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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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