Is the Baghdad Battery Real ?

Photo by Ironie, distributed under a CC license.

The story of the Baghdad Battery has been told and retold for several decades now. It was even featured in the Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World television show.

I even remember my science teacher enthusiastically telling us about it of how archaeologists found this ceramic pot with a metal tube and another piece of copper and it turned out to be a primitive battery. We even did a class experiment and build our own version of the battery and hold and behold it worked! Granted you couldn’t much with it but the concept was there.

So is the Baghdad Battery an anomaly ? is it a forgotten technology that was rediscovered centuries later ? Well if we want to accept this story as fact I guess this battery is surely one big anomaly.

Well that’s it then, right ? Sadly no as shocking and disappointing it’s gonna sound it turns out that the Baghdad Battery has never been truly accepted as fact by any archaeologist in the field. To this day it is still officially considered as a storage vessel for sacred scrolls.

So who is right ? One cannot deny that in those days clay pots with a metal tube would have been adequate to store scrolls and it does seem to have been a common practice at time.As for the battery, theory while no one can deny that it works as a theory there isn’t much else to go on. There have been suggestions that it could have been used to electroplate gold on silver objects but it is just another theory.

At the end it is really a matter of what we want believe. It would probably help the battery theory a bit further if they found additional batteries or some sort of records which explained or showed what it was used for or at the very least if they found a crafted object that had clear signs of electroplating being used on it.