[Retric]

The first battery is in no way a simple composition of existing ideas. Inventing a useful and novel idea is both hard and rare. The most extreme example might just be the fact Australia had 'modern' humans for 40,000 years without inventing the bow and arrow even though they had spears. And the rest of the world spent those 40,000 years without inventing the returning boomerang even though 'hunting' sticks where found in Europe well over 10,000 years ago.

[confluence]

As much as it pains me to say this, you are wrong :(

If you read the battery's history carefully you'll realize that it's the combination of previous findings in chemistry and electronics. See the other comment with the history link.

Just because you cannot conceive the exact intermediaries between single cells and a human being does not mean they didn't exist or that human's appeared from thin air.

I repeat: Everything is a remix.

[Retric]

There where battery's in 200BCE making that line of argument moot.

[confluence]

Perhaps but my point still stands.

[Retric]

? You can say everything is just a pattern using a relatively small set of elementary particles. And that's more or less true, but once you start moving back eventually you will find two hydrogen atoms that where cold enough to stick together for the first time, and guess what that had no prior precedence.

So to the line that separates a true multicellular organism from a colony of related cells that assist each other is not completely obvious, but when that colony starts to have specialization that's a 'new' thing.

As is the line that separates a smart phone from a normal one. Perhaps you move back the smart phone to include the first phone with an app store, but there is still a line you can draw even if where you draw it comes down the the specific definition you use.

PS: Fuzzy definitions does not mean you can't draw the line, just that different people will use a slightly different definitions to draw a slightly different line.

[confluence]

Ah but you see my friend that first collision was due to the combination of the four fundamental forces acting on the products of quantum physics. Indeed the only truly original "idea" is the big bang.

However there are indications that it too is neither unique nor special and may very well itself be a simulation or a small part of an infinite multiverse.

[Retric]

Lol, that's confusing patterns with reality, but nice try ;)

[Dn_Ab]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery suggests that basic knowledge and early experimentation with the known concept of electricity and a disagreement about whether a dead frog's leg can generate electricity inspired the battery. Volta notes those whose work he relied on.

[Retric]

Your confusing the origin of the term and the reinvention of the battery with the actual first battery ever produced in Mesopotamia if not earlier.