This Battery Has Lasted 175 Years and No One Knows How

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
If you think that the batteries in use today can’t be beat with anything created over 175 years ago, think again. The Oxford Electric Bell has been in continuous use for at least 175 years and no one has a clue as to how the battery is still functional after all of this time.
 
Apple had not invented planned obsolescence yet.
 
FFS tear it apart and figure out why... holy hell, we could be waiting another 100 years or more to find out some awesome magical battery tech...

or maybe they know enough to realize it's not that big of a deal?
 
Some battery company (or someone rich) probably owns the rights to it and has figured it out and realizes they don't want batteries similar to this on the market because it'd ruin their current business model so let it go and go and go. Similar to how the government has been stifling inventions for decades in the name of national security. They can have anything beneficial to humanity put under a secrecy order.

I'd bet the house that if the people of America could read the details about all the inventions the government stopped due to 'national security' there would be a revolution by tomorrow morning.
 
xJ321x said:
Some battery company (or someone rich) probably owns the rights to it and has figured it out and realizes they don't want batteries similar to this on the market because it'd ruin their current business model so let it go and go and go. Similar to how the government has been stifling inventions for decades in the name of national security. They can have anything beneficial to humanity put under a secrecy order.

I'd bet the house that if the people of America could read the details about all the inventions the government stopped due to 'national security' there would be a revolution by tomorrow morning.
Click to expand...

Your Tinfoil hat is showing...
 
This sounds more impressive that it looks, I expect there is some sort of minuscule effect keeping it going .
 
My guess is its low usage is receiving enough to recharge it from the atmosphere similar to tesla
 
9148130.jpg
 
ok its a dry pile
and the bell it self is pulling pico amps at best
so thats why its lasted that long
its like any thing else if you tried to pull any real power from the pile it would drain very fast but since the power is using is very small its lasted this long
no magic here
 
jroe52 said:
My guess is its low usage is receiving enough to recharge it from the atmosphere similar to tesla
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Depends upon how long it takes to charge up the ringer between the two. Article states it's a nano-amp of charge, a little digging has an oscillation of around 2Hz, so the max time it would take to charge would be a half second, but more likely than not is much lower than that. But lets just use the half second as an upper limit.

Ok so 1 nanoAmp x 0.5 seconds = 0.5 nano coulombs = approx 3 x 10^9 electrons used per zap.

Next lets just use the approximation of 10 billion rings over the life time, that's 3 x 10^19 electrons used.

Not sure how big the batteries are but zinc has a molar mass of about 65 g/mole, and thinking that 65 grams of zinc are in the battery isn't out of the ordinary unless the batteries were super tiny. So figure on the order of an Avogadro number of electrons in the battery since these type of batteries work on oxidation principles. So 6 x 10^23 electrons in the whole battery at the start, so it basically used 1/20000 of it's total available electrons. Theoretically speaking, it could keep ringing for another 3.5 million years ... remember this is the upper limit of charge time, if the discharge of the battery is quicker (which it is) it could keep going even longer.

Of course the battery's corrosion will do it in before it has a chance to use all the electrons but it's not all that super surprising that it's still going. And I suspect that's truly the big question in mind, is how come it hasn't gotten to a critical level of corrosion yet (being under the bell jar to keep out outside influences certainly helps).
 
jroe52 said:
My guess is its low usage is receiving enough to recharge it from the atmosphere similar to tesla
Click to expand...

Don't know allot about tesla..but is your point its acting like a capacitor/(battery) from some sort of pressure fluctuation/conditions/atmospheric to gain small loads of electrical charge?

Seems weird and intriguing to me, that and wifi charging. Wish their was a laymans guid to it all or a PBS video about it!, no time to actually study it just for curiosity sake..but interesting to think about.
 
Actually, just look at the pyramid structures generating electricity when facing a certain direction.
This really is no suprise, why would they give free natural energy to people, lol.

There is money to be made!!! -Thomas Edison
 
jroe52 said:
My guess is its low usage is receiving enough to recharge it from the atmosphere similar to tesla
Click to expand...

Or it could be something similar to something I saw happen back when I was in EE in college with a project a friend was working on.

He had built up a circuit that involved an LED and some associated circuitry. When we left the lab late at night after working on some stuff and turned off the lights we noticed that the LED was faintly pulsing with a strange variable rhythm to it -- and it wasn't hooked up to ANY battery at this point. The pulsing was so faint as to not be visible when the lights were on, but it was clearly noticeable in a completely darkened room.

