Faraday's ice pail experiment
Electrostatics experiment / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Faraday's ice pail experiment is a simple electrostatics experiment performed in 1843 by British scientist Michael Faraday[1][2] that demonstrates the effect of electrostatic induction on a conducting container. For a container, Faraday used a metal pail made to hold ice, which gave the experiment its name.[3] The experiment shows that an electric charge enclosed inside a conducting shell induces an equal charge on the shell, and that in an electrically conducting body, the charge resides entirely on the surface.[4][5] It also demonstrates the principles behind electromagnetic shielding such as employed in the Faraday cage.[6][7] The ice pail experiment was the first precise quantitative experiment on electrostatic charge.[8] It is still used today in lecture demonstrations and physics laboratory courses to teach the principles of electrostatics.[9]