Oxford Electric Bell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell

by TheAuditor • 12 years ago

106 60 12 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

jankeromnes• 12 years ago

that has

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pooper• 12 years ago

thank you. I can understand (not agree with but understand) some people insisting on writing name of companies with plural verbs like Google are and Microsoft have but a battery bell is a singular word no matter which way you slice and dice.

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josai2• 12 years ago

To be fair, judging by previous comments, it's likely the writer is not a native english speaker. English grammar is hard, and people make mistakes.

I for one would like HN to be an inclusive international community, and that means not jumping down people's throats just because their english is not 100%. I'd like to see any of us native english speakers try to submit something to a foreign language site...

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ern• 12 years ago

British English seems to prefer treat entities like companies as plurals, while the rest of the English-speaking world seems to treat them as singular. Lots of discussion on this point can be found on Google.

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stuaxo• 12 years ago

It is a shame they don't have a video or an animated gif of this dynamic object.

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marvin• 12 years ago

You can find it on YouTube. It doesn't ring very loudly, but I suppose that would be a requirement for constant 174-year operation.

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aylons• 12 years ago

Here it goes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dx1-f8xQio&feature=kp

Not as dynamic as one would expect, though.

Edit: Reproduction, easier to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKwSHtQwzD8

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thrillscience• 12 years ago

Here's a better video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsBak0oCgdY

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JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Strange the article seems compelled to mention that its not an example of perpetual motion. Why not also say its not magic, nor controlled by the gods?

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corin_• 12 years ago

Simply because there are far more people who are likely to forget the rules of science and think "wow, 174 years, it keeps going forever!" than people who think "wow, 174 years, must be magic"

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serf2• 12 years ago

I agree with you, but perhaps it's just to prevent those who believe in such things from citing this example as evidence.

The world has enough youtube videos of people claiming their homebrew magnet contraption is a perpetual motion machine, one hopes the author is simply trying to stymie that trend.

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drzaiusapelord2• 12 years ago

Do you not use the internet? Between the Tesla conspiracy theorirsts "OMG Tesla discovered free energy thus Westinghouse had him killed" and the constant rebadging of "cold fusion" I think these disclaimers are warranted.

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pflanze• 12 years ago

See also (different source about the same bell): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995422

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Spooky233• 12 years ago

I've always found things like this amazing. The "Centennial Light" is a lightbulb that has been in near-continuous operation for 113 years!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

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serf2• 12 years ago

I had known about that, but I never had realized until re-reading that article that it now runs at 4 watts rather than the original 60 watts.

I'm still impressed totally, but I must say that that factor dampened it a bit for me. If planned obsolescence is really non-existent in that industry one wonders how long a modern low-wattage bulb built for endurance could potentially last.

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC• 12 years ago

A modern low-wattage bulb built for endurance could potentially last roughly forever. And during that time turn so much electricity into heat that you'd be asking for shorter-lived higher-temperature bulbs to save on energy costs.

With normal incandescent lighbulbs, electricity is about 95% of the costs, so if you doubled the lifetime of those bulbs, the most you could save would be about 2.5% of total costs, if the lower operating temperature of long-lasting bulbs didn't increase the electricity needed for the same brightness, which practically means that you probably would pay more overall.

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drzaiusapelord2• 12 years ago

The wiki also lists it being shut off without specifying the reasons. "The fire department says that the bulb is at least 113 years old and has been turned off only a handful of times."

I really doubt there's anywhere in the US where power has run uninterrupted for 100+ years. Even the use of backup generators is fairly modern and those fail or run out of fuel as well.

Neat little thing, but I think back then they hand-wound the filament using much stronger and thicker (and with more resistance) wire than what we use today. Or used, considering that style of lightbulb is more or less dead. Dunno, I'm not impressed by this the same way I am by the pitch experiment or the ever-ringing bell.

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katbyte• 12 years ago

I've often heard that light bulbs are not manufactured to as high standards as they could be.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/light-bulb-conspiracy/

But i have no idea how much truth there is to it.

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Spooky233• 12 years ago

Depends on where.

Some smaller cities have municipal electricity that pretty much always works (Holyoke, MA is the one that comes to mind). Even in regional blackouts, there are a few Upstate NY towns that never go out... they can isolate themselves from the grid when necessary, and draw from the grid when they have issues.

