Chloride can trace its history back over 130 years, to a time when Queen Victoria sat on the throne of England, Gustave Eiffel completed his eponymous tower in Paris, and an unknown soda bottling company was founded in the US with the name of Coca-Cola. In this blog, Chloride’s VP of Marketing, Elena Chernetsova, shares the story behind how the Chloride of today became known as Chloride!
The history of the nineteenth century was forged in the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution, with the blazing trails that emerged lighting a path for the inventors, scientists and visionaries that would create a gilded age.
Towards the end of the century, on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean and unknown to each other, two chemists were researching ways of converting chemicals into electricity and storing the resulting energy to create a portable, wireless power source.
In 1889, one of these chemists, Clement Payen, filed a number of patents in the USA to protect his discoveries. Although none of these initial ideas evolved into long-term solutions, they provided the catalyst that inspired continued research, which then led to the founding of one of what would become the world’s two largest battery manufacturing companies – ‘The Electric Storage Battery Company of the USA’. Better known as ‘ESB-Ray-O-Vac Inc’, the company traded under the name for over a century until they were taken over by German battery manufacturer VARTA. In 2019, VARTA became part of US giant Energizer.
Around the same time as Payen, French chemical engineer François Laurent-Cely was conducting similar research in the UK. Both chemists’ processes used lead chloride as the substrate, to which cadmium chloride and zinc powder were added with the aim of creating what would become a battery cell. The knowledge gained in the laboratory laid the groundwork for the founding of the ‘Chloride Electrical Storage Syndicate’, which would grow to take its place alongside ‘ESB-Ray-O-Vac’ as one of the largest battery manufacturers in the world. The company was later incorporated as Chloride Group.
A few years later, in the hotbed of England’s industrial revolution, in the City of Manchester, William Mather, a successful businessman and owner of Mather & Platt – one of the UK’s largest textile machinery manufacturers, was eager for expansion. Mather was an enthusiastic and respected investor in new electrical technology, with the benefit of having deep pockets, earlier acquired the rights to the Edison Dynamo in the UK. In 1891, he founded Chloride Electrical.
130 years later, the company moved its headquarters to France and exited the battery business to focus on more advanced power electronics solutions. However, it still adheres to its principles of innovating to find technical resolutions for the engineering challenges our customers face.
Today, we walk in the footsteps of those groundbreaking pioneers whose remarkable discoveries have shaped the world in which we live. We honour their legacy by continuing to build a business that plays a pivotal role in the new Industrial Revolution—energy transition.
Author: Elena Chernetsova, VP of Marketing.
