This is why I love this channel-- you honestly never know what you're going to see. Yesterday it was a scrying mirror. Today it's a cool historical battery, tomorrow it might be some bizarre hillbilly booze night, and the next a fun-but-deadly Ebay thing [with schematic]. Lol. Thanks, Clive. Your channel is genuinely one of the most entertaining in my sub list.
Farms here on the East Coast used similar, albeit much larger, batteries to provide light before primaries were draped across the countryside. According to some of the older people I've spoken to, some farms were using batteries for lighting up into the 1960s. As a kid, I remember my parents getting a few of the glass battery cases which were about 2-3 gallons in capacity and we used those to store sugar and flour in. I've never seen one fully assembled. Another similar system was in use in older buildings up until the late 1980s to early 1990s for low voltage emergency lighting. The first company I worked for was still doing the yearly or bi-yearly maintenance on those cells, but I never got to go along for the ride.
The terminals were often connected with a bismuth containing solder, it expands when it solidifies (like ice) so they'd drill a hole, and then set the brass stud in with the solder, and it formed a decent physical and electrical connection. if you're interested i could search for the article in one of the books I have (it's probably a copy of telephony) LOL
Oh, the black pitch paint round the top that viewers may have noticed, is designed to prevent 'creep' of the electrolyte. What would happen is that the liquid would 'wick' up the side, as water based solutions do, then dry, then wick a bit further (using the crystals formed during drying), rinse, repeat... the solution and the active ammonium chloride would end up forming pretty patterns on the glass, corroding the wires , and doing other mischief, hence, they tried to avoid that happening by painting the top with a hydrophobic compound
Had these in the school physics lab back in the '60s Suppliers were Griffin & George or Galenkamp. The Ammonium Chloride was almost a saturated solution. The manganese dioxide was a degasser to remove the hydrogen bubbles from the carbon electrode surface, which would reduce the current output. Back then modern plastics were in their infancy so insulation was rubber, cotton braided covered rubber, waxed cotton or silk. Pitch was often used to seal batteries, even the old 'D'cells! It was unaffected by acids/alkali's For higher current applications, such as valve radio heaters, glass cased lead/acid 2 volt cells were used. Recharged at the local bicycle shop or garage. Good to see them again! Thanks for the memories!
There were several of these in the cellar of an old house that I once worked in. I always thought that they were some kind of battery, but was never 100% sure. Now I know. Cheers.
Wow, how often do you see serious old school technology, the reason we quit using these is they made nasty flash lights and were hard on transistor radios, lol
Well as Clive said old style HP2 cells in the UK were effectively one of these but with a paste instead of liquid. And it was more transistor radios were hard on them. A class "A" amplifier can be as low as 10% efficient and even a class "A/B" can only achieve 45% efficiency. So you could be using 25 watts of power to get 3 watts of sound out easily.
In 1959 when I was apprentice electrician at a coal mine, one of our duties was to check the bank of Leclanche cells and maintain then. They were sighted in the pit bottom and used for shaft signalling and were very reliable if looked after properly. Thanks for sharing , bought back some good memories to me.
I've got great memories of working in industrial environments (steelworks) from way back too. Before red tape and deskilling took all the fun out of work.
Clive you come up with some of the neatest stuff and you are able to explain it well. I'm not in the electronics or the electric fields but you have give me some good ideas on some of the simpler things to try out. Sometimes you remind me of a kid that loves to take thins apart just to see how they work. That's how I got in to the mechanical field. But when I was a kid, the stuff I took apart never went back together. Most of that stuff was broken anyway so I couldn't make it any worse than it already was. You have a good channel.
that was me! the kid who took things apart to see how they worked :0 Occasionally I did get them back together again, and loved to check out peoples trash on Tuesdays [ Garbage Collection day when the trash cans were out to the curb.] I would find non working electrical items , small Appliances etc. and putter around with them to see if I could fix them. what I couldn't, I stock piled the good parts for other projects.
Majorly cool. I have read so much about LeClanche cells but had never seen a real original one before. You did a great job deconstructing and explaining this Clive.
Thank you for showing us this antique electrochemical cell. Electrolysis (and this channel, of course) is what got me into electronics, so videos like this are quite a treat for me.
Hi Clive - I understand that the better quality cells used to have the zinc rod amalgamated with mercury to increase the life expectancsy and reduce corrosion. The upper portion of the class jar was coated with paint or pitch to stop the creepage of salt formation from the electrolyte.We had a stately home, some of those Leclanché cells on a wooden shelf to power the annunciator and bell, but regrettably no maids! Cheers.
I didn't realise they used such coarse MnO2 in the pot. I'd totally try to bring that cell back to life, heck I am pretty inspired to just make my own now that you've shown the kind of porous pot they use.
My parents home had a bunch of ignition batteries, the kind used for starting model airplane engines and or used in some cars back in the day. They were huge cells wired in series . The home had three flats and had a vestibule where there was a ear piece and a carbon mic one could speak into. The system never worked but I give that to the cells were dead. They were carbon zinc cells
In the 1950s, my dad, who worked for GEC, brought home several large brown earthenware jars. They were from an emergency power supply for a substation. I think they were Lechlanche cells as they came with zinc rods but nothing else. My mom used the jars to salt-down runner beans from my dad's allotment. A bit of early recycling.
We had three of these in the cellar of one house we lived in, the maid's quarters were in the attic, along with the bell and indicator board. The insulation on the wire you referred to would have been varnished cotton, a thread of cotton would be wrapped round the wire and then the whole lot soaked in varnish or shellac. One layer of cotton was called "Single Cotton Covered" (SCC) and there was double cotton covered (DCC) which had two layers of cotton. The bell had a couple of coils insulated with green DCC and no varnish. IIRC all the terminals were solid brass. Bell pushes were placed strategically around the house. I wish I kept it all, but I was a very inquisitive kid at the time and anything technical got dismantled.
The only old battery I have seen was decades ago when I was a teen and we moved to a local school's janitor's apartment (part of the school building) as my father got the janitor's job. In the basement there was an intriguing looking battery. It was a rectangular clear glass container, quite big perhaps something like 50 by 30 by 20 cm, and it was divided into many sections (the dividers were part of the glass container so it was quite a complicated glass piece all in all). It was also sealed on the top with a pitch-like black material. I think it was an early lead-acid battery but cannot be sure. It was connected to the emergency exit-light system (the green signs near doors). It was later replaced by a modern battery and I'm still kicking myself for not trying to get the old one for myself to study, it was such a beautiful thing!
