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:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)