Gaston Plante

Gaston Plante was a French physicist who in 1859 invented the lead-acid battery, the first practical rechargeable electric battery, using lead plates immersed in sulfuric acid to create a cell that could be discharged and then recharged repeatedly by passing a current back through it. Plantes lead-acid design, refined over the following decades by later engineers who improved its plates and capacity, became the technology used in virtually every automobiles starting battery for well over a century and remains in wide use today for backup power, off-grid storage and industrial applications. Before Plantes invention, batteries could only be used once and then discarded, so his rechargeable cell was the first practical way to store and reuse electrical energy at meaningful scale. The lead-acid battery he invented is still, over a century and a half later, one of the most widely manufactured energy storage devices in the world.