I have two of these in a wooden waxed box. Electrolyte was Amonium chloride, the white pourus pot contains manganese dioxide as a depolerizer, the carbon rod is positive an the negative pole is a zinc rod at the side. Used in early telephone systems and door bells, two in series was the norm but you could get boxes that hold six, I have a few stamped GPO, companies that made Leclanche batteries included Ever Ready, GEC Magnet to name a few. There were many batteries a bit like this including the Bambertite cell, Bunson cell, Denial cell, some were just ceramic pots with a bandage fill of manganese dioxide an a carbon rod, the Aston cell was one such battery which I have in my collection. I also have a Fuller's Mercury bichromate battery, the ceramic shell only. I also have a Siemens brothers one with leadless glaze, other makes of Leclanche batteries included Indian rubber company of Silvertown London. The real old Leclanche which I don't have yet was made by the national telephone company, these predate the GPO. The earliest battery was found in bagdad an was a ceramic pot with the remains of an iron rod, known as bagdad battery.
It's really sort of amazing some of the off the wall and obscure items you come up with, that's really cool, like a more modern version of the Baghdad battery.
Maybe it's already in the works but I'd love to see you restore one, clean it up and get it working again. Ammonium chlorate is avaiable on ebay after all.
In 1960 my parents bought an old vicarage which was very large and had a servants quarters in the attic. It had a large butler bell system tha ran on a whole bank of Leclanche cells which were still there but at some time they had been replaced with huge dry cells stood on top the leclanche cell's box, the dry cell's were interesting too as they were around 9 inches tall and 3 inch diameter with big brass thumb nuts as terminals and even though they had not been used in years still put out quite a few amps. When the house was renovated we found an even older bell system under the floors and in the walls that used wires and cranks. The batteries in the old stables were by far the best though, a bank of glass lead acid batteries each one the size of a washing machine, around 40 of them.
I remember chucking out a dozen or so of these when clearing out a school physics lab. Wish I still had them. You'd be surprised out what ancient stuff is still in school labs. I used to run a business where I published a newsletter for school science labs. One feature was an ID quiz, I put in a picture of a Poggendorff cell, and got a phone call from a school to say they had one. Don't try and remove the brass connection from the carbon plate, they were often fitted using a mercury copper paste. The manganese dioxide was mixed with carbon granules.
These were in our "O" and "A" level physics syllabus at school. There were lots of cells in the physics labs in perfect condition and they were used to power up demonstrations using magnetometers etc.. Happy days with Mr McCready..
Hello Clive, This was Very interesting to me, I now know what I have. I found this in an old house in western Massachusetts and always thought it was a battery of some sort. Mine has a light green chemical in it that might be nickel sulphate. The tell tail sign was the shape of the mouth on the jar. Thanks so much, I really enjoy your content. Frank
That takes me back, when I worked in the Liverpool Mechanics institute in the 70s we had a load of those still in working order, they had been in use till replaced by alkaline cells some time before I arrived. I believe they were in use at least into the late 50s
Double cotton covered wire! Those were the days. I found lots of that in old valve equipment. It rots, frays, then lets the electrons fly up your arm. Fun Fun Fun!!
What a great find! I like finding old tech like that. Though we don't really have those in the United States. We did have the wire casing you noted way back in the 1920's. I even had to work in an electrical panel (120VAC @ 60A) with the damn thing live! That casing was also very brittle and basically fell apart when moved. But the solid copper wire kept everything from shorting. A teacher friend of mine even brought his shop class around to see it before I started working on it.
Gregory Thomas I didn't mean the historical John Luther (Casey) Jones, I meant the children's TV series based upon the folklore which came to surround him. It frequently features Morse telegraph equipment, including glass jar cells. It's where I got my original fascination with the technology.
Paper or fabric (or both) soaked in parafin was used to insulate wires. In Spain we at the phone companies still call "parafinado" to the wires used to make connections, even when they have been insulated with plastic for as long as I can remember.
The early dry cells were made dry by using sawdust to absorb the ammonium chloride into a paste, then putting it into a zinc case as a housing. They were common until the 1980's as a power supply for farm phone lines which needed a local battery to operate. As the cells need oxygen to depolarise ( which is why they cannot deliver a high current) they put in a small vent made from porous ceramic so it would not dry out too fast. With your zinc electrode the way it was made was by casting the zinc around the tinned copper wire in a mould, so it was embedded in there. They just used what was then ordinary house wire, which was tinned copper (tinned so the copper would not react chemically with the rubber) wire in a natural rubber extruded casing which was then covered with 2 layers of cotton cloth woven around it. The anode is most likely held in by using a small lead strip that was pressed in with the brass screw. Pyrolytic graphite is brittle, but very tough for what it is, you can get it in large blocks used to make electrodes and seals.
Even though my house was built in 1976, there is a hatch above where the phone used to be ,where a No.6 dry cell ( 2½" diameter and 6" tall) would reside. I believe this rural area north (55km) of Auckland NZ was still on a party line exchange at the time. In spite of being 60km inside the northern border of the Auckland Super City ,we are still required to pay tolls for all the calls we make to the rest of Auckland.
During long use the cell polarised with gasses around the electrodes and current fell off. On resting they depolarised and could supply full voltage. The pitch is Anti creep pitch to prevent electolite crystallising up out of the glass jar. I believe these ran with visible crystals in the bottom of the jar in the solution of ammonium chloride. The small vent was for polarising gasses to escape.
Used to have a couple of dozen of these back in the 1950=s, used in telephone exchanges, house door bells, about 1.5 Volts so many sued in series to get higher voltages.
they had much larger batteries like this for rail road use. They had zinc plates and you added cos tic soda and water then they used oil on tp to "seal the water in". I have several at the museum where i work if you would like pics
I love antique battery tech like this. With my American accent, I had always pronounced it leh-CLANCH-ee. Would really like to get my hands on a genuine crow's foot gravity cell.
