Lewis Urry

Lewis Frederick Urry ( born January 29, 1927 in Pontypool (Ontario), Ontario; † 19 October 2004) was a Canadian chemical engineer and inventor. He invented the alkaline battery in his work for Eveready.

After serving in the Canadian Army, he studied until 1950 Chemistry at the University of Toronto and was then started at Eveready. In 1955 he was sent to the company's laboratory in Parma, Ohio, where he should find a way to extend the life of zinc -carbon batteries. The short life hurt the sales. Urry realized that it was more cost -effective to develop and to develop further the old a new battery. During the 1950s, many engineers had experimented with alkaline batteries, but no one had been able to develop a longer-lasting battery that would be worth the higher production costs.

After the test, a number of materials Urry discovered that solid manganese dioxide and zinc worked well in combination with an alkaline substance as the electrolyte. His main problem is that the battery is not made ​​enough, he sparked in 1959 by the powdered zinc. In order to convince his manager, he put the battery in a toy car and drove to the canteen against a similar car with an older battery. Eveready began production and was renamed in 1980 in Energizer. Modern alkaline batteries should hold due to improvements 40 times longer than the prototype that he together with the first commercially produced battery left it to the Smithsonian Institute in 1999.

• Chemical Engineering
• Canadian
• Born 1927
• Died in 2004
• Man