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BATTERY HERO: CAMILLE FAURE
Camille Alphonse Faure was the 19th century electrochemist who made the commercialization of the lead acid battery achievable, writes Kevin Desmond
The neglected hero who made the modern battery possible
To the inventor the glory. To the genius of the engineer that made the invention work, a footnote in the world’s history books.
So too when one looks at the origins of the lead acid battery we automatically think of Gaston Planté and his remarkable achievement in 1859 of creating the first rechargeable lead battery. But we then tend to neglect the work of Camille Alphonse Faure, the man who took the lead battery to the next level and made it fit for purpose.
Plante’s battery, to put it bluntly, was extraordinary in conception but primitive in execution. Although they could generate large currents over extended periods of time, they were huge, heavy and difficult to move around.
Faure’s lead-acid batteries were smaller, better made and lighter. They were immediately seized upon by his contemporaries as providing the basis for electric transport. Four years after Faure’s 1880 patent was released, an Englishman, Thomas Parker, pioneered the first production electric car.
Faure was born on May 21, 1840 in Vizille, a small but busy town in the south-east of France. He was a studious boy with a passion for chemistry and his parents sent him to the Ecole des Arts et Metiers at Aix, where he did brilliantly.
He got a job as a draftsman first with Peyruque-Cousin in Toulon and then with J. Chrétien in Paris, and became particularly involved with the Great London Exhibition of 1862. Returning to Paris, he published a report about machine tools. Having learned English at the Philotechnical Association in Paris, on Chrétien’s recommendation, Faure returned to London in 1866.
Here he worked for Debergue & Company, big English manufacturers of machine tools. He was clearly a valuable asset to the firm and was even sent to Russia on a protracted commercial mission.
From around 1872, it was while examining a Leyden jar battery with nitric acid built in London by instrument manufacturers Elliott Brothers that Faure began to think about improving electric batteries.
From 1874 until about 1880, he worked as a chemist at the new factory of the Cotton Powder Company at Faversham, Kent, England. While there, he and the factory manager, George Trench, took out patents for Tonite (a new high explosive) (1874), and an improved dynamite detonator (1878).
Following a visit to the Paris Exposition of 1878, Faure had the idea
for his secondary battery. Assisted by his life-long friend and patent attorney Dominique-Antoine Casalonga, Faure’s key patent was taken out on October 20, 1880, N° 139,358: “Improvements to galvanic batteries and their application to electric locomotives”, which he modified several times in January 1881, October 1881. It was the birth of a new battery that would lead in the end to the automobile revolution.
The breakthrough was a curing mechanism. Lead plates were coated with a paste of lead oxides, sulphuric acid and water, which was then cured by being gently warmed in a humid atmosphere. The curing process caused the paste to change to a mixture of lead sulphates, which adhered to the lead plate. During charging the cured paste was converted into electrochemically active material (the “active mass”) and gave a substantial increase in capacity compared with Planté’s battery.
A secondary battery that could be recharged and used again and again was now in a form that it could be adapted to other applications.
One of the very first to make use of Faure’s battery was the Parisian inventor Gustave Trouvé, who in April 1881 used these batteries to test out the world’s first electric tricycle.
Modifying an English CoventryRotary tricycle, its two smaller wheels were each driven by a little 5kg motor: a Faure battery of six accumulators gave the current; the weight of the vehicle raised up to 160kg, and gave a speed of 12 km/h.
“Behind the seat and sitting on the axle, a rough, newly fashioned wooden box contained six secondary batteries. These accumulators were quite similar to those of Gaston Planté and actuated the motors,” said a report at the time.
Encouraged and sponsored by M J Chrétien, Camille Faure and his brother Jules teamed up with Nicolas Raffard, an engineer working for the company “La Force et La Lumière”.
Raffard and his colleague Edmond Julien were looking for a battery powerful enough for the prototype electric streetcar they were constructing for the Paris General Omnibus Company.
Faure’s battery was an answer to prayer — 225 Faure cells, weighing more than two tons, were screwed down under the car’s seats. This cumbersome car had steerable front axles, which allowed it to be run off the rails for short distances.
They were unable to demonstrate it at the 1881 Electric Exhibition in Paris because of a delay in repairing the dynamo. But the following year, additional tests were operated with the number of battery cells increased to 375.
On one trip the car ran from the workshops to Versailles and back without the batteries being recharged.