We used to find this kind of stuff in my neighbours garden when I was a kid, the old chap had lived there all his life, nice and polite but ever so private, no new furniture, very little in his home, minimalistic to the extreme, he died in his 80's when I was about 10yrs old, my parents hadn't heard his bedtime light switch go off for a couple of evenings, and when dad couldn't get a answer at his door he looked into his front room and found him sat in his armchair, called the police and they discovered him deceased. His mum had lived there all her married life according my my parents, and she passed away ages before I was born, and the garden and shed was a treasure trove of 'old' stuff... none of it worth a penny to me as a kid, just fascinating to pick up, investigate and wonder about... My dad had told me that what these sticks of metal were, the broken jars and how they would take them into town to get refilled, there were so many bottles that had marbles in them, honestly, that neighbour threw so much stuff into the garden, and they never managed the garden, it was always overgrown, my dad and the neighbour the other side would get sick of shouting over the brambles and every few years would wade in and hack it down and have a bonfire in the middle... There was so much wildlife tho, but the rats and mice were a big pest... Our cats were always bringing home vermin. When the mice vanished the rats moved in, when they went the mice came back... Just seeing this video brought back sooooo many memories and explained what my dad couldn't, they must've thrown out so many chemicals into the soil I'm astonished plants could even grow there, let alone thrive! Wow, that was all sooooo long ago! I'm nearly 50 now!
Thanks for this. You do have your polarity reversed, as was pointed out below. I teach electrochemistry, and this will be a fun addition to show. I will try constructing one using laboratory equipment. Once it's done, I'd be happy to send pics, etc.
I grew up in Pennsylvania, the house I grew up in was built in the 1860s so electrical lines were added after the house was built... but we did some renovating in a room and there was still those style of copper wires wrapped in almost a cord sheath. Seems massively dangerous, but hey I guess the home never burned down.
It is interesting that in all this time not much has changed in the construction of the classic zinc-carbon battery. (Even if the advertising on the packaging always suggests otherwise. Supposedly everything is super new and better than the others). This wire on the zinc electrode can still sometimes be found here in Germany in the domestic installation in very old houses. Believe it or not, this wiring even often still meets the conditions for an insulation test with 500V test voltage. But mostly only under absolutely dry conditions.
Strange indeed. Back in the early 50's when we still lived on our farm referred to as "Up North!" in North Dakota, where we had no electric power, to charge the batteries on the farm equipment, when they went dead, father had a wind charger. There was a small light bulb in the garage, probably equivalent to a 25 watt today that could be turned on if the wind allowed. He had a glass battery of sorts but the container was much larger. When he finally stopped using the battery, the contents were discarded, and the battery jar was given to we children to use for what we desired. Well following a heavy rain, we discovered that tadpoles were developing in a mud puddle in the middle of our driveway (Cars diverted so as not to get stuck and drove on the grass. So we gathered many of the tadpoles and placed in that glass battery jar to watch them grow. My sister and I were just talking of this a few weeks ago, then I run into this video. To me that jar was very large, but I must have been 5 or 6 years of age, so who knows how large it really was.
+bigclivedotcom - the reason the current drops off is because you end up with ions clustering around the electrodes because they're attracted to them. They end up getting in the way of new ions going towards the electrodes to drop off their charge. When you stop drawing charge, the ions diffuse back throughout the solution and everything goes back to normal
Ammonium Chloride is useful for cleaning soldering iron tips. It's also used to make salmiakki (salty licorice candy) and for making baked goods crisp. The Indians call it noshader and use it as a spice in chaat masala. It has an interesting flavor.
The manganese diox is actually a mixture of Manganese diox and carbon particles. Improves the recovery time and delays the time before the cell under load loses voltage.
Extremely interesting video big Clive , thank you .....i sometime wonder what look on the inventors faces would be like if you could travel back in time with today's tech, imagine taking a 1.5v button cell back and showing him that, or a 12v car battery....imagination is a wonderful thing
I think they used to use these on the railway for track circuits. When I were a nipper, they were doing the local signal box and there were dozens of them piled up outside the relay-rooms. They were definitely not lead-acid, but were too heavy to usefully 'liberate.'
Signal & Telegraph applications often use NiFe cells, the electrodes being Nickel and Iron (unsurprisingly), with an electrolyte of Caustic Potash. EMF is 1.4V.
I swear to god there was those on a shelf, under the stairs in my grandmothers rented home back in the 80s, it did still have servents bells in the rooms. My parents lived inthe servents quarters on the third floor until they got their council place. How interesting.
The drop in current after prolonged use is due to the formation of tiny bubbles on the electrodes as current flows. These dissipate when the discharge stops.
Hi Clive,love all your videos ! I have a bell system in my house,it has a box above the main living room door with the numbers 1 to 5 on it ...when the front door bell is pushed number 1 shakes back and fore...other numbers cover the bedrooms... House was built about 110 years ago, and we must be the only house in the street that didn't rip them out! Prob goes back to the servant/master days of the house? Runs on bell transformers now though... Could you do a strip down of a cigar shaped battery pack that is currently on sale in B&M bargains,it is 2600mah and is £4.99 with a removable LED light which plugs in at the top...I have 2 but would love to see the build quality inside etc? Thanks martin
IIRC, you can prepare ammonium chloride by mixing ammonia and hydrochloric acid, both available at hardware stores, though in diluted, impure forms, and the latter is sold as muriatic acid. The yield will almost certainly be lower than simply purchasing ammonium chloride, but it _might_ be potent enough to do the trick here.
They are considering mining Manganese dioxide in a shallower part of the Mariana Trench, it forms on the rocks and gives them a rounded appearance in some places where it's so thick. I was watching a live stream from the Okeanos Explorer which was surveying areas of up to 7 kilometres deep.
Of course there was no TV when that technology was in wide use, lucky if they had radio :-) Note even in the 1950's and 60's TV's could have remote controls, who says that they had to use batteries at all or wires.
The zinc electrode is the anode (where oxidation takes place). Oxidation is loss of electrons (sort of). Zinc metal loses electrons to the circuit causing it to become negative not positive as you suggest. Interestingly with rechargeable cells, the negative electrode is the cathode during the charging part of the cycle. This means you can't link oxidation with a particular electrode unless you also specify if the cell is charging or discharging.
I've just recently discovered the origin of the word, "posh". It's an old anacronym from when travelling to places like India or such from the UK via a long voyage. Tickets, paid well in advance, were marked POSH... PORTside-Outbound, Starboard-Homebound so you wouldn't sweat to death during the trip. I don't know how much extra it cost but if you have to ask then you probably couldn't afford it.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I'm usually pretty good with nautically-derived acronyms and terms (my Grandfather was British, and a boatbuilder) but I never knew the origin of "posh". So the port/starboard cabin assignments were based on ticket price, as a means for wealthy folk to avoid the hot morning-to-noon sun when crossing the equator?
