MDDM Ch. 38 Summary & Notes

[Dave Monroe]

You're right to put that question mark there ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> 390.3 "Leyden Pile"  pile n. (Metallurgy) an 
> arrangement of wrought-iron bars that are to be
> heated and worked into a single bar (?)

"Leyden jars come in all sizes and shapes, but the
basic definition is this: a jar or bottle of an
insulating material, with a conductive lining and a
conductive outer coat. There is usually a metal rod
with a ball atop it placed in the mouth of the bottle,
so it is simple to connect electrically with the
conductive lining. Today, we call such devices
capacitors, and they are smaller and far more
efficient.

"Benjamin Franklin studied the Leyden Jar, and decided
he could increase their ability to store electricity
most efficiently by hooking several Jars together,
instead of making one big jar. He called the result a
battery of Leyden Jars. A four-Jar battery is shown
above, held in a wooden box. The outer coat is tin
foil; the inner conductive lining is gold leaf (a
common substance in early Jars

[...]

"When Volta discovered bi-metallic electricity, he
piled quite a few metal couples on top of one another,
and called it a pile. But other inventors put the
metals side-by-side. 'Pile,' with its connotation of
vertical, wasn't a good generic name. It didn't take
them long to settle on a 'battery of cells', by
analogy with the battery of Leyden Jars; and slowly
'battery' began to take on the meaning we use today."

http://www.thebakken.org/artifacts/leyden.htm

And see as well, e.g. ...

http://www.thebakken.org/artifacts/leydenjr.htm

http://www.thebakken.org/electricity/Leyden-jar.html

http://www.alaska.net/~natnkell/leyden.htm

Now I hope I'm not intruding, but, well, that "thick
description" ((c) Clifford Geertz) ...

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