For more than four decades, Francisco Trinidad kept the oldest battery there is modern
Few people understand the lead-acid battery as deeply as Dr Francisco Trinidad, or have done as much to advance it.
Dr Francisco Trinidad spent forty-three years in the lead battery industry, which is to say he spent a career on a technology the world assumes never changes, and showed, paper by paper and patent by patent, that it does.
The long road through the lab
He joined the Tudor Group in 1977 as a research electrochemist, and earned his PhD in electrochemistry from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1988. He rose through the company, from research engineer to research manager, then regional director for European industrial development, and when Exide absorbed Tudor in 1994, he became the company’s Director of Research and Development. He finished his career as Exide’s Director of Battery Technology, retiring in January 2020.
That is a rare kind of career: more than four decades inside one of the industry’s defining companies, spanning the whole arc from bench scientist to the person helping set a global manufacturer’s technology direction. He understood the lead-acid battery at the level of its chemistry, and at the level of a business that sold it by the millions.
Keeping the oldest battery modern
The lead-acid battery was invented in 1859, and it is easy to dismiss as settled. Trinidad’s work is a standing argument against that. His research pushed at the edges of what the chemistry could do: activated carbon and graphite additives to improve performance for hybrid vehicles, polymer-structured electrodes, and formulations for the demanding partial-state-of-charge duty that modern start-stop cars require. The through-line was always the same question: how do you make a mature technology do things it was never designed for?
The record behind it is substantial. In the citation that accompanied his highest honour, the industry counted 24 published articles, more than 65 conference presentations, 14 international patents, and decades of collaboration with universities and research institutes. It is the body of work of someone who treated an unglamorous, essential technology with the seriousness of frontier science.
A place in the field’s honour society
In 2021, the lead battery community recognised him formally: he was named the 28th member of the Alpha Beta Society, the honour society that recognises lifetime contribution to lead-acid battery science, at the LABAT conference. In more than two decades, it had admitted fewer than thirty people. He is one of them.
He has not stepped back since retiring. He has worked as an independent adviser, promoting new technology approaches for automotive and industrial batteries, which means his decades of judgment remain available to an industry that needs its institutional memory more than it often admits.
The Ledger
There is a particular value in the people who master a technology the rest of the world takes for granted, and who keep improving it long after everyone assumes the improving is done. For forty-three years, and beyond, Dr Francisco Trinidad has been one of them.
That belongs on the record.