Just when you thought it was safe to trust internet facts, you find that you can't trust internet facts... sheesh! "One day... one day, the internet will be trustworthy." Abraham Lincoln 1903. Wait... isn't the *Oxford English Dictionary* on the internet? (sounds a bit posh too, doesn't it? :) Ahhh... when you have a truth and a legend... Print the legend! ;-)
The diminution of current on-load is owing to a phenomenon known as polarisation; the cell recovers during rest as it depolarises. The manganese dioxide acts as a depolariser.
That type of wire been used alot in houses in belgium, i used to replace those alot as an electrician. rubber, fabric, greese insulation. Alot of houses actually still have them here.
I was just about to say, my house in Australia had that wiring until we renovated the house in the 1980's. However the call system used mechanical bell cranks (hence the name...) to ring a bell. Just for the front door, not to summon the servants!
My parent's house was built in the 1920's here in the States, and the original wiring was the same sort of thing. Most of it was replaced in the 70's when my folks took it over from my grandparents. There is still a bit of it in the attic, but it isn't hooked up to anything.
@@gasdive We called it Bell Wire in the old days. Bell wire definition is - a small-size wire insulated with paraffin-coated cotton and used especially for electric bell circuits.
How common is it to see fabric covered wires in the UK? From my experience in the northeastern US, you can find them in old wiring in houses or old lamps and things.
very early wiring was waxed cloth, or oil cloth, the same as the macintosh waterproof jackets, it does degrade badly with time, but this was before mains voltaged, and for a while was with mains voltages, then of course rubber came along and then the current pvc, for larger wires from the early generators they used wooden troughs, which is what edison did.
yes there is modern cloth flex, mostly seen on irons as its very resistant to burning, and new vintage lamp cord also, which is just an outer over a modern rubbery stuff
There are some specialist cables, mostly high temperature, with woven sheath but I can't think of a situation where it's used in fixed wiring. The oldest cable I've pulled out was a twin conductor where the conductors were wrapped in fabric and some sort of resin and then the whole lot was encased in a lead outer sheath, I'd guess over 100 years old.
I have seen it in avo test meters from WWII period. Not physically crumbling to the touch but in this scenario it doesn't get any significant chemical attack or heat degradation so i would expect it to be still ok. Usually black in colour
Lead sheathed vulcanised india rubber. Tends to be very crumbly these days. There are still some flats in this tenement wired with it because the owners don't want the expense of a rewire when "it still works".
As I recall, the original telegraph systems were powered with voltaic cells ( Cu and Zn in dilute sulfuric acid e-lyte) which developed a potential of about 1 volt. (How the standard of 1 volt was defined) I also seem to recall that these old cells used to power the telegraphs were quite large (volume measured in gallons). Talk about a mess if you broke or spilled one!
GPO bakelite dial phones in the UK up to the 1950s had cables to the hand set and to the wall outlet that were fabric wound and then plaited together. Quite durable and phones would commonly last 20 years in those days.
Cathode is the electrode (conventional) current flows out of, anode is what current flows into. So on a battery/cell the anode is -ve and cathode is +ve, on a device (like a diode) the anode is + and the cathode is -
This should be brought back to life (or replica made) , I made a replica a good few years ago with my students, great fun and works quite well as a voltage reference (but there are better systems). Hmmm DMX controllers, summoning spirits and the dark lord followed by summoning maids, , some sort of control theme here ..... :)
clive: you should have mentioned what the magnesium dioxide is used for. it does not participate in the electro-chemical reaction that generates the current. the role of magnesium dioxide is to capture and react with the hydrogen atoms generated during the reation; hydrogen atoms can combine to form hydrogen molecules (H2), which is a gas at room temperature and bubble of H2 will get out of the aqueous solution and stick to the carbon electrode. an electrode covered with gas bubbles will be less reactive.
This is why I love this channel-- you honestly never know what you're going to see. Yesterday it was a scrying mirror. Today it's a cool historical battery, tomorrow it might be some bizarre hillbilly booze night, and the next a fun-but-deadly Ebay thing [with schematic]. Lol.
Thanks, Clive. Your channel is genuinely one of the most entertaining in my sub list.
Indeed.
Additional bonus: Clive's channel comments are full of insights from some very smart and/or interesting people. :)
he's become quite the doodler too. lol
Oh did you miss the hillbilly video? ..think beer drinking midgets, bad teeth, shotguns and high voltage...it really was bizarre.
Farms here on the East Coast used similar, albeit much larger, batteries to provide light before primaries were draped across the countryside. According to some of the older people I've spoken to, some farms were using batteries for lighting up into the 1960s. As a kid, I remember my parents getting a few of the glass battery cases which were about 2-3 gallons in capacity and we used those to store sugar and flour in. I've never seen one fully assembled. Another similar system was in use in older buildings up until the late 1980s to early 1990s for low voltage emergency lighting. The first company I worked for was still doing the yearly or bi-yearly maintenance on those cells, but I never got to go along for the ride.
Thanks for sharing. There is always a ton of things to learn from comments related to educational videos.
This comment is nit YT quality. Why aren't you saying something stupid?
The terminals were often connected with a bismuth containing solder, it expands when it solidifies (like ice) so they'd drill a hole, and then set the brass stud in with the solder, and it formed a decent physical and electrical connection.
if you're interested i could search for the article in one of the books I have (it's probably a copy of telephony) LOL
Oh, the black pitch paint round the top that viewers may have noticed, is designed to prevent 'creep' of the electrolyte. What would happen is that the liquid would 'wick' up the side, as water based solutions do, then dry, then wick a bit further (using the crystals formed during drying), rinse, repeat... the solution and the active ammonium chloride would end up forming pretty patterns on the glass, corroding the wires , and doing other mischief, hence, they tried to avoid that happening by painting the top with a hydrophobic compound
Ah, I wondered about that bit.
Had these in the school physics lab back in the '60s Suppliers were Griffin & George or Galenkamp. The Ammonium Chloride was almost a saturated solution. The manganese dioxide was a degasser to remove the hydrogen bubbles from the carbon electrode surface, which would reduce the current output. Back then modern plastics were in their infancy so insulation was rubber, cotton braided covered rubber, waxed cotton or silk. Pitch was often used to seal batteries, even the old 'D'cells! It was unaffected by acids/alkali's
For higher current applications, such as valve radio heaters, glass cased lead/acid 2 volt cells were used. Recharged at the local bicycle shop or garage. Good to see them again! Thanks for the memories!
There were several of these in the cellar of an old house that I once worked in. I always thought that they were some kind of battery, but was never 100% sure. Now I know. Cheers.
