History
One of the earliest examples of an earth battery was built by Alexander Bain in 1841 in order to drive a prime mover. Bain buried plates of zinc and copper in the ground about one meter apart and used the resulting voltage, of about one volt, to operate a clock. Carl Friedrich Gauss, who had researched Earth's magnetic field, and Karl A. von Steinheil, who built one of the first electric clocks and developed the idea of an "Earth return" or "ground return", had previously investigated such devices.
Daniel Drawbaugh received U.S. Patent 211,322 for an Earth battery for electric clocks (with several improvements in the art of Earth batteries). Another early patent was obtained by Emil Jahr U.S. Patent 690,151 Method of utilizing electrical Earth currents). In 1875, James C. Bryan received U.S. Patent 160,152 for his Earth Battery. In 1885, George Dieckmann, received US patent U.S. Patent 329,724 for his Electric Earth battery. In 1898, Nathan Stubblefield received U.S. Patent 600,457 for his electrolytic coil battery, which was a combination of an earth battery and a solenoid. (For more information see US patents 155209, 182802, 495582, 728381, 3278335, 3288648, 4153757 and 4457988.) The Earth battery, in general, generated power for early telegraph transmissions and formed part of a tuned circuit that amplified the signalling voltage over long distances.
|
|
||
|---|---|---|
| Metal |
Potential |
|
| Magnesium (pure) | -1.75 | |
| Magnesium (alloy) | -1.60 | |
| Zinc | -1.10 | |
| Aluminum (alloy) | -1.05 | |
| Aluminum (pure) | -0.8 22 | |
| Steel (clean) | -0.50 to -0.80 | |
| Steel (rusted) | -0.20 to -0.50 | |
| Cast Iron | -0.50 | |
| Lead | -0.50 | |
| Steel (concrete) | -0.20 | |
| Copper | -0.20 | |
| Brass | -0.20 | |
| Bronze | -0.20 | |
| Steel (mill scale) | -0.20 | |
| Cast iron (high silicon) | -0.20 | |
| Carbon | +0.30 | |
| Graphite | +0.30 | |
| Coke | +0.30 | |
|
|
||
Read more about this topic: Earth Battery
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)