Camille Faure

Camille Faure was a French engineer who in 1881 solved the central practical problem holding back Gaston Plante's lead-acid battery: Plante's original design required a slow electrochemical forming process to build up an active layer on its plain lead plates before the battery could be used. Faure instead coated the lead grid plates directly with a paste of lead oxide, which formed into the active material far more quickly and with much greater surface area, sharply increasing the battery's capacity and making the lead-acid battery practical to manufacture in quantity. The pasted-plate construction Faure introduced remains, with refinements, the basic method used to manufacture nearly every lead-acid battery produced today.