+Doug Reed G.I. Joe!
+Reloader The other half is just battle!
*unleashes demon from Super Spooky Scrying Mirror*
en garde!
Would like to see an active one subjected to various tests. ;)
YES! bring it back to life! :D
I cant wait for the "Its ALIVE!" moment from BigClive lol
Wow, how often do you see serious old school technology, the reason we quit using these is they made nasty flash lights and were hard on transistor radios, lol
Up vote just for the "avatar"
Well as Clive said old style HP2 cells in the UK were effectively one of these but with a paste instead of liquid. And it was more transistor radios were hard on them. A class "A" amplifier can be as low as 10% efficient and even a class "A/B" can only achieve 45% efficiency. So you could be using 25 watts of power to get 3 watts of sound out easily.
The "anode" is the terminal where conventional electric current normally *enters* a device. On a battery, this is the *negative* electrode.
In 1959 when I was apprentice electrician at a coal mine, one of our duties was to check the bank of Leclanche cells and maintain then.
They were sighted in the pit bottom and used for shaft signalling and were very reliable if looked after properly.
Thanks for sharing , bought back some good memories to me.
I've got great memories of working in industrial environments (steelworks) from way back too. Before red tape and deskilling took all the fun out of work.
I've be watching you for a long time but god you make seemingly boring things fascinating!
Awesome cell! I got a Grenet-cell from an antique-shop in Dubrovnik last week in a very nice condition.
Clive you come up with some of the neatest stuff and you are able to explain it well. I'm not in the electronics or the electric fields but you have give me some good ideas on some of the simpler things to try out. Sometimes you remind me of a kid that loves to take thins apart just to see how they work. That's how I got in to the mechanical field. But when I was a kid, the stuff I took apart never went back together. Most of that stuff was broken anyway so I couldn't make it any worse than it already was. You have a good channel.
that was me! the kid who took things apart to see how they worked :0 Occasionally I did get them back together again, and loved to check out peoples trash on Tuesdays [ Garbage Collection day when the trash cans were out to the curb.] I would find non working electrical items , small Appliances etc. and putter around with them to see if I could fix them. what I couldn't, I stock piled the good parts for other projects.
Majorly cool. I have read so much about LeClanche cells but had never seen a real original one before. You did a great job deconstructing and explaining this Clive.
Thank you for showing us this antique electrochemical cell. Electrolysis (and this channel, of course) is what got me into electronics, so videos like this are quite a treat for me.
Hi Clive - I understand that the better quality cells used to have the zinc rod amalgamated with mercury to increase the life expectancsy and reduce corrosion. The upper portion of the class jar was coated with paint or pitch to stop the creepage of salt formation from the electrolyte.We had a stately home, some of those Leclanché cells on a wooden shelf to power the annunciator and bell, but regrettably no maids! Cheers.
I didn't realise they used such coarse MnO2 in the pot. I'd totally try to bring that cell back to life, heck I am pretty inspired to just make my own now that you've shown the kind of porous pot they use.
Hi Alan, nice to see you're still out there. If you do make one, I'd love to see a video of it on your channel :)
Have at it.
My parents home had a bunch of ignition batteries, the kind used for starting model airplane engines and or used in some cars back in the day. They were huge cells wired in series . The home had three flats and had a vestibule where there was a ear piece and a carbon mic one could speak into. The system never worked but I give that to the cells were dead. They were carbon zinc cells
You never fail to bring something new and different to show us, love it!
In the 1950s, my dad, who worked for GEC, brought home several large brown earthenware jars. They were from an emergency power supply for a substation. I think they were Lechlanche cells as they came with zinc rods but nothing else. My mom used the jars to salt-down runner beans from my dad's allotment. A bit of early recycling.
Would be very cool to see you try and get it working again.
We had three of these in the cellar of one house we lived in, the maid's quarters were in the attic, along with the bell and indicator board. The insulation on the wire you referred to would have been varnished cotton, a thread of cotton would be wrapped round the wire and then the whole lot soaked in varnish or shellac. One layer of cotton was called "Single Cotton Covered" (SCC) and there was double cotton covered (DCC) which had two layers of cotton. The bell had a couple of coils insulated with green DCC and no varnish. IIRC all the terminals were solid brass. Bell pushes were placed strategically around the house.
I wish I kept it all, but I was a very inquisitive kid at the time and anything technical got dismantled.
Many thanks for this, Clive!
I've been fascinated by those servant bells for decades,
but I had no idea this is how they were powered.
Really like the videos on vintage electronics like this old battery and especially that old elevator control circuit
I've never been in a posh attic.
Hehe!
You've never lived, son!
They only have them in the UK, posh I mean.
I'm in the UK. I'm just not posh enough.
I had forgotten about these. Glad you put this vid up.
You may like to double check. Conventional wisdom has the carbon rod positive, and the Zinc as the negative. Nice to see one in the flesh though
The only old battery I have seen was decades ago when I was a teen and we moved to a local school's janitor's apartment (part of the school building) as my father got the janitor's job. In the basement there was an intriguing looking battery. It was a rectangular clear glass container, quite big perhaps something like 50 by 30 by 20 cm, and it was divided into many sections (the dividers were part of the glass container so it was quite a complicated glass piece all in all). It was also sealed on the top with a pitch-like black material. I think it was an early lead-acid battery but cannot be sure. It was connected to the emergency exit-light system (the green signs near doors). It was later replaced by a modern battery and I'm still kicking myself for not trying to get the old one for myself to study, it was such a beautiful thing!
cool video, that you found something like this in an attic is fantastic.
Glad you posted the correction, very interesting tear down.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing this old technology.
history time with clive! thanks for another video clive
I have two of these in a wooden waxed box. Electrolyte was Amonium chloride, the white pourus pot contains manganese dioxide as a depolerizer, the carbon rod is positive an the negative pole is a zinc rod at the side. Used in early telephone systems and door bells, two in series was the norm but you could get boxes that hold six, I have a few stamped GPO, companies that made Leclanche batteries included Ever Ready, GEC Magnet to name a few. There were many batteries a bit like this including the Bambertite cell, Bunson cell, Denial cell, some were just ceramic pots with a bandage fill of manganese dioxide an a carbon rod, the Aston cell was one such battery which I have in my collection. I also have a Fuller's Mercury bichromate battery, the ceramic shell only. I also have a Siemens brothers one with leadless glaze, other makes of Leclanche batteries included Indian rubber company of Silvertown London. The real old Leclanche which I don't have yet was made by the national telephone company, these predate the GPO. The earliest battery was found in bagdad an was a ceramic pot with the remains of an iron rod, known as bagdad battery.
