The Ancient Battery That Shouldn’t Exist скачать в хорошем качестве

The Ancient Battery That Shouldn’t Exist

In 1936, railway workers excavating outside Baghdad unearthed a seemingly normal clay jar, but upon further inspection, they found something interesting. There was a copper cylinder sealed at the base, along with an iron rod poking through an asphalt stopper at the opening. The artifact was sent to the Iraq Museum, where Wilhelm König, an Austrian archaeologist and the museum’s lab director, studied it in detail. He believed that it was one of the strangest artifacts ever found, a clay jar that might have held electric power more than two thousand years ago. So two years after the discovery, he published his assessment, suggesting that this strange jar might actually be a galvanic cell, or in other words, an ancient battery. But to many, this didn’t make any sense, because the jar itself dates somewhere between 150 BCE and 250 CE, long before the invention of modern batteries. His reasoning drew upon observations of local jewelers who reportedly used similar devices for electroplating, a complex process that helps improve the durability of jewelry. Because of this, he theorized that ancient inhabitants used these vessels to plate silver objects with gold, citing thin metallic layers on artifacts from Mesopotamia. However, when specialists analyzed these layers, the coating proved to be mercury gilding, a process that relies on heat, not electrical current. Throughout all of the artifacts they have found, no evidence of ancient electroplating has been discovered in Mesopotamia. Alternative theories suggested medical applications. Perhaps these vessels delivered mild electrical stimulation for pain relief, comparable to Roman use of electric eels for therapy. In 1993, Paul Keyser published a paper proposing that the jars might have been employed for acupuncture-like stimulation. Yet this remains purely speculative. No supporting artifacts have been recovered, and no ancient medical texts reference such use. So if it wasn’t used for electroplating, and it wasn’t for medicine… what was it? Luckily, one archeologist connected some dots. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #ancienthistory #history #mystery