A 2,000 year old battery, or just a very interesting pot?
This is the debate that’s been swirling over the fragments of a puzzling artifact discovered in Iraq nearly a century ago. Dubbed the “Baghdad battery,” it’s believed to have originally been a clay jar housing a copper vessel, at the center of which was an iron rod. This arrangement, either by coincidence or design, could’ve allowed it to function as a primitive galvanic cell, some archaeologists argue — a primitive energy storage device pioneered in the Western world by Alessandro Volta, after whom the “volt” was named.
These are tough claims to bear out, not least of all because the original artifact has been lost since the US’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. As such, archaeologists have had to rely on reconstructing the strange vessel based on records to try to tease out its origins.
Now a new study highlighted by Chemistry World purports that the Baghdad battery wasn’t just a battery, but one that was capable of outputting much more power than once believed.
“If this artefact were truly a battery — and I could be wrong of course — then my experiment shows the most effective and convenient way it could have been used as one,” the author, independent researcher Alexander Bazes, told the outlet.
Skeptics argue that the artifact, in its suspected arrangement, would’ve outputted too puny an amount of power to have intentionally been a battery.
Bazes’s reconstruction argues otherwise. His experiments suggests that the clay jar’s porous exterior acted like a separator between an electrolyte, perhaps lye, and air, which connected with the copper vessel to create an outer cell. Meanwhile, the iron rod inside the copper vessel acted as an inner cell, creating an electrical series that could’ve produced 1.4 volts of electricity — approximately the same voltage of a modern AA battery.
Still, Bazes doesn’t buy the argument purported by some fringe archaeologists that the battery’s copper vessel would’ve been used to electroplate jewelry, or coat them in a thin layer of metal. Instead, he argues the Baghdad battery may have been used to “ritually corrode” prayers written on paper, as witnessing the corrosion would’ve been seen as “visual evidence of an energetic influence having passed through their prayer,” Bazes wrote in the study.
Or maybe it wasn’t a battery at all, counters University of Pennsylvania archaeologist William Hafford, who has extensively researched the artifact. In reality, it was likely a sacred jar for storing prayers, he told Chemistry World, noting that other magic items like it have been found buried nearby, including a similar clay jar with ten copper vessels, which is obviously too many to form a battery. The iron rod that supposedly acted as an electrode for the inner battery cell were really just iron nails that were part of the magical ritual.
“You would drop the prayer through the neck of the jar, seal it with bitumen and then bury it with a ritual,” Hafford told the outlet. “They were usually buried in the ground because you were giving them to the chthonic deities.”
More on archaeology: Divers Intrigued by Huge Underwater Structure
The post Scientists Investigating 2,000-Year-Old Artifact That Appears to Be a Battery appeared first on Futurism.
