Why when a small electronic device runs out of batteries, when you take out the batteries and put th

in, then it works again for a little while. It seems as if somehow these batteries get a slight bit of charge back by not being in any more.. it's really weird. The longer you have them out, the longer the device will last(even though still not a long amount of time.) I noticed this with my gameboy when I was a kid, and now I'm noticing it with my graphing calculator. Why does this happen? Isn't the battery just out of charge? isn't a battery like a redox reaction or something that when it runs out it just means that both sides have equal ion concentrations or something like that? so how does it come back for a little?

I see you really want an answer to this question. I'm wondering why it was removed on another post, maybe you removed it.

Anyway, I used to charge a huge battery on a submarine and when the load was taken off it regained a good amount of power. I wish I had the books I used to have to give you the technical info because you could easily handle it, but they're long gone.

Any battery that is connected has a load on it, whether the device is on or not. It's a small load but enough to back down the charge. The battery is never actually empty unless you touch a conductor to both ends and let the heat burn up the rest. The battery will only stop working because it isn't providing enough power for the device to operate. At the same time, while the device is not able to operate and it is drawing a load it is not enough of a load to actually take the rest of the power from the battery. It will slowly regain some of the capability once you take all the load off of it but it's not gaining any power, the power is already there. That's why you can use it over and over. If you want to hear one more song on your walkman you may be able to do that by resting the battery for a little while, put them back in and play it. You could do that several times before you use up that reserve power. Once it's dead you might use the same battery to power a penlight over and over until that amount is drained.

It's the same with a car battery. It's stupid to crank it down to nothing when all you normally have to do (if too many cells aren't dead from corrosion or other factors) is wait ten minutes.

magic?