The story of the rabbit batteries that never get tired: who created Duracell?

It's 1979, and a commercial is playing nonstop on American television. It features a bunch of toy bunnies, pink automatons. Each one has a red drum, which it beats with determination, as if trying to prove it can outlast the others. However, one by one, they begin to stop. All of them collapse from exhaustion except for one. The only one that keeps playing, unfazed, is the one that has been fed a ton of Duracell batteries. It was a concept the American brand had been repeating since its first commercials in 1973, when the rabbit first appeared on the scene.

It was a creation of the advertising agency Dancer, Fitzgerald & Sample, which was looking for a simple and unforgettable way to visualize the lifespan of Duracell batteries. Today, the rabbit remains the emblem of a company with more than 3,000 employees, selling its products in more than 130 countries, and generating around $2 billion in revenue annually. Creating the rabbit was a stroke of genius, but Duracell's story goes back more than half a century before the rodent's birth. Who created this corporate giant?

A chance encounter

The origins of Duracell can be traced back to 1920. That year, a young scientist named Samuel Ruben showed up at the door of the PR Mallory company looking for a piece of machinery for one of his experiments. Mallory, who mainly manufactured tungsten filaments for lamps and precision metal components, received him personally. He quickly realized that this young man had a special talent: an unusual blend of obsession, curiosity, and ingenuity. What was meant to be a quick visit turned into a long conversation, and from that conversation emerged a proposal: to join forces and start a business together. Ruben would contribute his inventiveness; Mallory, his ability to manufacture anything he could imagine. Unbeknownst to them, they had just laid the foundation for what, over the years, would become Duracell. During the 1940s, the Ruben-Mallory partnership took a giant leap forward. In the midst of World War II, Ruben developed a much smaller, more stable, and longer-lasting mercury battery. It was exactly what the U.S. military needed to power communication equipment, mine detectors, and flashlights in extremely harsh conditions. Mallory began manufacturing millions, and suddenly, that small metalworking company became a key player in the American war effort.

In the 1950s, Ruben never stopped experimenting. Mercury batteries had worked very well for military use, but he was obsessed with finding an even more stable, compact, and long-lasting technology. This research led him to perfect the alkaline manganese battery, a much more efficient version than all the alternatives on the market. Right at that time, the world of photography was experiencing a small but significant revolution. Kodak had created its Instamatic cameras with built-in flash, but they needed a new battery, small enough to fit inside the camera and powerful enough to power the flash. They found the answer in the batteries Ruben was developing.

From that need, the AAA size was born. Mallory began manufacturing it for Kodak, but demand grew so much that the company even licensed the technology so other manufacturers could produce it. The new cameras, recorders, and the walkie-talkies They transformed alkaline batteries into an essential part of everyday life. By the mid-1960s, all those innovations demanded their own identity. The name Duracell was born. When Philip Mallory died in 1975, the company passed into the hands of his son, but it was soon sold. In 1978, it was acquired by Dart Industries, which two years later merged with Kraft. In the late 1980s, the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) fund acquired Duracell and took it public. In 1996, it was sold again, this time to Gillette, which invested $7 billion. When Procter & Gamble bought Gillette in 2005, Duracell became part of its vast conglomerate, until, in 2016, the magnate Warren Buffett decided to acquire it through his firm Berkshire Hathaway.