So all of this is like the kind of western version of the story that all of these big breakthroughs were being made in the 1800s. There is another version of this story that actually humans had batteries way earlier. Way, way, way earlier. Oh, because. Do you know about this already?

[A]

No, but I'm just thinking, I just saw you make a battery that could have been made much earlier than 1800 in Baghdad.

[B]

Right. In Iraq in 1936, they found this 2000 year old jar. And within the jar, the, there was a copper cylinder with an iron rod inside it. And basically it's the same thing as this.

[A]

Right. So you could fill it with like sea water and you'd have an ancient battery.

[B]

An ancient battery, exactly. Okay, so it's about 14cm tall, right. Bit smaller than a pint glass basically. And the cylinder inside it is like rolled up copper and down the middle, not touching is, is the iron rod and any sort of acidic liquid in there? I mean, it's exactly a galvanic cell. It's exactly what I've just made.

[A]

Do we know what they would have done with it?

[B]

I should probably add here that there are some other archaeologists who think that the whole thing is nonsense. And actually it had nothing to do with electricity whatsoever. And actually it was just a pot. It was just a pot that people were putting stuff in. But if it had been, you know, set up properly, you could get 1.4 volts from it, which is about one double A battery. Yeah, she's pretty, pretty good. So everyone got very excited and were like, maybe they were, I don't know, like using it to plate jewelry. Okay. You know, like to sort of electrocute different types of jewelry. And maybe they were charging their iPad. Maybe they were. Maybe they were. I mean, they had tablets. Right. Is it that much of a stretch?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good one.

[B]

Right, totally. Because I think that's the thing about the. My. I just put my fingers in my mouth. They're so salty from that brine.

[A]

Oh, salted cardboard.

[B]

Salted cardboard. But, but I think this is the thing actually, which is what makes the, what Volta and Galvani were doing really interesting at that particular moment. Because almost certainly other humans came across this, almost certainly that at some point in history, two different metals and something like salt water were connected to each other and had this sort of strange chemistry. But it's the fact that they didn't just spot it, they worked out how the electricity could be used. And then other people like Faraday came along and really took that and ran with it. And I mean, you know, this. I really do think that the sort of discovery of electricity is by quite a long stretch the thing that has changed the world more than any other invention perhaps since, you know, fire. Right. It's like, it's phenomenal the thing that it's done. One thing that's kind of sad about that, the ancient battery, 2000 year old battery, is that there were fragments of it that were in Iraq's museum until 2003. And then in the war they vanished. The relics of it are now gone, which is really sad.

[A]

I think that's really sad. I mean that. And that's a huge problem when, when war comes to these important archaeological areas or artifacts, they, they can just be lost. And it's, it's such a shame because they stayed around for thousands of years and then we lose them. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to ask if anyone can help me get a deck of archaeological awareness playing cards, please reach out to us. The rest is scienceoldhanger.com Hannah, you've probably seen the Iraq war playing cards, like the most wanted playing cards that soldiers got. And it was like Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades. And. Okay, well, later, when it became really apparent that action in the Middle east was putting in jeopardy important archaeological artifacts, a deck of Cards was put together that didn't have all of the most wanted people on it. Instead, it had the most important archaeological treasures in the region. So that soldiers would become familiar with them and they would know, they would recognize. Ah, wait, that's not just some recent thing built that. That is important and we need to protect that. And the whole, the whole, like, vibe of the deck is the importance of. Of history, that this is not Iraqi history. This is human history. This is your history. And to win hearts and minds and to do the right thing for the past and the future and now protect them. It's like the opposite of if you see this guy, capture him. It was, if you see this, protect it. And you can buy the most wanted Iraqi leaders decks on Amazon. But I don't know how to get one of these archeological awareness ones. But they look incredible.

[B]

That is. Did it work? Did it. Did any artifacts get sort of saved? Is it by virtue of the fact that there were this deck of cards

[A]

I haven't heard about? If it worked, I know that it wasn't perfect because we continue to lose important pieces of our past irrevocably.

[B]

I like that idea, though. I really like that idea.

