During the 1880s a technological explosion took place. Electrical technology, which up until the eighties had been a growing but still relatively small-scale economic activity, rapidly boomed into a major segment of industrial and economic life. This activity was intense in Britain and the continent as well as in the United States, with American inventors and entrepreneurs developing the technology of electric light and power at least as rapidly as their overseas counterparts, and in several cases a good deal faster. Thomas Hughes has pointed out the British lag in the electric lighting industry in the 1880s vis-avis the United States.' In the field of electric transportation, the development of the trolley was an almost totally American technology until the 20th century.2 In almost every area of electrical technology, Americans were at least the equals of the Europeans: motors, dynamos, transformers, cables, meters, telegraph and telephone equipment, arc and incandescent lamps, etc. In only one area of electrical technology did the United States lag significantly behind its overseas competitors during the 1880s and early 1890s-in the manufacture and use of storage batteries. This paper will analyze the reasons for this anomalous lag.