Sitting on display at Oxford University’s Clarendon Library is an electronic marvel that has puzzled scientists for over 175 years. The Oxford Electric Bell isn’t a typical ringing bell. Instead, it’s an apparatus that has two cylinders with bells on the bottoms. Lying in between the two bells is a four-millimeter ball that hangs by a wire. Powered by a battery, the wire moves the ball quickly back and forth, ringing the bells. The battery has been powering the device nonstop for over 175 years—but no one knows how.
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Around 1840, Oxford physics professor Robert Walker bought the battery-powered novelty item from Watkins and Hill, a London manufacturing company. Though a note attached to the device reads “Set up in 1840,” in Walker’s own handwriting, Oxford University believes there’s evidence that the bell was actually set up as much as 15 years earlier.
Either way, the bell is run by one of the earliest examples of a battery called a dry pile. The two cylinders inside the glass case are voltaic dry piles, which are essentially hundreds or thousands (depending on the pile) of alternating strips of metal foil and paper, coated with manganese dioxide to generate electricity. The Oxford Electric Bell has an outside coat of sulfur. Because of this, and because the item sits in the Clarendon Library, the device is also called the Clarendon Dry Pile.
Though we know the general makeup of dry piles from other historical sources, each manufacturer made theirs differently. Watkins and Hill didn’t leave a record for how they created theirs, so scientists can only conjecture about how it was made. Scientists can only hypothesize what it’s comprised of because any attempt to open the device could stop the vacillating ringer and, therefore, ruin an experiment to see how long the bell will continue to ring. According to one scientist that has studied the bell, it’s more likely that the bell’s clapper will wear out before the battery’s electric energy stops working.
Yes, scientists have put a man on the Moon and are exploring the mysteries of Mars. But no one has been able to figure out how this little battery, dubbed by the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s most durable battery,” works. And it seems it will most likely stay that way until the battery decides to take a break and scientists can open it up and dissect its inner workings.
(h/t Motherboard)