[A]

Yeah. And I think the different suits were different things. Like one was landmarks, like large things, Another was small objects. And one suit was just like, why history is important. Each card was a reminder of why this matters. And I've only been able to see a few of the cards because again, a full deck is just not there online anywhere.

[B]

They found. Oh, look. I think that actually while we've been talking, our wonderful producers have found a deck. Oh, my gosh.

[A]

How did you guys find this? Oh, this is so beautiful. It's full of history. But I really love the cards that are about the importance of history. Yeah. I mean, look at the five of spades. It just says, a looted archaeological site means the details of our common past are lost forever.

[B]

Wow, there's one here. This site has survived for 17 centuries. Will it and others survive you.

[A]

I know. And you know, this also has some information about who made the cards on one of them, so that might help too. They've got a picture that the Jack of Diamonds has the Statue of Liberty on it. And it says, how would we feel if someone destroyed her torch?

[B]

Always wanted to go to Iraq. Always wanted. The history there is so phenomenal.

[A]

It's so phenomenal and it's so deep. It is so ancient.

[B]

Amazing mathematicians as well, Incredible mathematicians.

[A]

But we lost the fragments we had of this ancient battery.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Let Me, let me bring it back to my arch nemesis for the purposes of, purposes of this discussion, lithium. Because the point here is that actually we're not sort of stuck with lithium, right? You can make batteries from all different kinds of things, you know, just from, from salt water. Now on the list of energy density things, okay, it's important for me to add that water, that little concoction that I did there, it's way worse than anything in the room, including lithium battery. But the sort of, the history of this, this idea, right, that you start off with like brine and things, it took till 1859 before Gaston Plante created the first ever rechargeable battery. So the idea with the rechargeable battery is then you put energy into it. You take the two friends who are seated and you return them to the turnst pile, you sort of put them outside of the stadium again.

[A]

Now does that mean that, could you recharge that pile that you made? Could you like get this, the, the zinc to go back gain. You put, put electrons back on the

[B]

atoms and not easily because this one is literally about kind of corroding the metal.

[A]

It corrodes and it's.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Well, also on that topic, what do we call it when you coat something in a protective layer of zinc?

[B]

Galvanized.

[A]

Galvanized.

[B]

Galvanized baby galvini. Thank you. Thank you for your dead frog's legs. Okay, so the thing is, is that this, this first rechargeable battery, it was lead and acid, but it was like rolled in a spiral. He didn't, he didn't patent it. He just apparently spent most of his fortune helping broke scientists. He was sort of a good dude, this guy. Anyway, a bit later, 1866, there's a zinc carbon cell that's sort of the ancestor of the AA battery. Then you had Edison. Edison was quite particular, by the way. He didn't like the lead batteries. He wanted nickel. He also, incidentally, Edison was like really into electric cars. He was like really wanted electric cars to work. In fact, I have driven Edison's electric car, the one that he owned with an acid battery. I think technically it was an alkaline. But yes, basically in the front and in the back and everywhere because they were massive. Oh, and a tiller, tiller steering. It was, it was very fun day out. The problem is, right, that the reason why the electric thing didn't work out is purely because of the energy density, because petrol is so, so, so so much more energy dense. You could have a giant battery, right? Gigantic and it would be the equivalent of having like a thimble's worth of petrol.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's just as you, you know, forget it. You're just. You're not getting anywhere. And then in 1980, in Oxford, there was a guy called John Goodenough, which I think is the perfect name for this.

[A]

How was it spelled?

[B]

Literally? Good enough.

[A]

Good enough. One word. That's your last name?

[B]

One word, yeah. And what he gave us was essentially the lithium battery, which is. Sure, it's good enough for now.

[A]

Done.

[B]

Good enough. Thank you. It is good enough for now. But he worked out happily named people Volta.

[A]

Obviously that was a joke because the volt was named later on, but Good Enough.

[B]

Good enough. Exactly.

[A]

The Good Enough battery.

[B]

Yeah, the Goodenough battery. He was the one, really, who sort of set the stage. So. Okay, I'll tell you what, we'll go for a break now and then. Goodenough has got Nobel Prize, by the way.

[A]

Oh, that's good enough.

