Funny Thing about Discovery of Capacitance

CAPACITANCE WAS DISCOVERED BY CHANCE

A Bishop of  POMERANIA ( it is a historical region on the south shore of Baltic Sea) named Ewald Georg von Kleist was doing an experiment at the close of 1745 in October.

See Pomerania on map( Its in Europe)

Von Kleist wanted to isolate the electricity. He wanted to actually trap electricity in a jar containing water and to see how it looked like when trapped inside water.

He actually put a wire connected to a high voltage electrostatic generator into a jar containing water, and hold that jar in his hand. He thought, he would be able to trap electric current coming from high voltage electrostatic generator via conducting wire into water, but nothing happened like that. Then he disconnected the conducting wire from the electrostatic generator, and when he touched that conducting wire dipped in water with his naked hand, he experienced a painful electric-shock. He was very confused with this, that how an unconnected wire gave him electric-shock. He was unaware of the fact that it was because the unconnected wire stored some of the electric charge in it when it was connected to electrostatic generator. This concept of storage of electric charge by conductors later on formed the basis for making capacitors.

Later on the Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek invented a similar capacitor which he named Leyden jar, after the name of Leyden University, where he worked.

It is very astonishing for me to realize that when people in our country were ruled by the Mughal Dynasty and Britishers were about to come to rule India, there were also people in other parts of world who were busy in discovering and inventing things.