Beating, bombardment and batteries

Perhaps it might sound obvious but the word battery, the thing that powers your laptop or phone, is related to the same word meaning unlawful physical contact and a cluster of cannons.

To go right to the beginning, battery can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European word bhāt- meaning 'to beat or hit'. The word with the same meaning emerged in Latin as batteure and made its way into Old French as battre and batterie, meaning 'the action of beating', before producing related words such as battle and combat. Interestingly, batterie still exists in modern French today as something that is beaten in the form of 'drums' or 'drum kit'.

A 'batterie' is a drum kit in modern French.

Battery appeared in English as batry or battry, meaning an unlawful attack or a bruise left from a beating, from the 16th century. Around the same time it was also used to refer to a bombardment or to batter the walls of a city by means of artillery. This led to battery being used in the sense of a unit of artillery weapons or a cluster of cannons.

A battery of cannons in Newfoundland, Canada.

However, we have the American inventor Benjamin Franklin to thank for the modern use of the word battery in technology. He first used the term "electrical battery" in 1748 in a letter to Peter Collinson, a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, with whom he shared details about his experiments. Franklin apparently borrowed the military term because his invention contained glass Leyden jars grouped in rows like cannons in an artillery battery. 

Franklin's "electrical battery" of Leyden jars.

Batteries have come a long way since those first rudimentary contraptions but given that modern Lithium Ion batteries have been known to spontaneously explode, in some ways they share even more in common with the units of destructive artillery that gave them their name.