C'mon! I thought for sure that you were going to reassemble it, fill it back up and run an LED off it.
No Sal ammoniac here unfortunately. I'd also have to have used two in series to light an LED. (Or use a Joule Thief.)
+bigclivedotcom charge a phone off one!
+bigclivedotcom surely you can find an alternative
+bigclivedotcom get it working and run a led on a joule thief and see how long it will last?
It's really sort of amazing some of the off the wall and obscure items you come up with, that's really cool, like a more modern version of the Baghdad battery.
love that clive posts soo late
Maybe it's already in the works but I'd love to see you restore one, clean it up and get it working again. Ammonium chlorate is avaiable on ebay after all.
Actually ammonium chloride aka sal ammoniac. The chlorate wouldn't work at all.
In 1960 my parents bought an old vicarage which was very large and had a servants quarters in the attic. It had a large butler bell system tha ran on a whole bank of Leclanche cells which were still there but at some time they had been replaced with huge dry cells stood on top the leclanche cell's box, the dry cell's were interesting too as they were around 9 inches tall and 3 inch diameter with big brass thumb nuts as terminals and even though they had not been used in years still put out quite a few amps. When the house was renovated we found an even older bell system under the floors and in the walls that used wires and cranks. The batteries in the old stables were by far the best though, a bank of glass lead acid batteries each one the size of a washing machine, around 40 of them.
Great history lesson. I'd like to see more vids about battery development.
I remember chucking out a dozen or so of these when clearing out a school physics lab. Wish I still had them. You'd be surprised out what ancient stuff is still in school labs. I used to run a business where I published a newsletter for school science labs. One feature was an ID quiz, I put in a picture of a Poggendorff cell, and got a phone call from a school to say they had one.
Don't try and remove the brass connection from the carbon plate, they were often fitted using a mercury copper paste. The manganese dioxide was mixed with carbon granules.
These were in our "O" and "A" level physics syllabus at school. There were lots of cells in the physics labs in perfect condition and they were used to power up demonstrations using magnetometers etc.. Happy days with Mr McCready..
Great video. I just came across one and had no idea how it worked. Thanks
Hello Clive,
This was Very interesting to me, I now know what I have. I found this in an old house in western Massachusetts and always thought it was a battery of some sort. Mine has a light green chemical in it that might be nickel sulphate. The tell tail sign was the shape of the mouth on the jar. Thanks so much, I really enjoy your content. Frank
Very cool video big fella, most informative and interesting, as always sir.
That takes me back, when I worked in the Liverpool Mechanics institute in the 70s we had a load of those still in working order, they had been in use till replaced by alkaline cells some time before I arrived. I believe they were in use at least into the late 50s
Very interesting and I love how it looks like your hands are talking 3:05
Double cotton covered wire! Those were the days. I found lots of that in old valve equipment. It rots, frays, then lets the electrons fly up your arm. Fun Fun Fun!!
What a great find! I like finding old tech like that. Though we don't really have those in the United States. We did have the wire casing you noted way back in the 1920's. I even had to work in an electrical panel (120VAC @ 60A) with the damn thing live! That casing was also very brittle and basically fell apart when moved. But the solid copper wire kept everything from shorting. A teacher friend of mine even brought his shop class around to see it before I started working on it.
Of course you have them in the US! Didn't you ever watch Casey Jones?
Nope. Just did a wiki-search on him and remembered hearing about but not seeing anything.
Gregory Thomas I didn't mean the historical John Luther (Casey) Jones, I meant the children's TV series based upon the folklore which came to surround him.
It frequently features Morse telegraph equipment, including glass jar cells. It's where I got my original fascination with the technology.
Ohhhh...kewl beans! I will look that up shortly...thanks for the info!
ACID: Anode = Current Into Device. The anode of a cell is counter-intuitively the negative terminal. Otherwise, fascinating video.
This is amazing vintage stuff! Wow.
Paper or fabric (or both) soaked in parafin was used to insulate wires. In Spain we at the phone companies still call "parafinado" to the wires used to make connections, even when they have been insulated with plastic for as long as I can remember.
Thanks for showing this, Absolutely love your videos! Keep it up!. Looking at a CFL bulb as i watch this.
The early dry cells were made dry by using sawdust to absorb the ammonium chloride into a paste, then putting it into a zinc case as a housing. They were common until the 1980's as a power supply for farm phone lines which needed a local battery to operate. As the cells need oxygen to depolarise ( which is why they cannot deliver a high current) they put in a small vent made from porous ceramic so it would not dry out too fast.
With your zinc electrode the way it was made was by casting the zinc around the tinned copper wire in a mould, so it was embedded in there. They just used what was then ordinary house wire, which was tinned copper (tinned so the copper would not react chemically with the rubber) wire in a natural rubber extruded casing which was then covered with 2 layers of cotton cloth woven around it.
The anode is most likely held in by using a small lead strip that was pressed in with the brass screw. Pyrolytic graphite is brittle, but very tough for what it is, you can get it in large blocks used to make electrodes and seals.
Even though my house was built in 1976, there is a hatch above where the phone used to be ,where a No.6 dry cell ( 2½" diameter and 6" tall) would reside. I believe this rural area north (55km) of Auckland NZ was still on a party line exchange at the time.
In spite of being 60km inside the northern border of the Auckland Super City ,we are still required to pay tolls for all the calls we make to the rest of Auckland.
During long use the cell polarised with gasses around the electrodes and current fell off. On resting they depolarised and could supply full voltage. The pitch is Anti creep pitch to prevent electolite crystallising up out of the glass jar. I believe these ran with visible crystals in the bottom of the jar in the solution of ammonium chloride. The small vent was for polarising gasses to escape.
Used to have a couple of dozen of these back in the 1950=s, used in telephone exchanges, house door bells, about 1.5 Volts so many sued in series to get higher voltages.
they had much larger batteries like this for rail road use. They had zinc plates and you added cos tic soda and water then they used oil on tp to "seal the water in". I have several at the museum where i work if you would like pics
I love antique battery tech like this. With my American accent, I had always pronounced it leh-CLANCH-ee. Would really like to get my hands on a genuine crow's foot gravity cell.
