- How did a jar of water shock anyone?
Well, I'll tell you, and along the way,
I'll talk about shocking people
for the kings pleasure, breaking all the rules,
and a bunch of masochistic adrenalin junkies
with some really difficult names to pronounce.
Ready?
Let's go!
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
This story begins on October 11, 1745.
On that date, a German man named Ewald Georg von Kleist
gave himself a pretty good shock.
Kleist had read about a modern wizard named Matthias Bose,
who had electrified himself with an electrical machine
and then used a spark from his finger
to light alcohol on fire.
Now Kleist didn't really know how Bose did it,
so he just connected the alcohol directly
to the electrical machine.
He took a glass jar full of alcohol and put a cork in it.
He then put a nail through the cork into the alcohol
and held it up to his electric generator.
For a long time, not much happened.
Then, Kleist touched the nail with his free hand
and was thrown across the room!
Kleist wrote to several friends
about his traumatic experience
and they were eager to copy it.
People at the time were a bit of masochistic
adrenalin junkies, as you will see.
However, even though Kleist reported
that held the jar in his bare hands,
his friends thought that was reflective
of his lack of electrical knowledge.
Instead, they repeated the experiment
with a glass jar on a wax stand
and reported that it did not work.
Unfortunately for Kleist's friends, and for Kleist,
the bare hand is an important part
of how the bottle stores energy.
See, at the time, they knew if you tried to electrify
a conductive material on the ground,
the electricity would just flow into the ground.
Therefore, they knew they had to put the alcohol
on an insulator, a glass, or wax, or something like that.
What they didn't know was if the insulator was thin,
like the thin glass jar,
and it had a conductor on the other side,
it could store an incredible amount of energy.
See, when they rubbed the glass sphere
on the electric machine, it collected electrons.
The electrons then flowed into the liquid in the bottle.
The electrons would then stop
at the inner surface of the jar,
as the glass is an insulator
and does not let electrons move easily.
However, electricity works at a distance.
So, if someone is holding the glass with bare hands,
then some electrons in the person's hands
flow away from the jar and into the person,
and eventually, the ground.
This leaves the outside of the jar with a positive charge,
which causes more electrons to collect
on the inner surface of the jar,
which causes even more electrons to flow
from the outside of the jar and through the person.
This continues until it reaches its maximum charge capacity,
which is why it is sometimes called a capacitor,
with equal and opposite charges on both sides.
Once someone like poor Kleist touches both surfaces,
the electrons on the inner surface would race through him
all at once, giving him that terrible shock.
One of the strange features of this jar
is you can store charge for future use.
You charge it up with an electrical machine,
or even a modern battery,
and then you can move it safely
by just touching only the bottom part or only the nail.
Once you connect the two,
then you can get a big shock or a spark.
Of course, at the time, no one knew any of this,
so all attempts to recreate the shock were fruitless.
As Kleist wasn't famous in any way,
it looked like nothing much would come of this discovery.
Luckily, another amateur named Andreas Cunaeus
joined the story.
Cunaeus either heard about Kleist's experiment
or came up with something strikingly similar on his own.
Either way, he had the same setup,
but with water instead of alcohol in the jar.
Cunaeus got a shock from his jar of water
just like Kleist got from his jar of alcohol.
However, Cunaeus had a famous friend.
Pieter van Musschenbroek was a physics professor
in the town of Leyden, Germany.
Musschenbroek repeated Cunaeus's and Kleist's experiment,
and like the men before him, he too got a terrible shock.
He wrote to a Parisian friend about the terrible experiment,
which he advised his friend never to attempt.
He said he would never do it again
"for all the kingdom in France,"
and in fact, he only "survived by the grace of God."
A French clergyman and scientist named Jean-Antoine Nollet
read the letter and was intrigued, remember, masochists,
and quickly repeated the experiment,
whereby it "bent him double and knocked out his wind."
Nollet described the experiment to the Paris Academy
and soon, everyone was basically torturing themselves
with these jars.
He began selling them as Leyden Jars,
as Mucchenbroek was from the town of Leyden, Germany,
and presumably, Mucchenbroek jars was too difficult to say.
One of the favorite activities with the Leyden jar
was electrocuting large groups of people at the time,
Nollet entertained the King of France, Louis XV,
by electrocuting 180 soldiers at one time,
over 200 monks wearing their robes,
and over 600 people at the College de Navarre.
Nollet noted that,
"It's singular to see the multitude of different gestures,
"and to hear the instantaneous exclamation
"of those surprised by the shock."
In theory, these experiments informed people
how circuits worked, in a circle,
and how fast, very,
but mostly, it was just used for strange entertainment.
In 1767, a dour-looking English scientist
described the effect of the Leyden jar thusly,
"Everybody was eager to see,
"and notwithstanding the terrible account
"that was reported of it, to feel the experiment,
"and in the same year as which it was discovered,
"numbers of persons, in almost every country in Europe,
"got a livelihood by going about and showing it."
Leyden jars were not only insanely popular
for demonstrations in the 1700s,
they're still important for technology today.
See, if you wanna get a big shock like with a defibrillator,
then you connect a battery
to a modern Leyden jar called a capacitor,
then you connect the capacitor
straight to the patient's heart, and you get a big shock.
If, conversely, you have a portable system
that you wanna protect from jolts of electricity,
like you do for all modern electronics,
then you add a capacitor to absorb that spike in energy.
Finally, if a charged capacitor is connected to a coil,
it can create oscillating signals,
which is important for radio, and even television,
and computers and cell phones.
Don't worry, I'll get to that in later videos.
In the 1700s, one of the things
that was most intriguing about these jars,
aside from their awesome power,
is they seemed to violate
everything they understood about electricity.
Why did they store more charge
if you let the electricity on the outside
flow away from the jar?
Scientists at the time just couldn't figure it out.
As Mucchenbroek said at the end of his first letter
about the discovery of the jar,
"I've found out so much about electricity
"that I've reached the point where I understand nothing
"and can explain nothing."
The Leyden jar was the key
to unlock the mysteries of electricity.
Strangely enough, the person who figured it out,
the man who instinctively understood about electricity,
didn't live in France or Germany or England
or anywhere else a scientist from Europe would expect.
Instead, he lived Philadelphia.
How Ben Franklin discovered electricity
is next time on "The Secret History of Electricity."
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
Thanks for watching my video.
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Have a good day!
(lively music)