you still shouldn't eat watch batteries, but...

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Energizer claims this new lithium coin battery won't cause burns if a toddler swallows it. Look at this piece of ham.

[00:00:06]The electrical current is splitting water, which produces hydroxide ions, which dissolve the ham. Now, imagine this happening inside your throat. Not good. I wanted to figure out how their new battery works. So, I sniffed around their recent patents and found this, which describes using titanium to make the positive terminal of the battery.

[00:00:24]So, of course, I bought some grade two titanium, baby. All right, let's do my ham experiment again, but this time I'm going to switch out my stainless steel electrode for my titanium one. And we're going to set this power supply at 3 volts and just let it rip. While this was running, I actually reached out to Energizer and they agreed to talk, which is pretty cool cuz most of the time big companies just ignore me. This is Dan.

[00:00:45]He works at Energizer and he told me that particularly the 20 mm diameter battery are approximately the similar size of a child's esophagus. Now, a normal person would have just asked Dan to explain how the battery works, but I'm a teacher's pet, so I told him how I thought the battery works, and he said I was >> very close. Very close. Yes, it's a proprietary titanium alloy >> at the positive electrode of a battery that's electrolying water. Water molecules split up into hydrogen ions, electrons, and oxygen gas. But if you make that electrode out of a proprietary titanium alloy, >> the titanium develops a thin oxide coating on its surface which starves the circuit of electrons. And no electrons means no electrolysis. Okay, my ham experiment has been going for 22 hours.

[00:01:28]And as you can see, nothing happened.

[00:01:31]And by the way, I tested the pH at the negative electrode, and not only was it not basic, it was actually a little acidic. Now, let's test the battery itself. This is the regular kind and this is the new proprietary titanium alloy kind. All right, look at all this bubbling down here and up here. I mean, nothing. This is This is great. This is a good thing. This is good news chemistry.