[B]

Yeah. Imagine being his friend. It would be. It would be constant torture, wouldn't it? Constant torture not to just make the same joke all the time. All right, let's go for a break and then when we come back, I'm going to tell you why lithium batches are absolute rubbish.

[A]

Okay. I can't wait.

[B]

Okay, we come to lithium. What do you know about lithium?

[A]

I know it's a metal. I know that its atoms only have three electrons around them. I know it has some medical uses for mood.

[B]

And it's also a bit of a drama queen, isn't it? Bit of a drama queen.

[A]

I did not know that about it. I knew that. It's the name of a Nirvana song.

[B]

Have you ever put it near any water?

[A]

Oh. Oh, yeah. It's in that family of things like sodium and potassium. You put it in water, a lot of hydrogen gases, made a lot of heat, big flame explosion.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, come on, this is like. This is the planet of water. You're going to explode in the presence of. Come on.

[A]

Like, give it or give it a rest.

[B]

Calm down. It's not about you.

[A]

Hello.

[B]

It's very sort of pick me energy, isn't it?

[A]

Now, I know it's a drama queen, too, when seen from the right perspective, but I also know that it is part of a lithium ion battery, but I don't know how they work at all.

[B]

Okay. So, I mean, basically it's doing the same thing as. As the Galvani battery, the Volta battery that I showed you earlier, which is that you have this little atom of Lithium. And because it's a drama queen, it will just chuck away its electrons at the slightest, the slightest nudge. It doesn't care. It's very impatient. So I'm just not interested. So you have them, you have a lithium particle, lithium atom going through the turnstile. You can be, you can be the lithium atom. Oh, no, wait, which way around do we do? I'll be the lithium atom. I'll be the drama queen. That's fine. You can be the electrons, right, Go through the turnstile and then exactly the same way as before. The process is set up where the electrons go all the way around the stadium, all the way around, get the hot dogs and so on, and the, the, the ion goes straight to the seat and then they sort of meet up at the end. And the reason why lithium works, right, Lithium ion, sort of, you're saying you're stripping the electrons from, from the lithium. The reason why it works is because it is such a drama queen, because it will just give up its electrons so easily. That's sort of the reason why it ends up being used. It is because it is so reactive that it ends up being a good one.

[A]

Okay, so more so than zinc or iron, it gives up these electrons like more quickly or more with less of a nudge.

[B]

Yes. I mean, it's got the lowest electrode potential of any common chemistry. So it gives you the highest voltage, basically.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

In terms of its energy density, it's about three times more energy dense than the batteries that it replaced. Okay. It's like it's a genuine improvement on what went before.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But still absolute rubbish compared to butter. So there's this huge design flaw with them, which is that there is this liquid inside there that is incredibly flammable. So if a battery gets damaged, if it gets like, you know, knocked, or if it overheats or if it's charged incorrectly, it can catch fire and then the heat can sort of spread to other parts of the battery. You end up with this sort of chain reaction. It's just, it's, I would say bad, this failure that can happen. It makes it genuinely dangerous. Right. It's called thermal Runway runaway. And it's where you get essentially a slow motion explosion that's, that gets let off the leash. Right. The problem is also if you have a fire, a lithium battery fire, you can't smother it because as the cathode itself starts to break down, it releases oxygen. Okay.

[A]

So it's self oxygenating.

[B]

And then from the inside.

[A]

From the inside. So you can't Just cover it in sand. You can't just spray water on it

[B]

because you know what happens with lithium. It's, it's incredibly difficult to put out these fires. So Tesla's own firefighter guide, right, says that a battery fire can need 3,000 gallons of water and take up to 24 hours. Right. One one Texas crew apparently used 28,000 gallons of water to put out a single car, which is a month's worth of their water over seven hours.

[A]

Okay, so you can, you can use water, but what is it just that the amount of heat released is so high you just need more and more water to keep it.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[B]

I mean, these are burning past like a thousand degrees centigrade. Okay.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And like it's extreme also, by the way. You can leave them and then they can reignite days later. And I think this is it. You know, you. So you have all of these electric. There's so much of it in your house right now. It's everywhere. And you're sort of, oh, damage, electrical goods, whatever. Who gets. No, it's lithium, right? Yeah, it's like extreme drama queen. Like mega, mega drama queen. And you know, I think that there's a better, I think there's, there's, I think there's better options.

