Hey guys welcome back and thanks for joining us today on The King of Random
In the history of inventions, one of the greatest of all mankind
is the ability to harness and control electricity.
Some of the old experiments that taught us how electricity works are really incredible.
In 1745, an early version of a capacitor was invented by Ewald G. Von Kleist,
when he accidentally gave an electric charge to a medicine bottle.
A year later a man named Pieter van Musschenbroek came up with the same invention while living in a city called Leyden.
His version of the invention became a lot more popular and was named after the city and is now called a Leyden jar
Its most basic a Leyden jar is an insulated container with an inside and outside holding opposite charges
When something bridges a connection between the two the charges equalized and it creates an electric shock the purpose of today's video is to learn
how to build our own
Leyden Jar charge it up using electricity and then discharge it to get that electric shock the materials we need for this build are pretty
Simple we need a plastic bottle some aluminum foil a nail and some tape to build up our static charge
We're also going to want some paper towels and a length of
PVC pipe this one's about three feet long the exact length isn't important. We've gathered up all of our supplies now
Let's get started. You can use most any type of plastic bottle for this experiment
I prefer the type that has straight walls because we're going to be wrapping aluminum foil around the bottle and it's easier to wrap evenly
With straight walls than if it has a lot of curves in it
First empty your bottle
Next let's remove the label from the bottle it might work
Just as well with it still on, but I think it gives it a cleaner look if we take it off
Next let's tear off a piece of aluminum foil approximately the same length as the straight portion of our bottle
Let's see if some of the glue residue on the bottle will stick to the foil oh
It does that's brilliant
If your bottle doesn't have sticky residue you can roll it up. Just the same way
It doesn't need to be stuck to it like that. We have a little bit extra foil. I'm just gonna trim it off
With our foil wrapped around our bottle, let's secure it in place with a couple of pieces of tape
There you have it we now have a nice conductive coating on the outside of our
Insulated bottle fill your bottle almost all the way with water leaving a gap at the top of about an inch or two
100% pure water actually won't conduct electricity but most tap water has enough minerals and impurities in it that it will but just to be
Sure, let's add a pinch of salt to make sure that our water conducts electricity very easily
It should only take a pinch you really don't need much
There you go with the salt mix it into the water
We now have a very conductive liquid inside the bottle now the last step in building our Leyden jar is to drive our nail down
Through the center of the bottle cap so that a portion of the nail is sticking up above the bottle
But some of it is also sticking down into the salt water
You can see that the bottom of the nail is submerged in our salt water
This will allow a good electric current to flow from the nail to the water
And just like that your Leyden jar is built
This is now a device that for some time can hold an electric charge unless something conductive
Connects the nail to the foil with our Leyden jar complete
it's time to charge it up using static electricity a very easy and
Consistent way to build a static electric charge is using paper towel and PVC before we start using our PVC
Let's clean it off using some high grit sandpaper to be sure that it's free of any oils or dirts or residue
You can see that the sandpaper is so fine that it doesn't even actually take off any of the printing on the pipe
But it is removing some extra residue
Now take a piece of paper towel and run it along the length of the PVC pipe quickly this will help build up a static
electricity charge I
Don't know if you can hear that but
It's building up a charge fast
All right with a static charge built up in our PVC. It's time to transfer it into our Leyden jar
We'll do this by just passing the PVC pipe very close to the nail it
Sounds like if you rub the balloon on your hair
Or if you've ever had one of those old see our TV screens right when you turn it off makes that crackling noise
I've now charged up the PVC and put that electricity into our Leyden jar five or six times now
So I think it's time for a test to see if it will discharge
The nitrile gloves are gonna be too much of an insulator
So I'm gonna take them off try grabbing the foil and then touching nail to see if I get a shock oh
I got a shock just from the foil
That's not how it's normally supposed to go, but it's probably good side. We'll find out I know that
Was a little bit a little bit of a shock
And I jumped too hard just because I was nervous about whether or not it was powerful
I think it was probably not a good idea to keep the PVC pipe so close to the bottle it might have still
had some interference with the electric fields and it also is possible that I
Had just inadvertently built up an electric charge in the foil itself
And then when I first touched that it discharged a little bit, so let's try this again
All right, and it shocked me again wonder what's going on here. Well. I'll still try touching the nail
Yeah, it still got me again. It is working to some extent
I'm able to hold the foil and I get a zap when I touch the nail
But it's also zapping me a little bit when I grab the foil in the first place
So I'm going to try taking the foil down by a button
It's just in case the static charge from the PVC is also jumping onto the foil as I pass it next to the nail
I'm gonna try and move it away from the nail a little bit
Okay, let's try charging this up again
There's five charges and this time when I grab the foil it's not doing anything to me
Let's see what happens when I touch the nail oh
That was definitely a bigger shock all right
I think what's been happening is the foil itself has been building up something of a charge and since I'm standing on the ground when I
Touch the foil that charge runs through me
But when I hold the foil every time as I charge it it keeps the same charge as me which is a greater difference?