As it turned out, the pulses were in perfect sync to the signal coming from a nearby AM radio station -- which his circuit was inadvertently resonant to. Once we actually hooked up a ground, it stopped.

So, maybe they should stick the magic bell ringer into a Faraday cage and see if it stops -- it could be that some part of the circuit is resonant with some RF transmissions nearby and is absorbing just enough power to recharge the pile (or that the circuit has enough capacitance on its own to keep the bell ringing from power absorbed from signal ingress -- in which case, the dry pile could have been dead for decades).
 
There is no way to have free "natural" energy in the amounts we need it. If someone has these mysterious plans please god give them to Elon Musk.

I love the conspiracy theories. I hope that's trolling. I got my laugh.
 
No big deal.
Violating the first and second law of thermodynamics has become so common nowadays that I hardly see the point of this article.
 
xJ321x said:
Some battery company (or someone rich) probably owns the rights to it and has figured it out and realizes they don't want batteries similar to this on the market because it'd ruin their current business model so let it go and go and go. Similar to how the government has been stifling inventions for decades in the name of national security. They can have anything beneficial to humanity put under a secrecy order.

I'd bet the house that if the people of America could read the details about all the inventions the government stopped due to 'national security' there would be a revolution by tomorrow morning.
Click to expand...

I don't know about the US government suppressing it, but your are probably right about some existing battery company being involved somehow in all this.

AT&T invented the automatic telephone answering machine in the 1930s, and then immediately suppressed it out of fear that answering machines would make people talk on the phone less. We had to wait another 40 years for someone ELSE to re-invent it before we were allowed to have one.
 
You know it could just be dumb luck and the first pile reactor lol... if there was something with a decaying half life in there that that was reacting to nickle iron alloy it would generate current as the substance loses eletrons aka energy though to be blunt if it is that some one should figure out when the collape of the first proton or neurtron will happen and figure things out since half lives goes in cycles when they run out of eletrons they convert protons or netrons I forget which first but that is a surge of energy directly tied to the amount of material... a couple kilograms can rip apart a city...
 
drakken said:
You know it could just be dumb luck and the first pile reactor lol... if there was something with a decaying half life in there that that was reacting to nickle iron alloy it would generate current as the substance loses eletrons aka energy though to be blunt if it is that some one should figure out when the collape of the first proton or neurtron will happen and figure things out since half lives goes in cycles when they run out of eletrons they convert protons or netrons I forget which first but that is a surge of energy directly tied to the amount of material... a couple kilograms can rip apart a city...
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure they weren't messing around with nuclear energy 55 years BEFORE the discovery of radioactivity, unless you are suggesting that they accidentally created the world's first nuclear reactor without having any idea what they had built.

Also, if there was some sort of nuclear decay process happening here, it would be easy enough to test using just a Geiger counter.
 
no money to be made in batteries that last 200 yrs or tires that never wear out, or engines that don't need gas you know what that would do to the economy?
 
Sorry but chemical batteries will produce energy so long as there chemical electrolyte remaining to produce energy.

The total energy output of this bell is under a uJ per cycle. That's like 31w/year lol.
 
Elios said:
ok its a dry pile
and the bell it self is pulling pico amps at best
so thats why its lasted that long
its like any thing else if you tried to pull any real power from the pile it would drain very fast but since the power is using is very small its lasted this long
no magic here
Click to expand...

This right here. There is no magical genie that can make energy from nothing. A dry pile battery can make power, but only at a very slow rate (hint: because it's DRY, no electrolyte). And because it doesn't make a lot of power, it consumes the battery elements very slowly.

Any kid with a basic science education (high school level) should know this).

Has public education slipped this much?!? :mad:
 
sir-gold said:
I don't know about the US government suppressing it, but your are probably right about some existing battery company being involved somehow in all this.

AT&T invented the automatic telephone answering machine in the 1930s, and then immediately suppressed it out of fear that answering machines would make people talk on the phone less. We had to wait another 40 years for someone ELSE to re-invent it before we were allowed to have one.
Click to expand...

