INVESTIGATIONS: The Alchemy of Batteries

How many trace elements can dance on an electrode?

Last week the burning issue of AD-X2, an additive powder supposed to prolong the life of storage batteries, came before the Senate Small Business Committee. The testimony had a curiously speculative, unreal and alchemical quality as if this storage battery* had been invented by Alchemist Zozimus of Panopolis and AD-X2 concocted by Cagliostro.

Last spring Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks abruptly dismissed Dr. Allen

Astin, chief of the Bureau of Standards, because, he said, the bureau had not been “sufficiently objective” when it tested AD-X2 and pronounced it worthless. The scientific furor which followed caused Weeks to reinstate Astin temporarily (TIME, April 27), and the Senate Small Business Committee to announce it would hold a full investigation of AD-X2.

First to testify last week was burly Jess M. Ritchie of Oakland, Calif., coinventor and manufacturer of AD-X2. He confessed that he was really a “catskinner” (tractor operator) who had stumbled on to his secret formula and was bewildered by science, bureaucracy and his own invention. He refused to reveal the secret formula, but identified the main ingredients as anhydrous sodium sulphate and “a slightly basic, nearly anhydrous magnesium sulphate.” That, snapped Minnesota’s Senator Hubert Humphrey, a licensed pharmacist, “is nothing but Glauber’s salt and Epsom salts. One of them you give to horses, and the other you give to people.” Ritchie said he didn’t think so, but added that seven “secret trace elements” furnished the real kick to his powder, he thought.

Dr. Astin, an eminent physicist, took the stand and said that the “trace elements” were just impurities in the salts. But when Astin defended the bureau’s findings on AD-X2, Committee Chairman Edward Thye, Minnesota’s other Senator, pointed to a stack of orders for the battery dope. “That means more to me” he said firmly, “than the technical talk of a bunch of chemists … If a good, hard-fisted businessman has used the product . . . and is fool enough to come up and place orders month after month, what is the matter with him? Or otherwise, what is the matter with the Bureau of Standards test?”

Ritchie’s stack of orders revealed that the additive was used in tinkling Good Humor wagons. Such hard-fisted businesses as the Gillette Co. and General Foods Corp. were satisfied AD-X2 customers. Engineers from industry, mechanics from the Army and Navy, battery salesmen, all praised the additive in testimony before the committee. But no one could swear that AD-X2 had really revived their batteries. “Suppose you have a cold,” suggested Dr. Astin, “and you take some aspirin, and you are better the same day. Did the aspirin do it, or would you have been better anyway?”

Dr. Harold C. Weber, professor of chemical engineering at M.I.T., said that he had conducted tests on AD-X2, but that they neither proved nor disproved that it had any value in prolonging storage-battery life. Despite this emphatic disclaimer of an endorsement, Dr. Weber said that he is using AD-X2 in his automobile battery. Most committee members and witnesses seemed to agree that AD-X2 should be investigated further, so that businessmen and others would be protected in case it was no good. Zozimus of Panopolis had left no observations of value in the case.

* The storage battery has been shrouded in scientific mystery before. In 1911, when Engineer Charles Kettering took his invention, the self-starter, to Detroit for a demonstration, a Cadillac engineer said: “It won’t work.”

“How do you know?” asked Kettering.

“Because it takes from two to five horsepower to crank an automobile,” said the engineer. Then he asked: “How does this device work?”

“On a storage battery,” Kettering replied.

The Cadillac engineer was scornful. “Don’t you know that no small storage battery can furnish enough power to crank an automobile? The battery companies will agree to that.”

All Kettering could say was to suggest a test. although the weight of engineering argument was against him. The self-starter worked beautifully, and with it the industry passed the greatest roadblock in automotive progress since the first car was invented.