From the charge inside the water that makes it so when I touch the nail it give us a bigger shock
Last time I charged it five times this time. I'm charging it ten
All right
Here goes nothing let's see what it does to me
Girl oh
Boy, okay
So last time I felt in my arm that time I felt it in my whole body like it went
Like I felt it in my other arm and down through my legs and just still there's big ole jump alright
That's pretty fun. It doesn't actually hurt. It's just like a pulse that goes through you alright well
That's working pretty well something else. I want to try though
I'm gonna turn down the lights and see if we can actually watch the electric spark jump oh
I
Saw it I hope it was on camera. That was another good Joel tiny little spark
It didn't have a big gap to jump over, but it was there something
I'm going to try to see if we can make it a little visible
I'm going to hold another piece of metal before I touch it
Instead of touching you directly with my fingers it might jump the gap a little bit better that way
Good
Well, it didn't really jump the gap I still had to touch the foil to the nail
I think but I still did see a spark and when I touch it with my finger it looked like a yellow spark touching with
The foil looked like a blue spark no idea what the difference is there we go
We've charged up our Leyden jar using some PVC and paper towel
But I want to try and take it to the next level in a previous video we shattered a plasma globe while it was running
Now we're going to try using this plasma globe to see if we can charge up the Leyden jar with it when this is turned
On if a piece of metal gets near the bulb you can still see that purple spark showing up
I'm gonna try touching it with my glove oh
It's like doing pretty much nothing well. It's still getting the spark though, ooh
It's starting to heat up just took my finger, let's see if it
It doesn't really give you a shock it gets warm
But it doesn't like just this is a lot more of a feeling of electricity well
Let's see what happens if we touch this to our Leyden jar
well, it's sparking kind of like when I touch my finger to it I
Don't know if that's building up the charge or not
Let's just let it go for a second and see what happens. Oh, it smells like ozone
Wow, that's kind of powerful. Well that seems like plenty of charging to me see if it did anything
No shock from touching the foil
Nothing nothing whatsoever I
Thought it would do something. Oh well well whatever electricity is coming out of that
It doesn't seem to charge our Leyden jar
So I think the best way to do it is just stick with the PVC
I was kind of hoping you would be like a quick-acting charge. Just this is full oh
well
Whoa my favorite thing to do is you get this bottle charge it up pretty well about 10 passes
Then you get a group of people have one person hold the bottle on the aluminum foil and have everyone hold hands in a circle
Then you have the last person in the circle touch the nail and everyone in the circle will feel the jolt run through them
It's pretty entertaining
There you have it now. You know how to build yourself a Leyden jar
Which is an early type of capacitor a capacitor is similar to a battery except that instead of discharging its electricity slowly?
It dumps all of it at once
This Leyden jar capacitor is made just by using a plastic bottle some aluminum foil held on with tape and a nail
It's then filled with water with a little bit of salt added for conductivity and charged up using the static electricity
generated with PVC and a paper towel
This is something you can easily build an afternoon and have fun experimenting with or you can just use it to prank people and tell
Them to touch it and see if you can get them to do that without knowing what's gonna happen
They'll be in for a surprise
We tried charging up our Leyden jar using our broken plasma globe because it does discharge
Electricity in some form but apparently it's not anything that will charge this out if you know of a good experiment that you can do
With a Leyden jar let us know down in the comments, and we might try it out
Thanks for joining us for this project today, and we look forward to the next one talk to you then
This might be a very dumb experiment
I've charged it a little bit just in three passes, and you see what happens if I lick the mail
It's a tiny little
Zap on the surface of my tongue didn't do much. I don't really want to do much more than that it sounds painful
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