Gas voltaic battery

His second cell called gas voltaic battery consisted of platinum electrodes immersed in acid solution, with hydrogen over one electrode and oxygen over the other [iii-v]. It was the forerunner of the modern -+fuel cells. 

The fuel cell concept has been known for more than 150 years. It was Christian Friedrich Schonbein who recognized and described the appearance of inverse electrolysis [4] shortly before Sir William Grove, the inventor of the platinum/ zinc battery, constructed his first gas voltaic battery [5]. Grove used platinum electrodes and dilute sulfuric acid as a proton conducting electrolyte. Sulfuric acid is still used today for the impregnation of porous separators serving as the electrolyte in direct methanol laboratory fuel cells [6], but the most commonly used fuel cell electrolytes today are hydrated acidic ionomers. As opposed to aqueous sulfuric acid, where the dissociated protons and the diverse sulfate anions (conjugated... 

Fig. 1. Grove s experimental gas voltaic battery (1842). Oxygen and hydrogen are in contact with a Pt filament in the lower reservoirs and react in the sulfuric acid solution to form water. The electrical current is used to electrolyze water to oxygen and hydrogen in the upper tube (website http //fuelcells.si.edu/origins/origl.htm, accessed 15 February 2005).

The apparatus essential to the modern chemical philosopher is much less bulky and expensive than that used by the ancients. An air pump, an electrical machine, a voltaic battery (all of which may be upon a small scale), a blow-pipe apparatus, a bellows and forge, a mercurial and water gas apparatus, cups and basins of platinum and glass, and the common reagents of chemistry, are what are required. All the implements absolutely necessary may be carried in a small trunk and some of the best and most refined researches of modern chemists have been made by means of an apparatus which might with ease be contained in a small travelling carriage, and the expense of which is only a few pounds. 

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