When Benjamin Franklin performed his kite experiment in the midst of an electrical thunderstorm and lived for many more years to tell the tale, the device he had at hand to store electric charge was ...

The Leyden jar is a dissectible capacitor made of aluminum and glass that poses an interesting question of where the stored charge resides. A series of experiments can be done showing that the charge ...

What would MacGyver do if he needed a high voltage capacitor but only had some foil, tape, water, salt, a nail and a plastic jug? He would build a salt water Leyden jar, that’s what. The Leyden jar is ...

A Leyden jar being discharged, from an 1878 science text. This image originally appeared in Augustin Privat-Deschanel’s 1878 “Elementary Treatise on Natural Philosophy, Part 3: Electricity and ...

The mica capacitor—a Dubilier design that revolutionized wireless communications—was inspired by a demonstration of a wireless telegraph transmitter by Guglielmo Marconi. The transmitter required more ...

The Leyden jar capacitor posted the other day fails to compare to what [FastMHz], one of the members over at the 4HV.org forums, has been busy building, a 24kj capacitor discharge bank. This capacitor ...

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. If you were to take apart pretty much any electronic ...

Scientists have known since the 18th century that living beings can generate electricity. By the 19th century, doctors were putting that knowledge to use in medicine. In 1838, Irish physician Robert ...