Flashlight? The first use of battery powered lights was on shipboard, where they flashed signals to other ships, thus, "flash light". The early batteries were so poor that they were not much use for extended lighting, anyway... or so I read a long time ago.

I'll show my age. Any of you ever own a crystal radio, without any power source whatsoever? Had to ground it to a solid earthed ground, and it only had an earpiece, and damned little range. It depended on the power of the transmitter to work it's guts.

Then there was the "compact" 9" GE black and white TV I got for Christmas when I was about 10. Tube TV, with "Compactron" tubes with an average life of about 100 hours, then it was off to the drugstore and the tube tester to see which one was bad. And the only TV station in range was the local UHF station. To get anything else, you had to have a 150' steerable antenna to pick up the Birmingham stations 100 miles away. The local station had about 15 cartoons, half of them the el cheapos where the only thing really animated was the mouths, which were real human mouths superimposed on the cutout characters. Clutch Cargo and Space Angel, and some VERY weird full animation thing from the 30's in black and white about some arctic kingdom with little monk guys who worshiped the sun and some bad guys in stovepipe hats who fought with them and animated some ice monster who was melted at the last minute by the little monk guys and some esoteric machine which focused the finally rising sun on him until he did a Wicked Witch of the West meltdown in the finale. Warped me for life.

My wife lived across an abandoned cotton field from the TV station, and when they didn't have enough kids for the every afternoon Captain Jack local kids cartoon show, they'd call the neighborhood kids to come over and fill in, dirty and sweaty from playing in the dirt field. Captain Jack was about as sleazy a human as I've ever seen. His "costume" for the show was an old WW2 Army Air Corps hat with two foil wrapped pieces of coat hanger stuck to the brim and front of the crown as antennas. Jack was a serial philanderer and child molester, and traded out ads on the air for cash under the table to him.