What’s the difference between all the different battery sizes? Why do some need AA and others AAA?
In: Technology
From a historical perspective, batteries didn’t store energy very densely, so they needed to be physically large in order to have any kind of a useful battery life. Also, physically large batteries could deliver more energy faster than smaller ones, so something like a flashlight would be dimmer with physically smaller batteries — even if you were okay with the shorter battery life.
So, D cells were common for things like flashlights and boom boxes because they needed to be big to handle the power drain. But as battery chemistry improved, we could make C cells perform pretty well, and as a side benefit, our flashlights could be smaller and our boom boxes lighter. As batteries continued to get even better, we could reasonably power devices with AA and that opened up opportunities for smaller portable devices, like Sony Walkmen. Same goes for AAA — even more devices and smaller devices like TV remote controls.
It didn’t really happen that way exactly, but the idea is you use the physically smallest battery you can depending on how much power and battery life you need for your device. So today, something like an airbed inflator might use D or C cells so inflate a mattress more quickly and more times than AA cells could.
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