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For decades, remotes have come standard with television sets, cable boxes, and, more recently, streaming players, allowing for easy navigation from a distance. As great as it is not having to get up from the comfort of your bed or couch to make TV adjustments — with some TV remotes still using infrared technology to make this happen — remotes aren't without their downsides. A persistent one is their battery use, which does make them portable, but also makes changing the battery necessary every now and then. Of course, until you change them, there's the time-honored tradition of just giving your remote a good whack against your hand, which is often enough to get it going again.
This method of squeezing just a bit more juice out of your remote's batteries appears hardly scientific, so what is the science behind it occasionally working? There are a few potential answers to this question. One is that the strike shakes out the oxidation layer that can form between battery terminals and the contacts inside the remote over time. Thus, contact between the two is reestablished, and use can continue for a bit longer. Another potential reason could lie in the chemical makeup of the batteries, with the smack acting as a catalyst for the right chemical reaction to take place and give the remote a quick boost.
These aren't rock-solid scientific answers, but they make some sense from a scientific perspective. To best understand these hypotheses, though, it's key to explain what goes on inside single-use batteries and how their chemical processes influence whether a remote functions.
How single-use batteries work
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They don't appear to do much, but the fact is, standard batteries have a lot going on inside — and what goes on within them could be the key to the mystery of remote-smack functioning. They contain an anode and a cathode, with an electrolyte to facilitate the creation of energy. The specifics of which chemicals are inside depend on the type of single-use battery — lithium or alkaline. The anode and cathode react to the electrolyte, giving the battery its power. After the two are used up, the battery's energy is depleted, which is the point where a battery is considered "dead." Perhaps when shaken, the battery's internals shift enough to release some of the leftover energy for the remote to work for a brief time.
A frustrating byproduct of this chemical reaction inside of batteries is the aforementioned oxidation, also known as corrosion. Even when batteries aren't frequently used, the chemical reactions continue anyway. As a byproduct of this process, leakage can occur and create the white and green powder that corroding batteries are known for. Even on a small scale, this leakage can negatively impact the connection between the battery and a TV remote's terminals, or those found in any other electronic device. When a remote is smacked, it can reposition the battery or knock out that oxidation layer, thus reestablishing the connection. We may never know exactly why something as brutish as hitting a TV remote can suddenly get it to work again. Still, even if the reason is one of those discussed here or another, the fact is, this unconventional fix frequently gets the job done.
