The Baghdad Battery: A Jar That Might Have Sparked, or Just Stored Scrolls
Baghdad, 1938. In the laboratory of the Iraq Museum, a German researcher named Wilhelm König turned a small, unglamorous clay jar in his hands: thirteen centimetres of pale pottery, unearthed at Khujut Rabu, a village near Baghdad. Inside it sat a copper cylinder, and inside that a badly corroded iron rod, the whole assembly once fixed with plugs of bitumen. Museum storerooms are full of odd jars. This one, König decided, was not merely odd — it was impossible. In a paper published that year he proposed that the object was a galvanic cell: a working electric battery, built roughly two thousand years before Alessandro Volta stacked his famous pile in 1800.
Pause on how radical that claim is. A battery needs only two dissimilar metals and an acidic liquid between them, and the jar undeniably supplies the metals. König dated it to the Parthian era, between the third century BC and the third century AD; later scholars, judging by the style of the pottery, leaned toward the Sassanid period that followed. Either way, if he was right, someone in Mesopotamia had bottled electricity over a millennium before Europe had a word for it.
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