1925 Toyota lead-acid battery replacement prize

On this log scale, this shows that they used to mine about 10,000 tons of lead a year back in the time of the Romans, and it dropped, and we were up to a million, a hundred times as much. Why are we using it? We still use it in lead-acid batteries. There is no substitute for a lead-acid battery. People were doing all kinds of things on battery technology in 1925. A company in Japan named Toyota that made sewing machines — they had never made a car, but they are the successor — the car company is the successor — offered a twenty-five-million-dollar prize for someone who could come up with a replacement for the lead-acid battery, which was used in sewing machines back then. Twenty-five million dollars in 1925 was a lot of money, but no one has come up with that replacement for the lead-acid battery.