04/20/2005
Life Goes On
In the past few weeks, the world mourned the deaths of celebrities ranging from a pope to a prince to a Perdue. The passing of the latter, a chicken farmer from Salisbury, Maryland, was less widely noted than those of the pope and prince. However, in his world of poultry, Perdue was a giant who said that it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.
Since 1972, I have inhabited the world of batteries, 17 of those years in the Battery Development Department at Bell Labs. The department was dissolved about 15 years ago but those of us still in the area gather the last Friday of every month for pizza at a local restaurant. In the past few weeks, we have also suffered the painful loss of three members of our world.
When I watch the evening news and the response of a correspondent in Baghdad to a question from the anchorperson in New York comes only after an obvious delay, I think of Dean Maurer. It takes time for the question to get from New York up to a satellite and down to Baghdad and the response to return via the same satellite route. The life and functioning of the communications satellite depends on a battery. Dean Maurer was short in physical stature but stood tall in the field of aerospace battery technology and spacecraft power systems. An expert in the field of rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, he was a member of the team that built Telstar-1, one of the first communications satellites. After retiring from Bell Labs, he joined Loral Skynet, where he continued work on powering other spacecraft.
I last saw Dean at a pizza gathering last year when he announced he was moving to California to work at Space Systems/Loral, where he continued his work in aerospace for the few months before he died last month of a massive heart attack at 72. Dean not only supplied power to objects orbiting in the heavens, he loved ascending skyward in his hot air balloon. On earth, he loved horseback riding and always had a smile on his face, even in very difficult times. His atrocious puns, elaborately embellished, were a staple at our celebratory luncheons and were greeted with the derisive groans that a good pun deserves.
A wacky sense of humor in our department helped cement the camaraderie that keeps the group gathering for pizza years after its dissolution. One example, recalled at the luncheon following Dean’s memorial service last week, involved “Doc Tom”, another member of the group. Tom is the opposite of Dean in stature, towering over other members of the department. Someone decided to play a trick on Fred, an unsuspecting member of the group, by telling him that Doc had 11 toes! Legend has it that on a business trip Fred and Tom shared a room and that night Tom wadded up some toilet paper in his sock and Fred, seeing the extra “toe”, was convinced that the story was true. Tom’s 11 toes became lore in the department. Dean, always the embellisher, solemnly told a newcomer about the 11 toes but said, “It’s not what you think, it’s 4 and 7!” After this story, the memorial luncheon became a mix of jokes and puns, together with words of love and appreciation of Dean and his work. Dean would have loved it.
Two days earlier, I went to a funeral home to pay my respects to Don Morong, a technician in our department. Don was also a volunteer fireman and lay in his casket in his fireman’s uniform with various medals or mementos of his firefighting that would accompany him to his final rest. Can anyone not honor and respect one who volunteers to put his life in danger fighting fires, especially after 9/11? And some members of his family were following in Don’s footsteps as firefighters or in some sort of emergency management activities. Ironically, Don fell from a roof some years ago, not fighting a fire but doing someone a favor. He suffered from the resulting injuries for the rest of his life. Don was a true hero in my book.
Spouses also attend our pizza gatherings. We mourn the passing of Lola Amron, whose husband Irv has for decades handled the paying of the bill at the end of the meal. I don’t know whether Lola was heroic but suspect that she was, knowing that she was a survivor of the Holocaust. I’ve known a number of Holocaust survivors and have found them all to be exceptionally loving, kind and thoughtful. Lola fit that description and our group is poorer for her passing.
Our pizza group grows smaller and life goes on. As, it seems, does progress in our battery world. My friend Tom called my attention last week to an article in the April 7 New York Times by David Pogue. The article was titled “Can a New Disposable Battery Change Your Life? Parts of It, Maybe”. The battery in question is a new disposable battery introduced by Matsushita under its Panasonic label. In spite of the fat that it is probably more cost effective to shell out the extra money for rechargeable batteries, you and I still buy and throw away those AA or AAA alkaline cells that so many of our clocks, cameras, TV remotes, smoke alarms, toys, etc. require.
Brian Trumbore first alerted me to the Panasonic Oxyride Extreme Power battery with an article in the Wall Street Journal of January 4 by Phred Dvorak (yes, it’s Phred). According to the article, a team of engineers took 8 years to come up with the Oxyride battery, which debuted in this country at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. Matsushita went all out to promote the battery. They built a couple of 9-foot long low slung, cone-shaped cars. The Oxyride car is powered by just two AA Oxyride batteries. This car isn’t exactly a speedster, zipping along at slightly under 2 miles per hour for a distance of about 3/4 of a mile as long as the passenger weighs less than 104 pounds.
Obviously, the Oxyride car isn’t going to be seen on any of our highways, but it certainly demonstrates the power capability of the battery. Panasonic is pitching the Oxyride for electronic applications, especially the digital camera. Specifically, the claim is that the Oxyride will give you up to twice the number of shots with the Oxyride as do conventional alkaline batteries. We in the battery world often have seen overly optimistic claims about the performance of new batteries. However, an article by Rex Farrance in the April 2005 issue of PC World supports the Oxyride claims. The PC World people tested Oxyride against a premium alkaline battery of another manufacturer and found the Oxyride gave significantly more than twice the number of shots in their digital camera.
Good performance in one application may not guarantee good performance in another, as demonstrated in Pogue’s article in the Times. A journalist, Pogue did his own testing and also found the Oxyride to give more shots in his digital camera. However, in some other applications, he found the alkaline batteries to last longer. I personally don’t yet have a digital camera but am tempted to get one, if only to bring back memories of my past life in battery evaluation and testing.
What has Panasonic done to improve on the alkaline battery? One electrode in the conventional alkaline battery employs a mix of graphite with manganese dioxide, the active material. A press release posted on the Panasonic Web site reveals that they’ve added an oxyhydroxide of nickel to the manganese dioxide and graphite. Adding the nickel compound is probably the reason for a slightly higher voltage, by 0.1 volt, compared to normal alkaline batteries. Panasonic also says that they use finely divided materials and have a new “vacuum pouring” process to add their electrolyte. Finely divided materials have more surface area and the vacuum process might suck in more electrolyte in close contact with the finely divided particles. All these features are consistent with improved power and possibly longer life for certain applications. I’ll certainly follow with interest whether the Oxyride turns out to be as good as suggested in these early reports.
Dean Maurer would have been interested in this. As I mentioned, he was an expert on nickel-cadmium batteries, in which the nickel oxyhydroxide, NiO(OH), is the active material in one electrode. In our area of the country, the magnolias, cherry trees and forsythia are in full bloom. There’s a new pope, a new prince, another Perdue raising chickens and a new battery. Life goes on.
Allen F. Bortrum
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