That 2,000 year old battery theory still bugs me

I keep seeing people claim the Baghdad Battery was used for electroplating, but I read a paper from the Journal of Archaeological Science last month that tested it. The voltage is way too low to plate anything, and there's zero evidence of gold traces on any artifacts from that period. Has anyone actually looked at the raw data from those experiments?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa6716d ago

That paper from 2021 was really good. The tests showed the batteries produced like 0.5 volts max, which isn't enough to do anything useful. Honestly, the whole thing reminds me of how people today think a blender can charge a phone if you spin it fast enough. I see it all the time on social media, someone takes a cool old object and makes up a wild story about what it did. Nobody bothers to check if the math actually works out. Its the same pattern with ancient aliens and pyramid theories, people skip the boring facts and jump to the exciting story. The Baghdad Battery was probably just a storage jar for scrolls or something simple like that.

rivera.keith6d ago

Have you ever tried explaining the math to someone who's dead set on a cool theory? It's like talking to a wall. I was in a history group once where a guy swore his grandpa's old tractor battery could power a whole house, and no amount of showing him the voltage specs would change his mind. Sometimes you just have to let people believe what they want, but it's nice when the actual data backs up the boring truth like it does with those Baghdad Battery tests.