The electric battery has been feeding the bell for 175 years in a row

There is an amazing curiosity in the Clarendon laboratory at the University of Oxford: an electric bell that has been running for 175 years in a row. The source of electricity for him is the so-called. “ Dry battery ”. This is an early form of electrostatic battery, invented by Giuseppe Zamboni in 1812.

Zamboni used alternating disks of silver foil, zinc foil and paper in his batteries. Disks are collected in a compressed stack of several hundred pieces and are enclosed inside a glass flask. Such batteries give very little current. Interestingly, they were used until the 1980s, mainly as portable sources for military purposes. For example, during World War II they were used on infrared telescopes.

However, it is not known what exactly the battery consists of, supplying the Oxford bell for so long - scientists do not want to disassemble it while it works. An explanatory note from the manufacturers of the call, Watkin and Hill, reports that this device was launched in 1840 (although some researchers claim there is evidence that dates back to 1825).



Now the battery current is already measured in nanoamperes, so the sound of a small oscillating bell cannot be caught by the human ear - you can only observe its small fluctuations between the two bells. One of the researchers, A.J. Croft, who wrote a scientific paper on the bell in 1984 , even believes that the bell may physically wear out before the battery runs out of charge. One way or another, everything will ever end - and at the end of this experiment, we will be able to find out what is inside the battery.