I grew up in the boroughs of NYC, and don't recall ever having a power outage in those years. I think it flickered during a hurricane in the 80's, but never actually went out.

Where I live now (Upstate NY), forget it... even after eviscerating the street trees, any significant gust of wind has a probability of taking out power. The state no longer effectively regulates the utilities -- the transformer on my street blew up this past winter, and per the lineman had markings indicating that it was made in the mid 1960s.

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th0ma5• 12 years ago

Made in my hometown! Was always an inspiration to me, as well as a lesson in planned obsolescence.

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userbinator• 12 years ago

As the article mentions, the battery is likely a Zamboni pile, which has an extremely high internal resistance (i.e. can only supply very low currents) but is made for high voltage, electrostatic applications like this bell. That's why it lasted so long - modern battery chemistries have much lower internal resistance, and self-discharge would mean it being completely depleted in much less time. The battery in this bell has such high internal resistance that the self-discharge is many orders of magnitude less.

The characteristics of these batteries are different enough that you'll find lots of claims of "perpetual motion" on the Internet from people who have made them and found how long they can last when powering low-current loads like LEDs!

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angersock• 12 years ago

But this could be extremely handy for something doesn't use a lot of current, right, like an MSP430 or similar?

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LaikaF• 12 years ago

Why can't I buy LED lights that use these batteries and stick on things people run into in the dark?

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mrfusion• 12 years ago

I'm really confused how an electrostatic battery would get charged?

Is there a limit to how much energy can be stored in such a way? It seems like it might be a promising avenue for new battery research, no? Are there major limitations I'm not seeing?

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pjc502• 12 years ago

It's not an electrostatic battery. It's a perfectly normal non-rechargeable battery made of a very large number of thin cells; it provides high voltage but almost no current. However it also has a very low self-discharge, which would be a problem for almost any "wet" cell in this situation.

One nanoampere for 100 years is a very small number of amp-hours.

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VLM3• 12 years ago

You can engineering estimate it in your head as one kilo-day per year and one kilo-hour in a century, and a nano 1e-9 is a kilo-kilo-kilo so to less than one sig fig its of the order of a thousandth of an amphour per century.

Thermal noise is around a nanovolt per Hz at 50 ohms and room temp (Very roughly) so it would be a trick to use this power level to do much electronically, like generate a measurable radio signal. A much larger battery might be able to power a (edited: continuous) radio beacon.

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VLM3• 12 years ago

Its an electrochemical battery like any other. In fact silver-zinc chemistry (like a hearing aid) is not all that unusual for this type of dry cell. However the internal resistance from using paper as an "electrolyte" is incredibly high. So the weight or volume per power output ratio is extremely bad compared to anything. Even direct radio isotope batteries are worse. Radio isotope RTGs are worse.

The "electrostatic" comes from the engineering model where you can pretty much treat it like a magic leyden jar that charges itself. A self charging high voltage capacitor of sorts.

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tokenadult2• 12 years ago

From the lede of this Wikipedia article: "which has run almost continuously ever since, apart from occasional short interruptions caused by high humidity." Well, that's not the same as "have not stopped," or "has not stopped." The submission headline here is an exaggeration.

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devb• 12 years ago

Thank you for pointing out this major issue.

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Avshalom2• 12 years ago

Until one of those interruptions is 174 years long the title is completely accurate.

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tokenadult2• 12 years ago

Could you explain that, please? Hacker News has a policy of preferring that articles are submitted with their original title[1] (which was manifestly NOT done here), and to me the article is a lot less interesting than its submission title promises. I am a Wikipedian, and once in a great while I see an article on Wikipedia that is actually well written enough to be worth submitting to Hacker News, a community of thoughtful discussion that prizes submissions that "gratif[y] one's intellectual curiosity."

But most submissions from Wikipedia to Hacker News, and especially the submissions that are submitted with heavily altered titles, don't gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity so much as raise all kinds of questions about incomplete research or writing in the original underlying Wikipedia article. Here, the description appears to be of a very low-energy system that occasionally halts entirely and may not really be doing anything very remarkable. It's hard to tell how the energy flows or steadiness of motion in this system compare to other electro-mechanical systems that just weren't made quite as long ago, and that weren't judged by such relaxed standards.

[1] "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Gracana• 12 years ago

I don't think that matters. It wouldn't have worked on humid days in 1840 either, the important part is that the battery can still power it today.