We used to find this kind of stuff in my neighbours garden when I was a kid, the old chap had lived there all his life, nice and polite but ever so private, no new furniture, very little in his home, minimalistic to the extreme, he died in his 80's when I was about 10yrs old, my parents hadn't heard his bedtime light switch go off for a couple of evenings, and when dad couldn't get a answer at his door he looked into his front room and found him sat in his armchair, called the police and they discovered him deceased. His mum had lived there all her married life according my my parents, and she passed away ages before I was born, and the garden and shed was a treasure trove of 'old' stuff... none of it worth a penny to me as a kid, just fascinating to pick up, investigate and wonder about... My dad had told me that what these sticks of metal were, the broken jars and how they would take them into town to get refilled, there were so many bottles that had marbles in them, honestly, that neighbour threw so much stuff into the garden, and they never managed the garden, it was always overgrown, my dad and the neighbour the other side would get sick of shouting over the brambles and every few years would wade in and hack it down and have a bonfire in the middle... There was so much wildlife tho, but the rats and mice were a big pest... Our cats were always bringing home vermin. When the mice vanished the rats moved in, when they went the mice came back... Just seeing this video brought back sooooo many memories and explained what my dad couldn't, they must've thrown out so many chemicals into the soil I'm astonished plants could even grow there, let alone thrive! Wow, that was all sooooo long ago! I'm nearly 50 now!
Hi BigClive, thanks for this very interresting video! - pierre -
Thanks for this. You do have your polarity reversed, as was pointed out below. I teach electrochemistry, and this will be a fun addition to show. I will try constructing one using laboratory equipment. Once it's done, I'd be happy to send pics, etc.
In a dry cell battery, the zinc forms the negative terminal and the carbon is positive. We used to use them to start the engines on our model planes.
I grew up in Pennsylvania, the house I grew up in was built in the 1860s so electrical lines were added after the house was built... but we did some renovating in a room and there was still those style of copper wires wrapped in almost a cord sheath. Seems massively dangerous, but hey I guess the home never burned down.
hi Clive, been watching your vids for a long time, love your vids ( and your voice lol )
keep em comming! ( need some warm white leds now lol)
I would love to see you make a new one of these.
It is interesting that in all this time not much has changed in the construction of the classic zinc-carbon battery. (Even if the advertising on the packaging always suggests otherwise. Supposedly everything is super new and better than the others).
This wire on the zinc electrode can still sometimes be found here in Germany in the domestic installation in very old houses.
Believe it or not, this wiring even often still meets the conditions for an insulation test with 500V test voltage. But mostly only under absolutely dry conditions.
Strange indeed. Back in the early 50's when we still lived on our farm referred to as "Up North!" in North Dakota, where we had no electric power, to charge the batteries on the farm equipment, when they went dead, father had a wind charger. There was a small light bulb in the garage, probably equivalent to a 25 watt today that could be turned on if the wind allowed. He had a glass battery of sorts but the container was much larger. When he finally stopped using the battery, the contents were discarded, and the battery jar was given to we children to use for what we desired. Well following a heavy rain, we discovered that tadpoles were developing in a mud puddle in the middle of our driveway (Cars diverted so as not to get stuck and drove on the grass. So we gathered many of the tadpoles and placed in that glass battery jar to watch them grow. My sister and I were just talking of this a few weeks ago, then I run into this video. To me that jar was very large, but I must have been 5 or 6 years of age, so who knows how large it really was.
+bigclivedotcom - the reason the current drops off is because you end up with ions clustering around the electrodes because they're attracted to them. They end up getting in the way of new ions going towards the electrodes to drop off their charge. When you stop drawing charge, the ions diffuse back throughout the solution and everything goes back to normal
Ammonium Chloride is useful for cleaning soldering iron tips. It's also used to make salmiakki (salty licorice candy) and for making baked goods crisp. The Indians call it noshader and use it as a spice in chaat masala. It has an interesting flavor.
The manganese diox is actually a mixture of Manganese diox and carbon particles. Improves the recovery time and delays the time before the cell under load loses voltage.
Ya learn something new every day; today I learned about leclanche cells kool!
Extremely interesting video big Clive , thank you .....i sometime wonder what look on the inventors faces would be like if you could travel back in time with today's tech, imagine taking a 1.5v button cell back and showing him that, or a 12v car battery....imagination is a wonderful thing
I think they used to use these on the railway for track circuits. When I were a nipper, they were doing the local signal box and there were dozens of them piled up outside the relay-rooms. They were definitely not lead-acid, but were too heavy to usefully 'liberate.'
When my dad was a volunteer, about 15 years ago, at the Isle of Wight Steam Railway, they still used these for the track circuits.
Signal & Telegraph applications often use NiFe cells, the electrodes being Nickel and Iron (unsurprisingly), with an electrolyte of Caustic Potash.
EMF is 1.4V.
I swear to god there was those on a shelf, under the stairs in my grandmothers rented home back in the 80s, it did still have servents bells in the rooms. My parents lived inthe servents quarters on the third floor until they got their council place. How interesting.
The drop in current after prolonged use is due to the formation of tiny bubbles on the electrodes as current flows. These dissipate when the discharge stops.
Hi Clive,love all your videos ! I have a bell system in my house,it has a box above the main living room door with the numbers 1 to 5 on it ...when the front door bell is pushed number 1 shakes back and fore...other numbers cover the bedrooms... House was built about 110 years ago, and we must be the only house in the street that didn't rip them out! Prob goes back to the servant/master days of the house? Runs on bell transformers now though... Could you do a strip down of a cigar shaped battery pack that is currently on sale in B&M bargains,it is 2600mah and is £4.99 with a removable LED light which plugs in at the top...I have 2 but would love to see the build quality inside etc? Thanks martin
would be interesting to see one of these in functional use,,
IIRC, you can prepare ammonium chloride by mixing ammonia and hydrochloric acid, both available at hardware stores, though in diluted, impure forms, and the latter is sold as muriatic acid. The yield will almost certainly be lower than simply purchasing ammonium chloride, but it _might_ be potent enough to do the trick here.
They are considering mining Manganese dioxide in a shallower part of the Mariana Trench, it forms on the rocks and gives them a rounded appearance in some places where it's so thick.
I was watching a live stream from the Okeanos Explorer which was surveying areas of up to 7 kilometres deep.
Very interesting! Great video!
I found out fairly recently that they had battery powered taxis in London in the 1800's impressive stuff :)
Back in the old days, people must have had a monstrosity of a tv remote control, to be able to house two of these.
there were no remote controls. their controls were on the TV itself.
