The Leyden Jar

Howdy Howdy people today I will be talking about the Leyden jar. So, what did it do? Well, It generated electricity. In 1744 von Kleist tried to accumulate electricity in a small medicine bottle filled with alcohol with a nail inserted in the cork. Jean Picard's glowing barometer caught the attention of Francis Hauksbee. He was following up on an experiment developed by another man where electricity had been sent through water to set alcoholic spirits (like whiskey) on fire. He attempted to charge the bottle from a large metallic conductor suspended above his friction machine. He did not understand the powers of electricity, and received a huge shock when he accidentally touched the wrong part of the jar. The Leyden jar is a battery that stores charge. A glass jar, sides coated with metal, electrode inside.

Despite its mundane and safe appearance, the Leyden jar is a high voltage device, and electrical energy collected within it from friction may be as high as 35,000 volts. The ball on the tip of the rod is a corona ball to prevent leakage of the energy into the air by point discharge . Yikes. Hopefully he didn't have the jar fully charged. One day, he was swinging the jar back and forth while walking with a mercury barometer and it started glowing. That, I think, was one of the things that laid the foundation for the Leyden jar. After some studying, Andrew Kleist theorized that electricity was a fluid. As you can see, they were having some trouble understanding the concept. The Leyden jar generated electricity, but people didn't know what it was, what to do with it.

Hauksbee built an "Influence Machine" to produce the glowing effect at will. This was investigated by the Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek. Kleist got a huge shock from the jar he built, so he either didn't understand the machine or he didn't use it properly. Even though he wasn't the one who built it, Musschenbroek perfected the Leyden Jar, which was used a storage for power until the modern batteries and generators.