[A]

Okay, what are, what are they?

[B]

Okay, so I think that there are options. There aren't any clear options yet, but I think there are options. The main thing is like, this is one of the reasons why I'm really, really excited about quantum computing and this new era of AI which is exploring material science. So there's these new startups that are popping up all over the place that are going to try and do to material science what things like AlphaFold have done for biology, right, which is like completely revolutionized the space and the kind of gold star, north Star, whatever the phrases those tech bros use. The thing that like people really, really, really want is a better battery. One that is more stable, one that is more energy dense, one that can cram in more energy, is faster to charge. Just, you know, all of the above that doesn't require you the insane sort of mining that you need to, to get lithium, the one that isn't kind of dominated by one particular country. It's like a, it's a real thing that people are like, really, really.

[A]

And that would be a huge game changer. Not just because, like our phone batteries would last longer, but if the batteries were lighter too, then suddenly electric cargo trucking becomes much more feasible. Gosh, even like a space Elevator becomes, you know, something that your, your great dream. My great dream?

[B]

Your great dream. I mean, there's also an incredible amount of energy is lost in that process of taking the two from the seats and then putting them back outside of the turnstiles. Right. Like that's an inefficient process of like recharging the battery. You don't get out of it what you put in. So even if you, I mean, let's imagine that you, you kind of made a battery that was twice as efficient or 10 times as efficient or like, let's go crazy, as sort of body fat is 40 times as, as good as, as, as lithium. So maybe, you know, like, let's go crazy. I'm sort of mixing different, different measurements here. But just go with me for a second. You, you need to even make the smallest marginal difference improvement to lithium battery to completely change the world. And I think here's the thing, actually, we don't have a shortage of energy on this planet. There is no shortage of energy. There is plenty of solar energy, there is plenty of wind energy. There is plenty, plenty, plenty of renewable sources. Getting that and collecting it is not the problem. The problem is storing it. Storing problem is storing it and moving it to the right places that need it at the right time. And if you can crack that problem,

[A]

I mean, changes the world. Yeah. So we change like little digestive systems in our devices that we can feed butter to.

[B]

Maybe.

[A]

But why then our devices are going to poop then?

[B]

I'd advise a skin and poop. I would take a bit of poop, would I? If your phone was like, it's time for me to go for a poop, maybe I would, I mean, yeah, if

[A]

it meant that like an electric car could be lighter. If it meant that I only needed to feed my phone like every, you know, once a month, but I had to deal with some cyborg feces.

[B]

I don't know, maybe petrol stations could turn into poop stations.

[A]

That's right, yeah. Little flush zones for your electronic energy waste.

[B]

Hey, why not? Right, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you some of the. Because there are a few alternatives that are out there. Right.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. Tell me about the real.

[B]

None of them are quite like, you know, there. Yeah. But okay, so you can make sodium batteries, which is like also in the same part of the period table as the family.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And they are, it's sort of, they're bigger, they're, they're cheaper, they are harder to set on fire, which I Would say is, is a good thing. That's good. But key thing is that sodium, you can get it out of common salt, you know, there's plenty of sodium around.

[A]

Don't have to mine it from special areas. Yeah, exactly.

[B]

Other options are some like quite weird ones, which I like. So some people are experimenting with this thing called liquid air, which is where you take ordinary air and when you have an abundance of energy, so, I don't know, like loads of solar power or whatever it might be, you take ordinary air and you freeze it to minus 196 degrees centigrade.

[A]

So it's all liquid?

[B]

All liquid.

[A]

And that's going to be a mixture of liquid oxygen, nitrogen.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

A little bit of carbon dioxide.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. So now this thing is like this pale blue liquid, 1, 700 of its original volume, by the way. And then you park it in an insulated tank and you sort of, you know, leave it down. It will hold its charge for like hold its charge in a vertical commas for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. What you do is when the grid runs short, you bring it up, let it, let it go warm, it sort of flashes back into a gas.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You can use that to drive a turbine back to electricity straight away.