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cowbell3• 12 years ago

I find the last part amusing:

"The Oxford Electric Bell does not demonstrate perpetual motion. The bell will eventually stop when the dry piles are depleted of charge"

Yes, and the Earth revolving around the Sun is not perpetual motion, despite the fact that it has been happening for billions of years and will continue to happen for billions more. Score one more for the pendants! :D

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dragonwriter• 12 years ago

Its not pedantry. The significant thing about "perpetual motion" is how it would violate (and, hence, disprove) what are currently understood, on very strong evidence, to be physical laws. So, its a pretty key distinction.

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thekevan• 12 years ago

That part got me as well. Sure it isn't technically perpetual motion but I wonder if maybe it could be considered "near perpetual" or "relatively perpetual" from a selfish human point of view.

So if motion lasts longer than your lifetime, doesn't it seem like perpetual motion to you? Personally, when I think of perpetual motion, the first thing that comes to mind is using it to power a generator. In that context, if something could produce electricity for decades without being refueled or even attended to, aren't we moving toward and/or operating with a realm that feels like perpetual motion--even if it is only from our self centered point of view? Granted, this is sort of like if someone is in your field of view and then steps behind a tree that obscures your view of them, you can say they are invisible to you. Though it isn't exactly true to say they have gained the power of invisibility, you labeling them as being invisible is a self centered and relative statement.

So as self centered humans, from our point of view any motion which lasts years or even decades--and could be harnessed--could seem sort "effectively perpetual" to us, even though it is nowhere near actually perpetual.

(Yes, this theory ignores that fact that that generator's output would indeed be ridiculously low, probably close to unmeasurable--the important part is that if we have motion, we assume we can generate electricity. And yes, even if you could make this happen, it may take thousands or even millions of these together just to power an LED. I was probably prompted of this thought because of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hwLHdBTQ7s)

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saalweachter• 12 years ago

I think there's a lot of illusion here because not only is the energy being consumed at a terribly slow pace, you also can't "see" it being consumed. If you could watch the battery run down, and see that it was now only "half full" (or whatever fraction of the charge currently remains) as opposed to a hundred years ago, it would be less magical.

For a similarly long-running process, consider underground coal fires. If a seam of coal is burning, it may take hundreds of years to burn itself out, comparable to the lifetime of the ringing bell. But because it is consuming its fuel in a much more obvious fashion, it's less magical.

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awj• 12 years ago

I think pedantry can be excused in the face of claims that would disprove the fundamental laws upon which our understanding of the universe rests.

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0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

It's pedants not pendants. Do you always spell it wrong as a sort of infuriating joke? That's a good idea actually.

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cowbell3• 12 years ago

lol :D

I guess the thing that struck me about the perpetual motion line is how unintentionally(?) trollish it was. It invites debate. It would be better to omit it.

It's like a web form that asks your email address followed by "We never ever sell your personal information to anyone!!11!" It raises a question I wasn't even considering and now I'm not sure I trust it! http://goo.gl/PaXG5g

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shawnz• 12 years ago

Yes, and the Earth revolving around the Sun is not perpetual motion, despite the fact that it has been happening for billions of years and will continue to happen for billions more.

Well, circular motion does not cause any work to be done, so that's not quite the same thing. The earth might continue spinning around the sun forever in a perfect universe, but that still wouldn't violate conservation of energy.

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TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Moving charges radiate energy so there's at least one source of a drain.

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cowbell3• 12 years ago

circular motion does not cause any work to be done

Like tides?

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anigbrowl• 12 years ago

It's unfortunate that it doesn't estimate when that might be. As the 'internet of things' becomes more and more important, I can think f many applications for very long-lived low-voltage batteries in places that might not be suitable for solar panels or have access to wired power.

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andmarios3• 12 years ago

I have a Casio calculator (fx-100s) that still goes strong on its original battery since I bought it, 18 years ago! I use it a few times every week.

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batmansbelt• 12 years ago

It might be solar powered.

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andmarios3• 12 years ago

No, it only has an AA battery. I also have a remote control from a Sharp radio system which still works after 24 years with its original batteries! But this one is used very rarely, say 2-3 times every year.

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lisper• 12 years ago

Heh, I have a Casio EL-5813 that I got in 1980 that still is still running on its original batteries!

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Oxford Electric Bell

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