CHARACTERISTICS OF PRACTICAL CAPACITORS

That spark which leaps from our fingertips to the wall switch on a dry
day is a sharp reminder that we have electrical film capacitor, the
property of storing electric charge or energy. It is a property exhibited by
any two electrical conductors separated by an insulator. In this instance,
the body, as one conductor, stores charge with respect to the earth as
the other conductor, the charge being developed through friction
between shoes and carpet.
There is capacitance between us and the cat when we stroke its fur and
draw sparks, between a charged thundercloud and the earth, between the
road and our automobile which may, incidentally, acquire through
accumulation of static charge on above-ground potential of 10,000 volts
under favorable conditions. Capacitance is part and parcel of our
environment.
Those of us who build electronic circuits know the plague of unwanted
capacitance in creating parasitic linkages among different parts of a
circuit. In inductance coils and transformers, the "distributed"
capacitance between the wire turns tends to degrade performance by
causing the effective inductance to deviate from the ideal or geometric
inductance. In open- wire telephone lines and in cables, distributed
capacitance has the undesirable effect of by-passing the higher
frequencies upon which the intelligibility of transmitted speech largely
depends.
It was indeed the need to compensate for this unwanted capacitance that
stimulated the development of the loading coil. In all these instances, the
problem is one of reducing or neutralizing the effect of unwanted
capacitance. Diametrically opposite is the function of a capacitor, which
is to provide wanted capacitance, in concentrated or "lumped" form, in

controlled amount and conveniently packaged. To furnish this is the task

of capacitor engineering.
The specific idea of a "condenser" dates back to the invention of the
electrophorus and shortly thereafter of the Leyden jar in 1745. For a
great many years, students of electricity had been producing electric
charge, but the amounts were usually small and evanescent. Up until this
time they had not thought specifically in terms of the idea of
capacitance. Here at last was a device capable of storing a large electric
charge in a small space.
The invention focused attention on the idea and on the possibility of
storing electric charge. Invented and named after the town of its origin,
the original Leyden jar consisted of a glass vial containing water and
plugged with a cork through which a nail passed to touch the water. The
water constituted one electrode, the other being provided by the hand
which held the vial. This device immediately excited widespread interest
among the natural philosophers of those days because of the impressive
electrostatic charge that could be stored in it as compared with earlier
devices.
Most modern capacitors are variations of this fundamental form
differing only in materials and dimensions. How successful were those
intrepid, early investigators in trapping "electrical fluid" with this new
device is vividly portrayed in an experiment carried out by the
enterprising.