do you like physics history?

[Darren Dirt]

hundreds of photos of tools and gadgets from centuries past... Categorized too! (e.g. Electricity, Acoustics, etc.)

http://physics.kenyon.edu/EarlyApparatus/index.html


-Darren Dirt, closet science geek

[Thorin]

Cool.

Why we call them batteries:

The Leiden jar is the earliest form of the condenser or capacitor. The jar allowed the electric fluid produced by an electrostatic machine to be accumulated and stored for future use.

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An alternate approach making very large capacity Leiden jars is to connect a number of capacitors in parallel. This makes the equivalent jar whose foil area is equal to the sum of the areas of the individual jars. Today we would say that the capacities of condensers connected in parallel are additive.

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This set of nine jars connected in parallel is in the collection of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

When a condenser this large is shorted, a loud sound is heard as the spark jumps through the air. The sound was said to resemble the discharge of a battery of guns. The name "battery" was thus attached to a collection of condensers, and then to a collection of electro-chemical cells.