An Italian physicist, an English chemist, a German scientist, and Thomas Edison walk into a lab ….

No, this is not the start of a corny joke; it’s the progression of people who worked to bring you the lowly “disposable” battery that seems to be everywhere.

The stories

Alessandro Volta made the first battery in 1798 by stacking sheets of zinc, acid-moistened cardboard, and copper. In 1836 the English chemist John Frederic Daniell improved the battery by addressing the problem of corrosion. In 1888 the German, Dr. Gasser, invented a “dry cell battery that resembled the carbon-zinc batteries of the 20^th century. This was the first real practical battery and was used in 1898 when an enterprising fellow, Conrad Hubert, created the “electric hand torch” (aka, the flashlight). Edison, always a lover of electricity, improved batteries for cars and trains in the early 1900s.

Alkaline batteries came to us in 1959 and a Swede figured out how to recharge batteries in 1960. The present-day lithium battery arrived in 1992 and now seems that everything imaginable uses a battery: toys, flashlights, hearing aids, power tools, cars, clocks, watches, phones, MP3 players, etc. 

And therein lies a present and future problem.

Over three billion “disposable” batteries are sold annually in the U.S. and the vast majority are simply thrown in the garbage. Car batteries have an official recycling channel; however, that is not the case for most of the other uses. We are encouraged to do the right thing (recycling) but may be tempted to take the easy way out and simply throw them in the garbage.

Lesson

Now, why tell the story of the lowly battery? Well, it’s a simple story, covering over 300 years of slow change and it demonstrates the systems thinking truism of “every solution creates new problems.” The battery solved the problem of our need for portable power, but now we need to deal with the disposal problems it created.

Application

Look at your industry. What long-term problems are you finally “solving?” What new problems have you created that will vex future leaders?