How to Spend £200

What to do with a £200 Windfall?

In our survey this week we tried to establish what our website visitors would do with a sudden windfall of £200.

The top spot goes to buying Ipad/Tablet/Laptop with 24% of the votes, closely followed by buying a Phone in second place with 20% of the votes.

We guess that a fair few people who voted for Toys/Games had electronic games in mind so that means that something like 50% of the respondents would buy something that relied on rechargeable batteries.

The Importance of Batteries

Nowadays we rely on Lithum-ion batteries to power everything from the electronic devices we carry with us on a daily basis to electric cars. Did you know that some of these batteries are so powerful that they can provide enough power for a car to travel 250 miles on a single charge?

Battery technology is advancing all the time and it opens up the possibility of being able to STORE large amounts of energy; this in turn means that we will probably see large scale developments of solar power "farms" that acquire energy during the day to be used at night.

Lithium-ion batteries have already transformed the world we live in and they are likely to become increasingly important as the world becomes more attuned to the need for renewables.

All of us know about Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin but who do we have to thank for the life-changing scientific discoveries associated with Lithium-ion batteries? I didn't know and my guess is that you don't know either!

These names deserve to be remembered by all of us:

• John B Goodenough (Germany)
• M. Stanley Whittingham (UK)
• Akiro Yoshino (Japan)

Last year these 3 individuals were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019 for their outstanding work developing Lithium-ion batteries. In 100 year's time their names will be as famous as Einstein and Newton – if they are not, then I believe they ought to be!

More Survey Results