[A]

Oh yeah. I don't know why I never even thought of that. I've read so much about like molten salt as a way to store energy. But like liquefied air, the emission is

[B]

air is air, which is fine. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Yeah. Other options. There's some people who are experimenting with making batteries out of rust. So where you. I mean, it's sort of the most boring metallic process there is, where you just, just you let iron rust and then. Which pulls oxygen from the air to make iron oxide essentially. And then you can unrust it by kind of taking the oxygen out again. Right. So you have to be quite patient for this one to work. But it is sort of a way to. I mean, if you're thinking of energy as like this chemical process, any reversible chemical process can sort of be used as a battery in a way.

[A]

Yeah. Oh yeah. Right. And. And the question then is, can we make it small enough like. Sure. Air when it's frozen is compressed really small. But that can't go in here. It's gonna be really cold. And then that would be funny if my phone was just constantly emitting air in a gas state, it'd be better than pooping, but it would be farting.

[B]

So now we've got farting phones.

[A]

Yeah, Farting with a ph. Get it? Phone farting. Look, I'm the marketing guy. Reach out to me. I'll tell you what to call it.

[B]

But yeah, I mean this. I guess all I've got is to sort of summarize. You've got what you're holding in your hand right there. It's basically like a controlled. A very carefully caged explosion.

[A]

Yeah. No, it's dangerous. And I think it's fascinating to me that we've had to make some concessions. Like you can't bring a bunch of extra lithium ion batteries on an airplane, but you can bring your phone, not because it's safer, but because, like, people need their phones. So we just have to take that risk.

[B]

Can you imagine. Sorry? Can you just imagine, like, before, you know, back in, like the 70s, being like, oh, hi. Yeah, I. I just want to. I just want to jump around with this little bag of lithium with me at all times?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Would that be okay? You know, is that all right? But this is it, you know, when. If you, if you, like, drop your phone or like, it gets ground or whatever, and you break that lattice. Don't, don't, don't.

[A]

That's what happens.

[B]

Don't, don't. Yeah. So there you go. That's, that's. That's the thing that I'm really hoping for in the future is that lithium's thing of the past.

[A]

That's going to be cool. Yeah. And whatever comes next will be. Will be so much better. Not just. Not just safer, but, but better as a energy source for charging, for energy release. It's going to be different. Yeah. I think, I think we'll look back at, you know, photos from this time when people are, like, carrying around phone chargers and they're plugged into walls and we're going to go, oh, man. Remember when you had to charge stuff all the time?

[B]

Yeah. Was it Edison who wanted there to be sort of wireless charging around the entire world? I think he did.

[A]

I don't remember who it was, but yeah, I think we'll get there at some point. Like, why can't the radio stations just be charging my phone?

[B]

Maybe they should. Maybe they should. Oh, it was Tesla, apparently. Apparently.

[A]

Ah, Classic Edison Tesla mixer switcheroo.

[B]

And there you go. Instead of that, instead he lends his name to a car that burns a thousand degrees, takes a month's worth of water to. To put out.

[A]

He could lend his name to a car that doesn't.

[B]

That doesn't exactly. Right. There is one final type of battery, actually, that I think Holds some real promise. If the first battery was inspired by an eel, an electrical that volta had dissected, there's some really new work. This is like 2025, a group at Penn State who are stacking hydrogels. Right. So sort of eel architecture, basically trying to copy what eels are doing. The idea is that you can use them in pacemakers and implants and they can run off the body's own ions. So you have all of the stuff going on in your body already, all of this sort of electrical signals.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is there a way that you can sort of create a battery that taps into that? Yeah, because you do not want to put a lithium battery inside here of human.

[A]

No, no, you don't. But I'll be a battery if I need to be.

[B]

Hey, we'll plug you in.

[A]

Speaking of bodies providing energy, you all energize us. Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing to us on YouTube, following us on whatever podcast platform you use.

[B]

Just, just, just, just before we go, what's quite nice is because you're in New Zealand, I'm in London. We're basically antipodes from one another. The sun left me as it arrived at for you. Look, I'm now in the dark.

[A]

Fun. Now you got my son. Look at that. I love it. You look like a Rembrandt painting. And I'm over here just looking like some guy on a 90s camcorder. But, you know, it's the odd couple.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

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[B]

We will see you next time. Thank you.