This right here has happened in a lot of industry... Can you honestly tell me that since 1885 technology for automobiles hasn't advanced enough to seriously get 100 or more miles per gallon out of an engine?!? If you could get that much out of a gallon of gas there goes the whole oil industry. Tesla was a man way ahead of his time when it came to electricity and Edison and others put him out of business cause they were afraid of what he was doing. Standard Oil actually removed MANY electric rail systems from many cities to replace them with gas powered buses to sell more gas. Imagine how batteries and electric power might have progressed had that not happened.
 
kodan said:
This right here has happened in a lot of industry... Can you honestly tell me that since 1885 technology for automobiles hasn't advanced enough to seriously get 100 or more miles per gallon out of an engine?!? If you could get that much out of a gallon of gas there goes the whole oil industry. Tesla was a man way ahead of his time when it came to electricity and Edison and others put him out of business cause they were afraid of what he was doing. Standard Oil actually removed MANY electric rail systems from many cities to replace them with gas powered buses to sell more gas. Imagine how batteries and electric power might have progressed had that not happened.
Click to expand...

Some people are claiming they will be able to get cars to run a 100 years without refueling.
 
spugnor said:
This right here. There is no magical genie that can make energy from nothing. A dry pile battery can make power, but only at a very slow rate (hint: because it's DRY, no electrolyte). And because it doesn't make a lot of power, it consumes the battery elements very slowly.

Any kid with a basic science education (high school level) should know this).

Has public education slipped this much?!? :mad:
Click to expand...

Idiocracy is a documentary. You have an appeal to the lowest denomination to satisfy federal standards made by people who never taught in classes all so everyone can pass high school and go to college. Not to mention if you are successful, you are taxed through your nose all so lazy dumb people can have state subsidies for more kids.
 
xJ321x said:
Some battery company (or someone rich) probably owns the rights to it and has figured it out and realizes they don't want batteries similar to this on the market because it'd ruin their current business model so let it go and go and go. Similar to how the government has been stifling inventions for decades in the name of national security. They can have anything beneficial to humanity put under a secrecy order.
Click to expand...

I can definitely see why a company with exclusive access to a massive competitive advantage would want to not use it at all. The best way to make lots of money is to keep churning out the same stuff as everyone else is on vanishingly tiny margins.
 
kodan said:
This right here has happened in a lot of industry... Can you honestly tell me that since 1885 technology for automobiles hasn't advanced enough to seriously get 100 or more miles per gallon out of an engine?!? .
Click to expand...

That's quite easy. It's just that most people would rather have safe cars that accelerate reasonably quickly than 100mpg. You can't just arbitrary increase engine efficiency without limit. You get decreasing returns the closer you get to the Carnot limit.
 
Obi_Kwiet said:
I can definitely see why a company with exclusive access to a massive competitive advantage would want to not use it at all. The best way to make lots of money is to keep churning out the same stuff as everyone else is on vanishingly tiny margins.
Click to expand...
Unless of course they have a decent sized monopoly from buying out a lot of the upcoming competition. Yeah, that.
 
mdburkey said:
Or it could be something similar to something I saw happen back when I was in EE in college with a project a friend was working on.

He had built up a circuit that involved an LED and some associated circuitry. When we left the lab late at night after working on some stuff and turned off the lights we noticed that the LED was faintly pulsing with a strange variable rhythm to it -- and it wasn't hooked up to ANY battery at this point. The pulsing was so faint as to not be visible when the lights were on, but it was clearly noticeable in a completely darkened room.

As it turned out, the pulses were in perfect sync to the signal coming from a nearby AM radio station -- which his circuit was inadvertently resonant to. Once we actually hooked up a ground, it stopped.

So, maybe they should stick the magic bell ringer into a Faraday cage and see if it stops -- it could be that some part of the circuit is resonant with some RF transmissions nearby and is absorbing just enough power to recharge the pile (or that the circuit has enough capacitance on its own to keep the bell ringing from power absorbed from signal ingress -- in which case, the dry pile could have been dead for decades).
Click to expand...

Concur. Or maybe it's like an ion engine where it performs such a small amount of work that the efficiency is extremely high and the battery really is discharging over time. But I would think that after so many years that it would be "expired" by now if it wasn't being recharged.
 
Elios said:
if you dont mind a nuclear reactor in your car sure
we have ships and subs that havent been refueled in decades
Click to expand...

Yeah but they also need the space for the entire reactor and cooling system, steam turbines, etc. Don't think it can be scaled down to a car, but I'm just guessing on that one.
 
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