Lewis Urry

Canadian chemical engineer

• Born: January 29, 1927
• Birthplace: Pontypool, Ontario, Canada
• Died: October 19, 2004
• Place of death: North Olmsted, Ohio

Urry’s development of the alkaline battery made it possible to significantly extend the effective lifetime of batteries used in personal and household items ranging from commonplace flashlights and smoke detectors to complicated electronic devices. By the end of Urry’s active career, his original contribution had been carried forward by researchers who developed the extremely sophisticated batteries that power not only modern portable electronic devices but also critical medical devices such as pacemakers.

Primary fields: Chemistry; electronics and electrical engineering

Primary invention: Alkaline battery

Early Life

Lewis Frederick Urry was born in 1927 in Pontypool, Ontario, Canada. After serving in the Canadian army between 1946 and 1949, he studied at the University of Toronto, receiving a degree in chemical engineering in 1950. His first employment was with the Eveready Battery Company, the firm that had a very long history going back to the development of battery cells for use mainly in household flashlights. While still a young man of twenty-eight, Urry moved in 1955 to the Eveready main research laboratory in Parma, Ohio. His assigned task, which yielded results by the end of the decade, was to find a way to lengthen the life span of what was then the commercially dominant zinc-carbon battery.

Life’s Work

When Urry moved to Eveready’s laboratory in Ohio, a number of researchers working for battery manufacturing companies had already begun investigating the possibility of extending the effective life of common household batteries using zinc-carbon electrodes and acidic components as electrolytes. Batteries in this category were called galvanic cell batteries. Although an entirely different category of battery—dominated by the technology used to produce automobile batteries—involved combinations of chemical components that lent themselves to recharging, the market sector that interested Eveready covered mainly portable electrical devices. The limitations of size and weight precluded any possibility that the technology of automobile batteries would attract Urry’s attention.

In retrospect, the essentials of the challenge Urry faced would appear rather simple to a modern student of chemistry familiar with the process of ionization. Ionization occurs when electrons contained in an atom (or a molecule composed of diverse atoms) absorb at the time of a chemical reaction a sufficient amount of energy (called the ionization potential) to break away from the normal electric potential system that binds them in atomic orbit. When electrons break loose, what remain are referred to by chemists as (variously charged) ions. Electrons are the bearers of energy known as electricity. Battery technology involves containing and directing the movement of electrons released through chemically induced ionization. It was Urry who introduced the idea that, by using an alkaline-based electrolyte together with manganese dioxide and solid (later powdered) zinc in what was essentially the same structural makeup as batteries already being produced, one could obtain a higher level of electron emission in the ionization process than was produced by acid-based components.

In 1980, Eveready decided to adopt the name Energizer as the new label, for marketing the (by then improved) alkaline battery originally developed by Urry. The Eveready label was retained for marketing standard carbon-zinc batteries that, because of their lower price, continued to supply a significant portion of the consumer demand market.

Over time, and indeed right up to Urry’s departure from the active scene that he had originally pioneered with Eveready, developing technology made it possible to market an entire line of Energizer batteries offering significantly different performance specifications. Two models beyond the widely used Energizer Max alkaline battery (essentially designed for common household and portable electronics), the very lightweight Advanced Lithium and Ultimate Lithium Energizer batteries would carve out somewhat specialized segments of the consumer market. Both lithium-based batteries not only proved to be more efficient for use in technologically more complex systems demanding higher levels of electrical current but also could promise consumers longer storage life, ranging between ten and fifteen years.

Although such qualitative differences came to characterize the market for alkaline-based batteries, impressive quantitative developments were recorded in another sphere: battery longevity. Even though consumers were impressed in the 1960’s by battery longevity, by the end of the twentieth century “ordinary” but technologically improved alkaline batteries lasted up to forty times as long as the earliest Energizer batteries.

Despite the modesty that surrounded his person and his work by the time of his death in 2004, Urry was able to consider himself a first-generation contributor to the continuously expanding technology of battery cell technology. Several products of the next generation—rechargeable batteries based first on nickel-cadmium and later more efficient nickel-metal-hydride, zinc-air, and lithium-ion components (the latter essential to the laptop computer and cell phone industries)—were being patented and commercialized by inventors whose work owed much to Urry’s pioneer discoveries. Patients requiring pacemaker technology to monitor the proper functioning of their hearts owed the very security of their lives to the lithium-iodide battery—another generational product stemming from Urry’s pioneer invention.

Impact

Although Urry’s development of the alkaline battery did not represent what one might call a striking technological breakthrough (since a wide variety of different types of batteries had been in use for several generations, and many would remain on the market alongside the alkaline battery), it certainly had a major impact on the commercial marketing of batteries used for everyday purposes. Because of their longer service life, and despite their visibly higher initial purchase price, alkaline batteries attracted buyers who wanted to avoid recurring unpredictability (and therefore a certain degree of risk, depending on the nature of the battery-powered device being used) associated with “conventional” zinc-carbon batteries.

Success in market competition depends not only on the proven technical qualities of a given product but also on the attractive power of advertisements. Potential Energizer consumers came to recognize the company’s slogans during the mid- to late 1980’s: “It’s supercharged!” in 1986 and, beginning in 1989, “It keeps going and going and going”—the company’s classic slogan that accompanied the now familiar figure of the Energizer Bunny, who “beat the drum” in energetic support of the superior Energizer battery. As the popular demand for long-life batteries expanded, Energizer, alongside the competitor product developed by Duracell, essentially dominated the consumer market. Energizer’s use of a battery-driven bunny was inspired from a similar rabbit figure adopted earlier by Duracell for advertisements in Great Britain. In stages, alkaline batteries became commonplace items on display in drugstores, supermarkets, and convenience stores all over the world. Although the alkaline battery stands out as the most widely known of Urry’s inventions, his name appears on the original certificates of more than fifty patents.

Bibliography

Alper, Joe. “The Battery: Not yet a Terminal Case.” Science 296, no. 5571 (May 17, 2002): 1224-1226. Reports from various researchers working on improving efficiency levels of batteries used in portable electronic devices suggest that there will continue to be ways of increasing levels of electrical power produced by smaller and smaller batteries. The author considers, but argues against, claims that alternative technologies—solar power cells in particular—will inevitably make inroads against alkaline batteries, basing his argument on the increased sophistication of materials used in products coming onto the twenty-first century market.

Frazer, Lance. “Leading the Charge of Better Batteries.” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, no. 4 (April, 2002): A200-A203. Discusses reports published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services focused on health hazards stemming from human exposure to component elements in batteries developed for use in common electronic devices. Specific concern grew over the use of cobalt (developed to serve as an electrode because of its high capacity to attract electrons) and cadmium. Suspected health risks of such battery component materials ranged from their possible contribution to pneumonia and asthma, as well as carcinogenic dangers.

Licht, Stuart, Baohui Wang, and Susanta Ghosh. “Energetic Iron (VI) Chemistry: The Super-Iron Battery.” Science 285, no. 5430 (August 13, 1999): 1039-1042. Describes impressive gains in the amount of electrical energy produced, as well as environmental advantages gained, through the use of iron with a specific valence value (the highly reactive iron VI, with just two valence electrons, the existence of which had just been discovered) as a component material in technologically advanced batteries. The authors predict electrical energy outputs that could mark a 50 percent gain over “conventional” alkaline batteries then on the market.

Vincent, Colin A., and Bruno Scrosati. Modern Batteries: An Introduction to Electrochemical Power Sources. 2d ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997. Provides a layperson’s overview of processes, based on the main lines used even before Urry’s introduction of the alkaline battery, to improve levels of electrical output and longevity in modern batteries.