Portable jump starters are energy supplying devices that can be used for a number of different purposes including providing power to a dead car or truck battery, providing power to small electronic devices that require either AC or DC power, and many other applications. While Portable Jump Starters are quite common today, they weren’t always available in earlier years.
Before portable jump starters came along people had to rely on more traditional methods for charging car batteries and providing power to small electronics items. Back then the only real solution that was available for jumping a dead car battery was a set of jumper cables which could be hooked up between the batteries of two vehicles and the dead battery in one vehicle which was then charged by the live battery only charged battery among the two.

As you can probably imagine there were a number of drawbacks to traditional jumper cables, or booster cables, which eventually led to the creation of portable jump starters. One main drawback of traditional jumper cables was that they required the presence of another vehicle with a strong enough battery that could be connected to. In some situations this simply may not have been possible simply because there were no other vehicles around. If this were the case, then the jumper cables were of no use to you.
Another drawback to using traditional jumper cables was the fact that they were confusing to use. The task of hooking up jumper cables between two car batteries was quite intimidating and perhaps a little frightening for those who didn’t know much about the mechanics of batteries or cars in general. Instead, they wanted something that made charging their car battery a much simpler process.
Portable jump starters were therefore created as an alternative to traditional jumper cables which were difficult to use for those who didn’t have a lot of experience. They were also created for situations where there were no other power sources to connect to such as batteries in other vehicles.
Over time, a number of convenient features have been added to portable jump starters in order to make them more convenient and much easier to operate. Features such as reverse polarity alarms, overcharge protection, charge meters, and many others have made charging a car battery a much more feasible task for those who are not so mechanically inclined.