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.
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