I remember my Grandfather had a VCR with a wired remote! It plugged in with what I think was a 3.5mm jack.
Of course there was no TV when that technology was in wide use, lucky if they had radio :-) Note even in the 1950's and 60's TV's could have remote controls, who says that they had to use batteries at all or wires.
The zinc electrode is the anode (where oxidation takes place). Oxidation is loss of electrons (sort of). Zinc metal loses electrons to the circuit causing it to become negative not positive as you suggest. Interestingly with rechargeable cells, the negative electrode is the cathode during the charging part of the cycle. This means you can't link oxidation with a particular electrode unless you also specify if the cell is charging or discharging.
Darn. That's where I got mixed up.
I've just recently discovered the origin of the word, "posh". It's an old anacronym from when travelling to places like India or such from the UK via a long voyage. Tickets, paid well in advance, were marked POSH... PORTside-Outbound, Starboard-Homebound so you wouldn't sweat to death during the trip. I don't know how much extra it cost but if you have to ask then you probably couldn't afford it.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
I'm usually pretty good with nautically-derived acronyms and terms (my Grandfather was British, and a boatbuilder) but I never knew the origin of "posh". So the port/starboard cabin assignments were based on ticket price, as a means for wealthy folk to avoid the hot morning-to-noon sun when crossing the equator?
I heard that but have never seen POSH on a ticket from the Victorian era etc.
All the best backronyms are
Just when you thought it was safe to trust internet facts, you find that you can't trust internet facts... sheesh!
"One day... one day, the internet will be trustworthy." Abraham Lincoln 1903.
Wait... isn't the *Oxford English Dictionary* on the internet? (sounds a bit posh too, doesn't it? :)
Ahhh... when you have a truth and a legend... Print the legend! ;-)
+wdavid parks It sounded so legit too... I'm comfortable with this myth. :)
The diminution of current on-load is owing to a phenomenon known as polarisation; the cell recovers during rest as it depolarises. The manganese dioxide acts as a depolariser.
That type of wire been used alot in houses in belgium, i used to replace those alot as an electrician. rubber, fabric, greese insulation. Alot of houses actually still have them here.
I was just about to say, my house in Australia had that wiring until we renovated the house in the 1980's. However the call system used mechanical bell cranks (hence the name...) to ring a bell. Just for the front door, not to summon the servants!
My parent's house was built in the 1920's here in the States, and the original wiring was the same sort of thing. Most of it was replaced in the 70's when my folks took it over from my grandparents. There is still a bit of it in the attic, but it isn't hooked up to anything.
@@gasdive We called it Bell Wire in the old days. Bell wire definition is - a small-size wire insulated with paraffin-coated cotton and used especially for electric bell circuits.
How common is it to see fabric covered wires in the UK? From my experience in the northeastern US, you can find them in old wiring in houses or old lamps and things.
very early wiring was waxed cloth, or oil cloth, the same as the macintosh waterproof jackets, it does degrade badly with time, but this was before mains voltaged, and for a while was with mains voltages, then of course rubber came along and then the current pvc, for larger wires from the early generators they used wooden troughs, which is what edison did.
yes there is modern cloth flex, mostly seen on irons as its very resistant to burning, and new vintage lamp cord also, which is just an outer over a modern rubbery stuff
There are some specialist cables, mostly high temperature, with woven sheath but I can't think of a situation where it's used in fixed wiring. The oldest cable I've pulled out was a twin conductor where the conductors were wrapped in fabric and some sort of resin and then the whole lot was encased in a lead outer sheath, I'd guess over 100 years old.
I have seen it in avo test meters from WWII period. Not physically crumbling to the touch but in this scenario it doesn't get any significant chemical attack or heat degradation so i would expect it to be still ok. Usually black in colour
Lead sheathed vulcanised india rubber. Tends to be very crumbly these days. There are still some flats in this tenement wired with it because the owners don't want the expense of a rewire when "it still works".
As I recall, the original telegraph systems were powered with voltaic cells ( Cu and Zn in dilute sulfuric acid e-lyte) which developed a potential of about 1 volt. (How the standard of 1 volt was defined) I also seem to recall that these old cells used to power the telegraphs were quite large (volume measured in gallons). Talk about a mess if you broke or spilled one!
Fascinating! How were they recharged? Please please get it working again and show us!
Apparently they just needed topped up with water every so often and a new zinc electrode when the old one had been eaten away.
GPO bakelite dial phones in the UK up to the 1950s had cables to the hand set and to the wall outlet that were fabric wound and then plaited together. Quite durable and phones would commonly last 20 years in those days.
cable is covered in varnished cambric (a form of cloth)........interesting video
Cathode is the electrode (conventional) current flows out of, anode is what current flows into. So on a battery/cell the anode is -ve and cathode is +ve, on a device (like a diode) the anode is + and the cathode is -
The wire is what used to be called Double cotton covered. (DCC) a primative insulation.
More stuff like this please!!!
Yes, endlessly fascinating!!
Yeah, I love it when he covers things from the victorian era. Made me rewatch the video he did in a Glasglow park about a nutty quack electrotherapist
Haven't you got the polarity wrong. On a zinc carbon cell the zinc outer case was neg and the carbon rod was pos.
Was going to ask about this too.. Ah well, I do hope Clive does indeed refurbish this cell and does some experiments with it.
Hmm. I read that the zinc was described as the anode, but it could be wrong.
Yes zinc is negative. Should work with water but not much current, maybe add epsom salt.
This should be brought back to life (or replica made) , I made a replica a good few years ago with my students, great fun and works quite well as a voltage reference (but there are better systems). Hmmm DMX controllers, summoning spirits and the dark lord followed by summoning maids, , some sort of control theme here ..... :)
We still used them when I was in college in about 1971.
clive: you should have mentioned what the magnesium dioxide is used for. it does not participate in the electro-chemical reaction that generates the current. the role of magnesium dioxide is to capture and react with the hydrogen atoms generated during the reation; hydrogen atoms can combine to form hydrogen molecules (H2), which is a gas at room temperature and bubble of H2 will get out of the aqueous solution and stick to the carbon electrode. an electrode covered with gas bubbles will be less reactive.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
That looks like early motor rewind wire. I've rewound many old motors that had cotton covered wire like the kind you've found on the zinc anode.
in the Victorian era almost all wires were cloth covered. I am not sure but I think it was the 20's or 30's when rubber became common to use.
Funny fact that Leclanché is still in my city in Switzerland
The insulation around those wires is probably Gutta-Percha, an early form of rubber.