The folks on this board know way more than I do about what was used to
power historical equipment. I only worked with batteries for a year (25
years ago) as a technician ("go there, do that") with the small watch cells
and the only high-voltage work we did was a 5 cell pack of 1.5V AgMnO cells
that was boosted by a customer's device to higher voltage (think of what
the Invisible Fence collar unit does and you get the idea). The only radio
type construction I saw was a Mg-MnO pack that they had made for years for
military radios, soon to be eliminated in favor of Li chemistry.
The thing to remember about commercially produced batteries is that the
chemistry is less than half the equation. The packaging is what makes
these things so very useful, or destroys our equipment. The old school
"heavy duty" battery used the zinc itself as a can, and as the capacity is
used up, it can eat holes in the can letting the electrolyte leak. Put them
in something to catch the leaks and they are as useful under low discharge
rates as anything else. The modern alkalines have a steel can on the
outside and the zinc is granulated in the center, which results in higher
discharge rates. My interest is in the physical processes that occur, but
most people don't care at all about diffusion-limited reactions, they just
want their flashlight to turn on long enough to get where they are going :)
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