EaglePicher Technologies

EaglePicher traces its corporate line back to 1843 and a white lead works in Cincinnati, by way of a 1906 merger between Eagle White Lead and the Picher Lead Company of Missouri. The battery business started in 1922 and eventually became the whole of the company. Today EaglePicher Technologies is headquartered in Joplin, Missouri, runs facilities in Missouri, Kansas and Massachusetts, and employs more than 900 people. Ownership has moved several times in recent years. Apollo Global Management sold it to the private equity firm GTCR in 2018, and GTCR sold it in 2023 to Tuthill Corporation, a privately held industrial manufacturer that now owns it outright.

The defence business is built on thermal batteries, a reserve chemistry that sits inert for decades and then activates in milliseconds when a pyrotechnic heat source melts the electrolyte. That behaviour is exactly what a missile or a guided munition needs. EaglePicher is the leading thermal battery supplier to the US Department of Defense and says it holds roughly 85 percent of the missile battery market, powering the majority of American precision guided munitions and missile systems. The same product family reaches into torpedoes, directed energy demonstrators, hypersonic test articles and unmanned underwater vehicles.

Space is the other half of the story and the older half. An EaglePicher battery flew on Explorer 1, the first American satellite, in 1958. Silver zinc cells supplied power during the return of Apollo 13 in 1970. Nickel hydrogen batteries built by the company kept the Hubble Space Telescope running for nineteen years against a five year design life. Thermal batteries have gone to Mars on Pathfinder, Odyssey, the Mars Exploration Rovers and the InSight lander, and the Perseverance rover carries two EaglePicher rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, each eight 43 amp-hour cells in series. For Artemis I the company supplied batteries for both the Orion crew module main power and the Space Launch System flight termination system. More than 600 satellites in orbit run on EaglePicher power.

Aviation and naval work rounds out the portfolio. Lithium-ion aircraft battery systems fly on the B-2 bomber and on Global Hawk and other unmanned aircraft, covering engine and auxiliary power unit starting, emergency power, fuel shutoff valve actuation and payload power. On the undersea side the company builds large silver-oxide zinc cells, including a 750 amp-hour rechargeable design supplied to the US Navy with spares and engineering support for submarine and torpedo applications.

The chemistry list is unusually wide for a battery house of this size. Beyond thermal, lithium-ion and silver zinc, EaglePicher works in lithium oxyhalide, lithium thionyl chloride, lithium sulfur dioxide, lithium manganese dioxide, lithium carbon monofluoride and CFx hybrids, lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide, aluminium air, zinc air, lithium air, silver aluminium and lead acid. It also builds energetic devices and initiators, battery management electronics and custom packaging, and it developed the first human-implantable lithium-ion battery. Around 250 scientists and engineers support that range.