alterkrmn | Reading

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72493&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=volts-before-volta

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72493

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-seventh issue:

“The Baghdad Battery: Experimental Verification of a 2,000-Year-Old Device Capable of Driving Visible and Useful Electrochemical Reactions at over 1.4 Volts,” by Alexander Bazes.

ABSTRACT

The “Baghdad Battery” has posed an archaeological enigma for over eighty years. Discovered at the Parthian site of Khujut Rabu (first century ce), this famous artifact’s utilitarian yet highly specific design tailors so clearly to the requirements of an electrochemical cell that it is difficult to conceive of another use for it. Although efforts have been made to recreate this battery (König 1938, Keyser 1993, MythBusters 2005), prior experiments have failed to (1) account for all aspects of the artifact’s design and (2) make a device that has enough power to be evidently useful for people two thousand years ago. The result of these previous recreations has thus been to cast doubt upon whether the Baghdad Battery was, in fact, a battery at all. The present study’s recreation dispels this doubt by accounting for two previously neglected aspects of the artifact’s design, namely the use of solder and the function of the ceramic jar, which together form a previously unrecognized second source of voltage for the device: an aqueous tin-air battery. This “outer cell,” which is integrally connected in electrical series with the device’s already well-understood “inner cell” (comprising copper and iron), enables the Baghdad Battery to generate over 1.4 volts: an electric potential capable of driving a number of useful (and highly noticeable) electrochemical reactions, including electroplating, etching, and the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The present study’s result therefore provides the strongest evidence to date for people in the Near East having had a working knowledge of electrochemistry nearly two millennia before Alessandro Volta’s experiments with the voltaic pile.

Keywords: Baghdad Battery, Parthian Galvanic Cell, tin-air battery, aqueous metal-air battery, ancient electrochemistry

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