In the opening line of the Gizmodo article Batteries: The Absolute Definitive Guide, Andrew Tarantola boldly points out that people don’t give much thought to batteries despite its profound impact on our society. I’m no exception to this, until now I’ve never reflected on my interactions with batteries despite its pervasiveness in everyday life. My father however is someone that I believe has spent a great deal of time interacting with and thinking about batteries. This is simply because he was an engineer and has spent his entire life tinkering with electronics. To put his life and career into perspective, my father was born in 1935 and worked for many years at Bell Laboratories where they had developed the transistor. He has multiple closets full of antiquated radios, transistors, circuit boards, batteries and other electronics he’s collected over the last 60 years. When I was in early elementary school, I remember him teaching me how to make simple circuits connecting a battery to a light source. Nearly every week he’d come up with a different project for us varying from teaching me to use an oscilloscope to learning to operate a ham radio. He often reminded me to take the batteries out of any electronics I wasn’t planning on using because of the corrosive nature of battery acids. Which I later learned the hard way when I came back to my Gameboy after years of neglect and it no longer worked. When I thought any of the batteries for my toys were dead, he’d have me bring them to him, which he’d then place in a box amongst other supposedly dead batteries. About once a month he’d take out his voltmeter, measure each battery from this box, and then label it with its voltage reading. At the time I thought this was normal, but I highly doubt most people’s parents owned a voltmeter let alone measured the voltage of each battery. I speculate he does this partly out of frugalness, but mostly driven by his deep fascination and wonderment with batteries.
While my father does not reject modern technology, he simply doesn’t seem as interested in it. He owns an iphone with a lithium ion rechargeable battery, which I believe to be much more impressive than the batteries he collects. However, I’ve never once seen him show an inkling of this same I described earlier towards his iphone. This is probably due to the sheer inaccessibility of today’s modern products. Even something so simple as replacing a phone battery has become a process that is reserved for the experts at the apple store. Apple even discourages you from opening up your phone by reserving the rights to terminate your warranty early if they think you’ve tried to modify the phone in any way. For many people in the older generations, taking apart, modifying and rebuilding technology was an exciting hobby. Today, I wouldn’t even think about taking apart my iphone unless I was in desperate need of a $600 paperweight. This extreme inaccessibility of the knowledge of how to build and repair our modern technology has lead to the extinction of this concept of “tinkering with technology” and given way to a throwaway culture.
While my father does not reject modern technology, he simply doesn’t seem as interested in it. He owns an iphone with a lithium ion rechargeable battery, which I believe to be much more impressive than the batteries he collects. However, I’ve never once seen him show an inkling of this same I described earlier towards his iphone. This is probably due to the sheer inaccessibility of today’s modern products. Even something so simple as replacing a phone battery has become a process that is reserved for the experts at the apple store. Apple even discourages you from opening up your phone by reserving the rights to terminate your warranty early if they think you’ve tried to modify the phone in any way. For many people in the older generations, taking apart, modifying and rebuilding technology was an exciting hobby. Today, I wouldn’t even think about taking apart my iphone unless I was in desperate need of a $600 paperweight. This extreme inaccessibility of the knowledge of how to build and repair our modern technology has lead to the extinction of this concept of “tinkering with technology” and given way to a throwaway culture.