The nitric-acid battery, or Grove cell, employed a zinc electrode suspended in dilute sulfuric acid and a platinum electrode suspended in concentrated nitric acid, separated by a porous ceramic pot. The battery produced a considerably higher voltage than previous models, doubling the voltage of its most powerful rival, the much more expensive Daniell cell. For this reason, the Grove cell became the battery of choice for telegraph systems in Great Britain and the United States from 1840 on and was not universally replaced until 1860, in spite of two serious defects. The first was that the voltage it generated diminished over time; the second was that the nitric acid tended to give off poisonous nitrogen dioxide gas, which could accumulate dangerously in a cramped but busy telegraph office.

The fact that Sir William Robert Grove made his battery freely available rather than patenting it, thus missing out on the payments that other pioneers of commercial telegraphy received--and which, as a lawyer, he would have been better placed than some of his rivals to claim and negotiate--may seem odd, given his subsequent crusade for the professionalization of science. What he wanted, however, was for scientific research to be better rewarded for its own sake, freed from the lottery that restricted success to the discoverers of patentable applications. The fact that the Grove cell became so important as a power source of early electrical technology presumably gave him a good deal of satisfaction, and there is no evidence that he regretted his failure to cash in on it. He would probably have been delighted to know that his gas battery, which had no useful applications at the time, would eventually become highly significant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a nonpolluting fuel cell.

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