Even before electric traction had proved itself, business treachery was interfering. While Simon Phillipart and Faure were over in England setting up an English company, Volckmar and Phillipart Jr abused the trust placed in them by trying to sell off certain patent rights without the approval of the directors.
Simon Phillipart set up the English Faure Co with Sir William Thompson as consultant. They began with manufacturing in Liverpool in April 1882, and Volckmar and Phillipart’s erring son joined forces with John Sellon, of the Anglo-America Brush Co, who had obtained provisional protection for a pasted type plate.
This differed from that of Camille Faure’s, in that the active material was pasted into a grid instead of being held by a felt wrapping to the surface of a plain roughed lead plate.
The weakness of Faure’s design had been that the red lead applied to the lead plates was so friable that vibration would cause it to lose its grip and fall to the bottom of the battery container, electrically shorting the positive and negative plates.
Sellon also acquired from Joseph Swan, the English light bulb inventor, a method of keying the active material by punching holes in the plates, so providing a battery purchase for the red lead.
Their Electrical Power Storage Company (EPS) was formed in March 1882 to manufacture the Swan-Sellon-Volckmar accumulator.
At first, the British Faure Co tried to discredit the EPS Co, claiming infringement of patent rights developed by discharged employees.
The fledgling battery industry already seemed to be in trouble before it had even got under way.
In May 1882 the Faure Co abandoned its threat of litigation and patent rights were given by the Faure Co to the EPS Co through a mutual exchange of shares.
By 1883 no fewer than 11 concerns were engaged in the manufacture of Faure accumulators. These ranged from La Force et La Lumière of Paris; Faure Electric Accumulator Company of London; Force & Power Co of
One of Thomas Parker’s early cars outside the family home in Staffordshire, England. Thomas is in the middle and on the back seat is possibly his son Alfred.
New York; the French Metropolitan Electric Carriage Co; EPS of London; India and Oriental Electric Power Storage Company — and even the Australasian Electric Light and Power Storage Co. Following litigation in the US, the two American companies combined to become the Electric Accumulator Co of New York.
Camille Faure, now just in his early 40s, decided to pursue other challenges.
In 1883 he set up a trial factory at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, in the Ile-deFrance region, for the manufacture of aluminium using an electric kiln.
By 1886 he had invested 200,000 francs into research and development of the project.
In September 1886 he sailed to the US to work for an American offshoot company of the London-based EPS.
He returned three years later to Paris, one month after the opening of the 1889 Universal Expo. He exhibited one of his batteries and was given the gold medal.
But Faure the chemist was more interested in the manufacture of low cost aluminium, the mass production of nitrate for agriculture and in particular that of chlorine.
He took out patents for the treatment of alkaline chlorides by electrolysis and in electrical batteries for alkaline salts.
From 1897 the French Post Office, as directed by the forward-thinking under-secretary of state for Posts and Telegraphs, Léon Mougeot, had been looking for a way to replace horsedrawn mail vans with mechanical transport.
Mougeot had even been trying out Serpollet steam railcars to collect letters from post boxes on the line between Creil and Beauvais.
Charles Jeantaud, the French engineer, exhibited one of his parallelogram steering electromobiles with a motor by Zenobe Gramme and battery by Camille Faure, calling it “L’auto-poste” at the Paris Motor Show, but it attracted little interest
During the 1890s, Faure applied himself to a whole range of inventions. Among them was the development of internal combustion engines for automobiles, including motor vehicle steering systems, and motorcycles, but also the use of cyanate as fertilizer, a device for sterilizing water in living apartments either by using permanganate of potassium or by using an electric jet to submit tap water to an intense centrifugal force.
He also envisaged building a factory using the hydroelectric power from the gorges of the Dauphiné Alps to use an electric furnace to manufacture a new improved lower cost nitrate fertilizer.
Camille Faure died suddenly on September 14 1898 at his home in Paris, aged only 57.
He left behind him his widow, Amalia Maria Francesca Bandinelli, his seven-year old son, Camille Jules, who died in the Great War, but also a lead battery legacy that lasts to this day.
His official biography in the CNRS (Centre National de la recherche Scientifique) written by his patent attorney Dominique-Antoine Casalonga, ends with an extraordinary tribute to him.
“Rewards, distinctions, the gratification of wealth meant little to him. But the legacy that he left behind him was such that the battery design he created was a masterpiece — and that one thing alone will keep his name alive in the memory of men.”
Sadly, if that only were the case for a man mostly lost to history who had such a powerful influence on the modern world.
