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 :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/6873c81c-2951-430f-b32c-653582b7c44c%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.