One of the earliest forms of visible electricity a spark, a bright flash of lighting in nature of hundreds of millions of volts, able to start a forest fire, during thunder and lightning storms, then some cleaver people in the 1800 started making piles, piles of alternating metals with different galvanic potential, with cloth soaked in acid as electrolytes.
Bright arcs of electricity at the National Ignition Facility, but IMAX 10KW projector bulb, one of the coolest things ever commercialized. Metal Halide automotive projector lamps. Low pressure sodium then high-pressure sodium street lamps. Microwave sulfur bulbs.
Recording Movies analog on physical film media required Bright Lights
Movie production and Surgery illumination produced market pressure for the production of very high brightness lighting technology. In many applications, inside a video projector, being able to produce high luminous flux density light with good color rendering index in a highly controllable directional focusable way meant that it became possible to make video projectors with good ANSI lumens for outdoor visibility, using very powerful compact short arc XENON bulbs in a glass ceramic reflector housing with an output lens.
Video Projection Needed Bright Lights
Today many video projectors use a high brightness LED lamp through LCD or DLP chips to project video in home theater systems. I used an LED video projector to crate a 70in indoor smart TV by plugging an Amazon Kindle Stick into the HDMI port of the projector, and for $20 the Kindle Stick came pre-programmed to my Prime account incredibly, turning our old dumb projector into a Smart TV, that we mounted with a bracket to the ceiling, then adjusted its keystone setting to send the image onto a large fat patch of painted white sheetrock drywall in front of our couch.
Lemon Battery At-Home Project with Kids
A simple at home DIY battery can be made by driving copper and iron nails into a lemon, do a few rows of each, then connect then one to the other to form a string series, in this way you can bump up the voltage enough to light and LED or power a small DC motor with a plastic fan on its axel, or through an automatic voltage regulator you could even charge your smartwatch or smartphone over USB-C cabled connected to your DIY voltage regulator connected to Lemon Battery "Pile" this kind of battery called a primary battery and will not last very long, because lemon juice inside the lemon has poor physical availability to the dissimilar metals forming the electrodes, moreover one electrode will rust or oxidize while the other reduced to ions in the lemon juice or corroded away, so you can improve the lemon battery by using platinum plated titanium as one electrode and graphite rod as the other, and put an array of those in holes in a plastic box filled with diluted muriatic acid (hydrochloric), or try using a paste made of RO water and potassium hydroxide.
French Inventor Creates Worlds 1st Rechargeable Battery
1859 Gaston Plant invented a Rechargeable Lead Acid or Pb-A battery of ~ 20 wh/kg
Waxed coated wood box held the lead & lead oxide plates, dilute sulfuric acid the electrolyte. These early lead acid batteries were sensitive to vibration damage, had very low energy density, but worked better than any other battery at sending out very large DC current pulses, which eventually became useful for energizing the 4-7kw electrical engine starting motors with output shaft sprag clutch mechanism that tooth gear aligns into a ring gear attached the crankshaft, so at 12.4vdc under load the 6 cell Pb-A battery sends out hundreds of cold cranking amps to cold start an automotive engine. Today 12-volt car batteries are also known as Starting, Lighting & Ignition batteries. Even BEV like a Tesla Model 3 still contain a lead acid battery.
Highest Quality Sub-C NiCD Batteries
In the middle of the 20th century NiCD Nickel Cadmium, Dewalt 18v tool batteries with Sanyo Sub-C cells "CADNICA" are some of the highest quality longest lasting NiCd battery ever made. Some piston engine small aircraft use large liquid NiCD batteries that are very expensive and hard to recycle. Many consumer electronics sold from 1960's through the late 1990's and even early 2000's featured memory prone NiCD
NiMH moves Hydrogen ions in La doped Nickle Sponge
Nickel Metal Hydride was greatly improved rechargeable battery made better with the addition of lanthanum to the nickel sponge. Famously early BEV's like the RAV4 EV in the 1990's used large format automotive NiMH battery packs to store traction energy in the multiple kWh range to give useful driving range, while an at home paddle charged plugged into the front grill for recharging. Even more famously, Toyota Hybrids have featured NiMH batteries for over 25 years.
Battery Industry Entrenchment or Technological Lock-in
In the late 1980's executives at Sony of Japan were developing ideas about a portable media player, but they wanted it to have good time and be small and compact, so they need a battery better than NiCD or NiMH and had gone on to contact all of the battery companies in Japan to ask for a lithium ion battery, but having entrenched enormous investments into NiCD and NiMH and even superior PbA, AGM versions, Fumed Silica Gel Batteries, no battery makers of Japan willing to help Sony make lithium ion batteries. So Sony famously setup the own battery manufacturing plant and started producing the worlds first commercial rechargeable consumer electronic lithium-ion batteries for the Walk-Man in the early 1990's.
1st Li-ion in Sony Walkman
Low volume production, supply chain issues and no economies of scale, meant the earliest Sony Li-ion batteries cost in excess of $3600 per kilowatt hour. By 2020 Tesla had effectively cost optimized NCA down to under $157 in their so called Tab-less designs, though they still as of middle 2026 failed to deliver scaling of production of these Tab-less batteries, while FSD only 2.7 level, not level 5 like Elon claimed 10 years ago and still never delivered.
1958 Nuclear Silo LIB, GM dropped the ball
In America the Pentagon, for nuclear missile silos, had aerospace niche lithium-ion batteries as early as 1958, but those were state secrets, National Security level classified technologies, not to be commercialized. Though a tech transfer agreement between DARPA and GM in 1980 meant that GM became the world's foremost expert on Automotive LIB or lithium ion batteries, and could have commercialized LIB EV's way before any other automaker, but their greedy selfish leadership under Bub Lutz prioritized higher profit margin SUV and Trucks, so in the most deranged fashion of bad management, they purchased the Hummer from AM General instead of optimizing the EV1 platform with LIB or Li-ion or lithium ion batteries.
Welding With Electrical Plasma Fire
A welding machine, STICK, MIG, TIG, regardless of which kind, creates electrical hot plasma arc, see 4th state of matter, not blood plasma, electrical arc plasma, which makes the metals liquid hot, so the welding pool created bonds the metals together, but for eye and skin safety, welding arcs are a enormously bright source of UV light, which will burn the retina can cause blindness, or skin burns, like a sun burn, so wearing long sleeves, neck scarf, gloves, a welding hood with auto darkening window or welding glasses, you need to wear protection, personal application specific welding gear for your safety, and make sure to weld where there is good air flow ventilation, because welding fumes are toxin and cause metal fever, which is acute metal poisoning. Welding fumes can cause fatal damage to lungs, so make sure to vent welding fumes.
Helion making the Worlds 1st Fusion Power Plant
Online making grid power by 2028 with a $400 million dollar Microsoft data center power purchase contract. The Sun, center of our solar system, fuses 600 million tons of hydrogen every second. The sun is about 10,000 times larger than the Earth, a giant gravity confined fusion reactor called a Star. Amongst stars in Space the Sun not very big or very powerful. A yellow GV2 class star, the Sun just bright enough to power all life on Earth from 93 million miles away :)
Mental Imagination Curiosity Passion for STEM
People comment asking me "how do you come up with idea to write about" I woke up thinking about electrical arc fire, an 70W HPS lamp system I created and want to hook up. Then I thought about that super cool IMAX bulb with its liquid cooled machined tungsten electrode that must be very expensive as a system. Then I thought about how welding arc melt metals into little welding pools that bond metal parts together. This made me think about short arc xenon bulbs in video projectors, which in turn made me think about the Sun.