 We use combs from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery, but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today? That's a question we're exploring. Each week I try to take the next step forward in human history. My name is Andy and this is how to make everything. The big debattery is several of so-called out-of-place artifacts. An object that appears to perform a technology that predates when that technology is commonly believed to have been invented. So almost certainly, this must mean ancient aliens did it. But in case this is not true, we will be looking at the big debattery. These are supposed to first form a battery that predates the most commonly believed invention of the battery by nearly 2,000 years. The big debattery is a 2200-year-old blade vessel that was discovered near modern-day Baghdad, Iraq. The artifact has been attributed to the Perithian Empire, with the jar itself dated to sometime around 200 BCE. It was first described in 1938 by German archaeologist Wilhelm Konig. The original artifact stood around 5.5 inches by 3 inches in diameter. The opening was sealed with an asphalt plug which held in place a copper sheet that was rolled into a cylinder. The tube was capped at the bottom with a copper disc held in place by more asphalt and a narrow iron rod was placed through the middle. When the jar is filled with an electrolyte such as grape juice or red wine vinegar, you have yourself a battery. The acid facilitates a free flow of electrons when two metal terminals are connected. While they're these ancient vessels where actual batteries are not, we're going to apply some modern knowledge and see if we can produce an actual battery using the available technologies of the day in around 200 BCE. So most people are probably familiar with the lemon battery. It may have been a project he did in science class in school, but it's very simple. Just take a lemon and you get two different metals. Here we have a zinc coated nail and here we have a brass screw. You just shove both of these in there and you have a battery. It's got a multimeter here. So we run this and we get a little bit less than a volt. So the lemon batteries, I think there's a kind of a misconception that it's the actual lemon that is producing electricity, but really the lemon is just a vessel. The lemon really isn't too important and you can just replace it with salt water. Ultimately what is happening is an electrochemical reaction between the two metals when they are connected in a complete circuit. The citric acid in a lemon acts as an electrolyte which conducts electricity. In a process called oxidization, the zinc sheds electrons as charge electrical ions into the acid. This causes zinc to have a negative charge and cause electrons to flow out the wire through the circuit and re-enter the lemon through the copper metal. In the electrolyte, two positively charged hydrogen ions combine with two electrons at the copper electrode surface forming uncharged hydrogen gas. The lemon battery is very similar to the first historically recognized battery that was made in 1799, the Voltic Pile. Substituting iron for the zinc in the setup, you get a very similar although weaker battery and effectively this is what the Baghdad battery might possibly have been. Alright, welcome and today we're actually filming in front of a live studio audience. Alright, so in order to make the Baghdad battery we need the vessel to hold the electrolyte solution. The shape does not matter but the traditional shape looked like this. So I'm just making the sides, this will be the bottom, okay, pinch the old sides, give it a little pinch, kind of nice, okay, Baghdad. Here it is, straight from Baghdad. Now just to pit fire the ceramics overnight, next you cast the bronze cylinder portion of the battery. So the last piece of the actual battery is going to be the electrolyte solution. We have a few different options available to us both at the time and things we've unlocked. So I'm going to do a test of each of these and see if there's any difference of the amount of voltage we get. So I have iron and a copper alloy to try out on these different solutions and see what gives the best reaction, what has the best voltage. We can scale that up in our larger battery and see how much voltage we can stack by doing a few of them. We have lemon juice, it's the citric acid in that that allows it to work. Then we have what is believed to possibly have been what was in the Baghdad battery, which is a red wine vinegar, and then we have a control of just a standard white vinegar and then we have brine salt water solution and then we have sulfuric acid which technically was discovered sometime around here. I thought that might either all be exactly the same or if anything the strongest acid, the concentrated sulfuric acid would be the most reactive but it's actually the vinegars that performed best. Alright, so now we have all the different elements for making the actual battery. We have the different ceramics, the loramid, it may be pit-fired. We have a few iron rods and then we have the copper tube and casting a tube is surprisingly difficult so a lot of these aren't the greatest, it's probably our best one. It is theorized that it was more of a foil that they wrapped around it which maybe would have been a little bit easier in retrospect and really the shape of it doesn't really matter if this is supposed to be a battery and now we just got to assemble them. Historically with the Baghdad battery they used bitumen type of asphalt as kind of a seal atop. Now the advantage of not being electrically conductive so it prevents it from shorting out. We don't have any asphalt, we've harvested so far but we do have beeswax which is similarly not conductive so we'll make kind of a cap out of that so hold everything in place and event the two metals from touching and then we'll fill it up with the electrolyte we've not selected which is going to be a vinegar so we're going to use some of the red wine we made previously and has not been stored ideally. It's turned into a bit of a vinegar and to be honest it was pretty vinegary to start with, put everything together and see how much of a voltage we're able to generate. Oh we are like almost exactly half a volt, that's pretty decent, might be enough to electro plate but see if I can at least get a zap, no, not enough to feel. You can stack them in the voltage, potentially allow us to light up some light bulbs and maybe even charge a phone. It's probably going to take a few of them, for at least a moment of time we might have a fair amount of power. Hey, we overshot a little bit, we're at 2 volts so we should be able to create light with this LED. Turn up the lights and see what we got. There it is. That's it, we have made electricity, we have enough power to light an LED so if the Baghdad battery was a real battery that was made way back then there wasn't really too many practical uses of it, there wasn't really LEDs or anything to actually light with it but one possibility that's theorized is that they could use it for electroplating. There isn't any evidence of electroplating that early in history but if this was a battery it's something it could potentially be used for. So we have four of them hooked up again, drying about 2 volts to this coin, we cast way back in our currency episode, this made our bronze, we have a solution of copper sulfate and we can see if we can electroplate it. And process electroplating is kind of the reverse of what's going on in the battery itself where a chemical reaction produces electricity. Here we have current forcing a chemical reaction that causes the metal to come out of solution and form on the anode which is going to be this coin. So we have some copper wire on one end and on the other we'll place the coin so it should allow a very thin plate of copper on our coin. So just hope we get a nice fresh layer of copper. All right, starting to form a little bit of copper on there. All right, so after letting it run for a while we will do electroplate a coin, give it a nice little copper shine. So in the end these batteries aren't the most powerful. I was trying to stack a bunch of them to get it to actually power a cell phone and charge it at least a little bit, but in the end that was not really working out too well, even with all the batteries, the amperage was just so low. It wasn't enough to meet the minimum of the USB. God damn it. The next step is going to be improving upon this and that's going to require sourcing a few new materials to build some bigger and better batteries. Electricity and electronics are not my strong suit, but there's a lot of possibilities and I look forward to exploring more and learning more about it as we go. If anybody has any suggestions of future electronic projects you want to see us try an attempt, be sure to leave a comment and suggest it and you can see what we can do. Thank you to everyone for watching and supporting us this past year. It's been a little bit challenging and thank you to everyone who has supported us on Patreon. We are in the midst of rebuilding and have a lot of new videos coming up this next year. So thanks for watching and thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. Subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.