ensational step was taken about 1880, when Faure in
France and Brush in America broke away from the slow and weary process
of "forming" the plates, and hit on clever methods of furnishing them
"ready made," so to speak, by dabbing red lead onto lead-grid plates,
just as butter is spread on a slice of home-made bread. This brought the
storage battery at once into use as a practical, manufactured piece of
apparatus; and the world was captivated with the idea. The great English
scientist, Sir William Thomson, went wild with enthusiasm when a
Faure "box of electricity" was brought over from Paris to him in 1881
containing a million foot-pounds of stored energy. His biographer, Dr.
Sylvanus P. Thompson, describes him as lying ill in bed with a wounded
leg, and watching results with an incandescent lamp fastened to his bed
curtain by a safety-pin, and lit up by current from the little Faure
cell. Said Sir William: "It is going to be a most valuable, practical
affair--as valuable as water-cisterns to people whether they had or had
not systems of water-pipes and water-supply." Indeed, in one outburst of
panegyric the shrewd physicist remarked that he saw in it "a realization
of the most ardently and increasingly felt scientific aspiration of his
life--an aspiration which he hardly dared to expect or to see realized."
A little later, however, Sir William, always cautious and canny,
began to discover the inherent defects of the primitive battery, as
to disintegration, inefficiency, costliness, etc., and though offered
tempting inducements, declined to lend his name to its financial
introduction. Nevertheless, he accepted the principle as valuable, and
put the battery to actual use.

For many years after this episode, the modern lead-lead type of battery
thus brought forward with so great a flourish of trumpets had a hard
time of it. Edison's attitude toward it, even as a useful supplement
to his lighting system, was always one of scepticism, and he remarked
contemptuously that the best storage battery he knew was a ton of coal.
The financial fortunes of the battery, on both sides of the Atlantic,
were as varied and as disastrous as its industrial; but it did at last
emerge, and "made good." By 1905, the production of lead-lead storage
batteries in the United States alone had reached a value for the year
of nearly $3,000,000, and it has increased greatly since that time.
The storage battery is now regarded as an important and indis