Invention of the Leyden jar

A Leyden jar is a device that early experimenters used to help build and store electric energy.  It was also referred to as a "condenser" because many people thought of electricity as fluid or matter that could be condensed. Nowadays someone familiar with electrical terminology would call it a capacitor.

In 1745 a cheap and convenient source of electric sparks was invented by Pieter van Musschenbroek, a physicist and mathematician in Leiden, Neth. Later called the Leyden jar, it was the first device that could store large amounts of electric charge. (Ewald Georg von Kleist, a German cleric, independently developed the idea for such a device, but did not investigate it as thoroughly as did Musschenbroek.) The Leyden jar devised by the latter consisted of a glass vial that was partially filled with water and contained a thick conducting wire capable of storing a substantial amount of charge. One end of this wire protruded through the cork that sealed the opening of the vial. The Leyden jar was charged by bringing this exposed end of the conducting wire into contact with a friction device that generated static electricity.

Within a year after the appearance of Musschenbroek's device, William Watson, an English physician and scientist, constructed a more sophisticated version of the Leyden jar; he coated the inside and outside of the container with metal foil to improve its capacity to store charge. Watson transmitted an electric spark from his device through a wire strung across the River Thames at Westminster Bridge in 1747.

The Leyden jar revolutionized the study of electrostatics. Soon “electricians” were earning their living all over Europe demonstrating electricity with Leyden jars. Typically, they killed birds and animals with electric shock or sent charges through wires over rivers and lakes. In 1746 the abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, a physicist who popularized science in France, discharged a Leyden jar in front of King Louis XV by sending current through a chain of 180 Royal Guards. In another demonstration, Nollet used wire made of iron to connect a row of Carthusian monks more than a kilometre long; when a Leyden jar was discharged, the white-robed monks reportedly leapt simultaneously into the air.

In the United States, Benjamin Franklin sold his printing house, newspaper, and almanac to spend his time conducting electricity experiments. In 1752 Franklin proved that lightning was an example of electric conduction by flying a silk kite during a thunderstorm. He collected electric charge from a cloud by means of wet twine attached to a key and thence to a Leyden jar. He then used the accumulated charge from the lightning to perform electric experiments. Franklin enunciated the law now known as the conservation of charge (the net sum of the charges within an isolated region is always constant). Like Watson, he disagreed with DuFay's two-fluid theory. Franklin argued that electricity consisted of two states of one fluid, which is present in everything. A substance containing an unusually large amount of the fluid would be “plus,” or positively charged. Matter with less than a normal amount of fluid would be “minus,” or negatively charged. Franklin's one-fluid theory, which dominated the study of electricity for 100 years, is essentially correct because most currents are the result of moving electrons. At the same time, however, fundamental particles have both negative and positive charges and, in this sense, DuFay's two-fluid picture is correct.

Joseph Priestley, an English physicist, summarized all available data on electricity in his book History and Present State of Electricity (1767). He repeated one of Franklin's experiments, in which the latter had dropped small corks into a highly electrified metal container and found that they were neither attracted nor repelled. The lack of any charge on the inside of the container caused Priestley to recall Newton's law that there is no gravitational force on the inside of a hollow sphere. From this, Priestley inferred that the law of force between electric charges must be the same as the law for gravitational force—i.e., that the force between masses diminishes with the inverse square of the distance between the masses. Although they were expressed in qualitative and descriptive terms, Priestley's laws are still valid today. Their mathematics was clarified and developed extensively between 1767 and the mid-19th century as electricity and magnetism became precise, quantitative sciences.
 

A very big Leyden jar being discharged

After the development of static electric generating machines, early electrical experimenters were able to generate high-voltage electrical currents, but they had no way to store this electricity. By the mid-18th century, the capacitor emerged in the form of the Leyden jar, named for the University of Leyden in the Netherlands where much experimentation with these jars was performed and published. With a Leyden jar, an experimenter could store an electrical charge and move it to another place to use. Soon, Leyden jars were incorporated into the construction of frictional static-generating machines to make larger, longer sparks.

In the middle of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin of England first observed the oscillating nature of the discharge of electricity from a Leyden jar through an inductor. This and subsequent work by the American scientist Mahlon Loomis, the British mathemetician James Clerk Maxwell, and the Serbian-born American inventor Nikola Tesla, led to the development of radio, television, and communications as we know them. Today it is obvious that Benjamin Franklin's early experimentation with Leyden jars was actually producing radio waves--but no one was listening!
 
 

Classic Leyden Jar (reproduction of the classic instrument)

700 pF, 175 kV

450 pF, 400 kV

450 pF, 400 kV

 

Battery of Leiden jars, used by Marconi around 1900.

Read in the Internet:
Leyden Jars
Static Electricity