THE LEYDEN JAR. 515 



charge? So they put alcohol and a wire in a bottle and 

 electrified it, and put it down and contemplated it, and saw 

 nothing, and wrote to Von Kleist that his apparatus, what- 

 ever it was, must be of peculiar strength, as theirs would 

 not work. And Von Kleist answers naively that he has 

 never seen any apparatus but his own, and hence cannot 

 draw comparisons, but that he has not found the least 

 difficulty in his performances, and in fact has made an 

 excellent little contrivance out of a thermometer tube four 

 inches long, containing water and a wire tipped with a 

 lead ball, which lights spirits satisfactorily and sometimes 

 gives two discharges. Hitherto he has spoken of his de- 

 vice only generally as a machine; now he names it the 

 " Electrical Thermometer," a designation which it has 

 never borne. 1 



The title which it has received, and how it came so to 

 be known, is now to be told. Meanwhile the Dantzic 

 philosophers, with such new light as Von Kleist afforded, 

 returned to the charge, and at their task for the present I 

 leave them. 



The two most eminent physicists of Holland, during the 



1 The weight of evidence from all sources examined is in favor of the 

 foregoing account of the discovery of the Leyden jar; but a passage in 

 one of Winkler's treatises (Die Eigenschaften der Electrischen Materie 

 und des Electrischen Feuers, etc., Leipsic, 1745), which bears date the 

 2oth of August, 1745, and hence some months prior to Von Kleist's 

 formal communication of his experiment to Lieberkuhu and others, 

 indicates that Von Kleist not only made the experiment considerably 

 before this time, but essayed to describe it to Winkler. Wiukler's under- 

 standing of it was evidently not clear, for in discussing the strengthening 

 of electric sparks, he says that he placed iron and brass tubes of different 

 lengths one upon another, and hung a large hollow copper ball from 

 them, electrifying all together, and getting stronger sparks than when a 

 single tube four ells long was employed. He then notes that Von Kleist 

 has bound together two iron rods and got similar results, and adds: "The 

 electrical sparks from metal were especially strengthened if the metal 

 object were placed on silk cords in such a way that either the object 

 itself or an iron rod hanging therefrom reached the surface of water, 

 \\hich in a thin glass vessel was electrified while resting upon a silk net." 



