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 ...

It might be too soon to consider the innards of the old CRT monitor at the back of your closet to be something worth putting on display in your home or workshop. For that curio cabinet-worthy appeal, ...

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 ...

In April 1751, the Royal Society in London published a collection of letters from Ben Franklin to Peter Collinson entitled "Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America ...

IT is one of the great generalizations established by Faraday, that all electrical charge and discharge is essentially the charge and discharge of a Leyden jar. It is impossible to charge one body ...

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 ...

You are able to gift 5 more articles this month. Anyone can access the link you share with no account required. Learn more. Benjamin Franklin believed that a turkey killed with electricity would be ...

We in medicine are generally aware of how important electric devices are — and were — to understanding the function of the heart and brain. Thanks primarily to work by physicists who sought to tame ...

Got some empty plastic bottles in your recycling bin or cluttering up your desk? Then you’ve got a large portion of the material you need for building your own Wimshurst machine like [Thomas Kim] did.

A glass tube with brass crook set in a cork insulator and sealed into the top of the tube with red wax. Exterior coating of lead(?) about 1/3 of length. Three brass leaf springs are attached to the ...