How to Order

PV Scientific Instruments

Contact Us!

About Leyden Jars

After the development of static electric generating machines, early electrical experimenters were able to generate high-voltage electrical currents, but they had no way to store this electricity. By the mid-18th century, the capacitor emerged in the form of the Leyden jar, named for the University of Leyden in the Netherlands where much experimentation with these jars was performed and published. With a Leyden jar, an experimenter could store an electrical charge and move it to another place to use. Soon, Leyden jars were incorporated into the construction of frictional static-generating machines to make larger, longer sparks.

Shortly after the discovery of the Leyden jar, an American, Benjamin Franklin, became the first electrical experimenter to understand and explain how it functioned. Franklin based his understanding on another of his observations—that electrical energy has both positive and negative charges.

In the middle of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin, a British scientist, first observed the oscillating nature of the discharge of electricity from a Leyden jar through an inductor. This and subsequent work by the American experimenter Mahlon Loomis, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, and the Serbian-born American inventor Nikola Tesla, led to the development of radio, television, and communications as we know them. Today it is obvious that Benjamin Franklin's early experimentation with Leyden jars was actually producing radio waves—but no one was listening!

PV Scientific Instruments offers a wide range of classic Leyden jar capacitors, from static-electrical experimentation types to spark-oscillation tranformer types for radio work. We also produce custom designs. Please contact us at 607 387-6752 with questions.

Classic 175 kV Leyden Jar

Series Pair of Leyden Jars

High Isolation Leyden Jars