Jewish Invention Myths: The Mercury Battery
The ‘jewish invention’ claim that they invented the mercury battery – which references the mercury dry cell battery which is in common use to this day and they claim a jew named Samuel Ruben invented. (1)
As far as facts go it looks like a solid claim because Ruben did indeed create a mercury-based dry cell battery in 1942 at the request of the US Army Signal Corps for use in the Second World War and also founded the well-known battery company ‘Duracell’.
The problem with the jewish claim however is that Ruben was only repurposing existing technology since the dry cell battery (what we think of today as a battery) was invented by German doctor Carl Gassner in 1886 when he created the modern battery but with a zinc chloride chemical base as German patent 37,758 which was then also successfully patented in the United States in November 1887 as US patent 373,064. (2)
Gassner shares the credit for inventing the dry cell battery with Danish industrialist Wilhelm Hellesen who created his own dry cell battery in 1887 and successfully patented it in the United States in 1890 as US patent 439,151. (3)
In addition to a Japanese inventor named Sakizo Yai who created his dry cell battery independently of both Gassner and Helleson in Japan in 1887 but which was never patented because Yai didn’t have the money to pay for the patent filing. (4)
Further mercury-based batteries were in no ways new as the first mercury-based battery was created American inventor Charles Leigh Clarke in 1884 and successfully patented the same year as US Patent 298,175.
In other words, all Ruben actually did was take existing dry cell battery technology and change the zinc chloride base for the mercury base used in some wet batteries.
So no Samuel Ruben didn’t invent the mercury sealed battery!
References
(1) https://christianislamicforum.wordpress.com/dedicated-to-our-jewish-brethren/
(2) https://patents.google.com/patent/US373064
(3) https://patents.google.com/patent/US439151
(4) https://www.mitsubishielectric.co.jp/fa/compass/lectures/pioneers07/report.html