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Bottled Energy

By Birgitte Wistoft

Bicycle lamp, electric torch, door bell, model railway, and doll’s house… These are the things which spontaneously come to mind when reflecting on the use of batteries in one’s childhood. Big, heavy, and often flat and red – with the vigorous tiger on the front.


Today the name is "Duracell" and not "Hellesens" as in my childhood. Today you find displays of batteries right before the check-out counter of almost every supermarket. They end up in the shopping basket weekly because the need seems infinite in a large family. Nowadays everything seems to function provided small doses of direct current are connected.

An Enormous Comeback

Chemically stored electricity in portable containers is an almost 200 year-old product. Since the first appearance of public power plants in Denmark in the 1890’s and until well after World War II the trend was, however, to produce apparatuses which could be connected to the plug outlet rather than to go for battery power. But most of the 19th century was the golden age of the battery . Now it seems to experience a tremendous renaissance.

At Post & Tele Museum we have a very fine collection of old batteries. They have all served as power supply to the communication miracle of our ancestors: wire-carried contact between people over long distances by telegraph or telephone. At the same time they substantiate a part of the Danish industrial history.

Volta and All the Others

Long before anyone ever dreamed about power plants, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) discovered the possibility of creating and storing electric energy chemically. A glass container with two different metals lowered into a weak acid was the basic principle of the voltaic pile which, in different versions, supplied electricity to the laboratories of scientists and inventors as well as energy for a countless number of purposes including the first electromagnetic telegraphs and telephones from 1800 and onwards.

The combination of battery, copper wire, Morse key, and inker established itself all over the world from the 1840’s. The oldest battery in the museum used to serve that very purpose. The glasses on the tray with Leclanché batteries from about 1895 were originally filled with a concentrated ammonium chloride solution.

Product Development Required

It can hardly be called a handy apparatus. Imagine grappling with these fragile glass vessels filled with corrosive liquid which often had to be changed. The smell was not pleasant either. The use of this kind of arrangements had to be limited. The rapid spread of telegraphy and not least the triumphal progress of the telephone all over the earth from the 1880’s made the need for a handier product obvious. The wet batteries could, however, be kept at a distance from imprudent users as long as they were only a necessity at the telegraph stations. But the first generation of telephone apparatuses required electricity for sound amplification at the apparatus itself which was placed at the customer’s, and unpleasant experiences could be foreseen.

Hellesen’s Widow & V. Ludvigsen Ltd.

"Hellesen’s" success was owing to exactly the meeting of this demand. In 1887, V. Ludvigsen founded his factory in Frederiksberg. His only product was the dry cell which he had developed in collaboration with W. Hellesen, who died a few years later in 1892. However, the Hellesen name would adorn the product whose worldwide success he did not live to experience. Hellesen’s dry cell obtained a long life and competition from many replica products. In the dry cell the liquid elektrolyte is tied so that it can be contained in a hermetically closed battery which is dry on the outside and which has, moreover, been shaped in such a way that it can be fitted into far more apparatuses than the telephone.

During the between-war years the large factory, which was then situated in no. 6, Aldersrogade, in the Østerbro district of København, obtained international success, which was not least due to effective marketing and a professional sales organization. It became the age of the tiger.

By the way, today the name of the company is Duracell.

The Battery and the Telephone

The first telephones were clearly a spur to the development of the dry battery. But soon, concurrently with the development in power plant technology a new type of telephone exchange was introduced in which the necessary amplification could take place at the exchanges – and consequently the battery disappeared from customer’s telephone apparatus. The dry cell found, however, other fields of application such as for ignition of automobiles, electric torches, radio sets, etc.

But the story about the telephone and the battery is not finished; not at all. Rechargeable batteries are today securing our frequent use of mobile telephones – not to speak about the memory function in telephones and computers. We have got rid of the fragile glasses and troublesome liquids, but the principle of "bottled energy" has truly had a comeback – also in the communication sphere.


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