Miriam's kitchen.........glass jars.......with plastic flowers in them...........neato mosquito.........Mr. Magneto.................Handiness.................on the wall................man oh man..


In October 1745, Ewald Georg von Kleist of Pomerania, Germany, found that charge could be stored by connecting a high-voltage electrostatic generator by a wire to a volume of water in a hand-held glass jar.^[2] Von Kleist's hand and the water acted as conductors, and the jar as a dielectric (although details of the mechanism were incorrectly identified at the time). Von Kleist found that touching the wire resulted in a powerful spark, much more painful than that obtained from an electrostatic machine. The following year, the Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek invented a similar capacitor, which was named the Leyden jar, after the University of Leiden where he worked.^[3] He also was impressed by the power of the shock he received, writing, "I would not take a second shock for the kingdom of France."[4