Learn English – “Battery” and “Battery”, why are they called the same

etymologymeaningnouns

This post made an interesting point about what would be understood when the word battery is used.

In the U.S. at least, the word battery
is so rarely used outside the legal
phrase assault and battery that a
listener would be pretty much
guaranteed to assume it meant an
electrical battery unless it was
specifically disambiguated by context.

This prompted me to see if there is a difference in the etymology of each words. According to Wiktionary, they both have the same origin, the Old French baterie, which means "the action of beating". So this prompted many questions: How did the meaning of the word evolve in one case to "A device that produces electricity by a chemical reaction between two substances."? When was it first used as such? Or is there a mistake in Wiktionary concerning the etymology of electrical battery?

Best Answer

Etymonline has this:

Meaning shifted in M.Fr. from "bombardment" ("heavy blows" upon city walls or fortresses) to "unit of artillery" (a sense recorded in English from 1550s). Extension to "electrical cell" (1748, first used by Ben Franklin) is perhaps via notion of "discharges" of electricity.

Wikipedia drops the "perhaps" and says:

The usage of "battery" to describe electrical devices dates to Benjamin Franklin, who in 1748 described multiple Leyden jars (early electrical capacitors) by analogy to a battery of cannons.[5]

That last link goes to About.com, where we read:

  • 1748 - Benjamin Franklin first coined the term "battery" to describe an array of charged glass plates.
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