Faraday's Namesake Measurement

In the history of electricity, the invention of the capacitor, a device that can store a charge, began in the 18th century with German Ewald Georg von Kleist. A year later Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek invented a similar storage mechanism and named it the Leyden jar after the University of Leyden where he worked.

Daniel Gralath combined several Leyden jars in parallel, a "battery" that increased the charge storage capacity. Even Ben Franklin worked with a Leyden jar. He disproved the theory that the charge was stored in water when in fact it was stored on the glass itself. He's responsible for the term battery.

Storage media grew smaller and smaller and came to be known as condensers. Sometimes that word is still used instead of capacitor.

Since the capacitor is capable of storing an electrical charge, it therefore stores electrical energy in the resulting field. The measurement of a device's capacitance is called farad in honor of Michael Faraday. The symbol F is used to represent 1 farad, and that's the capacitance that develops a potential difference of one volt when it stores a charge of one coulomb.

Bringing Meaning to Madness

Aren't you glad you don't have to know all this in order to use electricity. Flip a switch, and the lights come on.