"Battery" and "Battery", why are they called the same?
Etymonline has this:
Meaning shifted in M.Fr. from "bombardment" ("heavy blows" upon city walls or fortresses) to "unit of artillery" (a sense recorded in English from 1550s). Extension to "electrical cell" (1748, first used by Ben Franklin) is perhaps via notion of "discharges" of electricity.
Wikipedia drops the "perhaps" and says:
The usage of "battery" to describe electrical devices dates to Benjamin Franklin, who in 1748 described multiple Leyden jars (early electrical capacitors) by analogy to a battery of cannons.[5]
That last link goes to About.com, where we read:
- 1748 - Benjamin Franklin first coined the term "battery" to describe an array of charged glass plates.
The word batterie in French (and batteria in Italian) identify a sequence of identical objects. E.g. a batterie of cannons or a batterie of electrical cells.
The word came from the ancient Greek baktérion that means stick.
The "missing link" is the french verb battre. This verb is used to refer to hunting technique of battue. Imagine a sequence of men, each one with his stick, that walk aligned to pursuit the hunted animal and you'll understand the etymology of the word batterie.
It is not easy to track all the passage in the evolution of these words because them jumped forth and back from a language to another.