Tom Swift and his NiMH battery

Here's a weird find - my wife and I were looking for some light reading and downloaded a couple of the old Tom Swift books, which you can find for free in quite a few spots. I read Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout last weekend, and thought it was interesting to note that the car in question used nickel / metal hydride batteries. In a book that was written in 1910. I was a bit curious as to how far ahead of its time that would have been, and it appears that the first commercial use of NiMH batteries was in 1989. I wonder if that was a lucky guess, or if someone (the Tom Swift books aren't easy to match with their real authors) was really paying attention to cutting edge chemistry research back then. Thought you guys might find that interesting.

Man I miss those old Tom Swift books. I devoured those when I was a kid in about 1970-72. They were in our local public library, non-PC characters and all. In retrospect, I have a sneaking suspicion that they were probably original editions, too. They were definitely published no later than the '20s.

You can get a ton of them in ebook form on Project Gutenberg if you want to have a look at them now:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Tom+Swift

Interesting, could be either. I wouldn't be surprised if people knew about the theoretical potential of lithium batteries back then.

Some discussion of it here:

http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/runabout.html

Tom's battery chemistry sounds fishy. Thomas Edison developed a Lithium/Iron battery about that time (1906) but it was a primary (non-rechargeable) cell. Lithium ion technology was unheard-of and when it finally was tried, 60 years after this story, the explosion hazards of overcharging limited its applications, at least for a while. When asked, my local battery expert, Dr. Keith Shaw, stated simply, "the chemistry wouldn't work."

That's cool that there's a site dedicated to examining some of the engineering in the books.

Although Tom was using lithium in the battery, it seemed like he was just using that as a cation (he had a different, heavier proof of concept battery using potassium hydride) instead of what's usually called a lithium battery. The chemistry still wasn't spot on; he didn't use quite the same nickel compound as production NiMH batteries on the positive side, and iron oxide for a negative electrode may not have worked.