From the Vault: The Electric Ark

What if the Ark of the Covenant was actually a bronze-age machine capable of storing an electrostatic charge? It almost certainly wasn't, but the idea is a great excuse to explore the understanding of electricity in the ancient world. Join Robert and Joe for another Ark-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault. This time we're gonna
be looking at part two of our exploration from December
of the Ark of the Covenant myth and uh and
some strange historical hypotheses people have had about that. Yeah.
In particular, this episode focuses mostly on the idea that,

(00:27):
uh that what if the Ark of the Covenant wasn't
so much a holy box of divine wrath it was
more just a giant battery. This was I remember, I
had some of the weirdest stuff we've ever read proposed
by Nicola tesla Um. So yeah, anyway, we hope you enjoy.
And Nate ab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took

(00:47):
either of them his censer and put fire therein, and
put incense there on, and offered strange fire before the Lord,
which he commended them not. And there went out fire
from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before
the Lord. Now the Lord spoke to Moses after the
death of the two sons of Aaron, when they had

(01:08):
approached the presence of the Lord and died. The Lord
said to Moses, tell your brother Aaron that he shall
not enter at any time into the Holy Place inside
the veil before the mercy seat, which is on the Ark,
or he will die, or I will appear in the
cloud over the mercy seat. Welcome to Stuff to Blow

(01:33):
your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back for Arc
too Electric Boogaloo, our second exploration of a bunch of
weird sort of bronze punk, takes on the stories of

(01:55):
the Ark of the Covenant from the Hebrew Bible. Right,
It's it's kind of perfect because is this is a
kind of this is kind of Hanaka content for Stuff
to Blow your mind. Oh, I didn't think about the timing. Yeah,
we're publishing these episodes the week of Hanaka almost entirely
by by by accident, but but a pleasant accident, I
would say. So. Last time we talked about the stories

(02:15):
about say, the Philistine captivity of the Ark of the
Covenant and the immrods and what all that meant. But
there is another aspect to the ark of God's story
that tends to tempt people into the techno mythology realm.
Not only was the Arc said to bring vast destructions
and plagues of m rods, there are also these Bible

(02:36):
stories that tell of the Arc lashing out with blasts
of power that kill offenders in an instant. Uh. And
so there are a couple of examples. One is the
story we just told about Erin's two sons. We don't
get a whole lot of details, but it seems like
Erin's two sons entered the presence of the Arc with
some kind of strange fire. Essentially that it sounds like

(02:56):
they were not doing the rituals of the tavern ackle
as they had been commanded. They were doing something incorrect.
Fun fact I I actually traveled home and attended a
Sunday School class at my mom's church recently, and this
was the passage they were discussing really well in the
last episode. I thought we were talking about how they

(03:18):
almost never bring these stories up in Sunday School, at
least when we were kidding. I saw a great example
of why. Because it's it's kind of difficult for folks
to have a like a casual, real life oriented conversation
about a passage like this about the strange fire of
the Lord, which apparently sometimes translated is alien fire. Yeah,
alien fire. They brought alien fire and the sensors before

(03:39):
the Lord, and the Lord did not like it, and
he lashed out and struck them dead, consumed them with
fire from the mercy seat. Now, before we get into
the bronze punk discussions today, we should tell at least
one more story of this kind. How about the story
of Uza. So remember how the arc was taken to
the land of the Philistines. That's one of the stories

(03:59):
and Bible about it. The Philistines. Uh, there's a battle
and Philistines take the arc and they put it in
the temple of Dagon until the arc messes them up
and it topples the statue of the god Dagon. And
eventually the Philistines repenteth and the Israelites get the arc back.
And so when the Israelites under King David are they're
bringing the arc back to their land that we get

(04:22):
to this passage quote. They placed the Ark of God
on a new cart that they might bring it from
the house of a ben a Dab, which was on
the hill, and Usa and Ahio, the sons of a
ben Adab, were leading the new cart, so they brought
it with the Ark of God from the house of
a ben Adab, which was on the hill, and Ahio
was walking ahead of the arc. Meanwhile, David and all

(04:44):
the house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord with
all kinds of instruments made of fir wood, with liars, harps, tambourines, castanets,
and symbols. But when they came to the threshing floor
of Nakon, Usa reached out toward the Ark of God
and took hold of it. For the oxen nearly upset it,
and the anger of the Lord burned against Usa, and

(05:06):
God struck him down there for this irreverence, and he
died there by the Ark of God. And then there's
a story that apparently this place comes to be named
what roughly translates to the breakthrough of Usa or the
bursting out at Usa, as we discussed at length in
the last episode. Uh, if you look at any of
these stories of the Ark of the Covenant, or if

(05:27):
you look at, of course, in the classic film Raiders
of the Lost Arc, you see great depictions of this
general fact that the Ark of the Covenant is considered
a dangerous item in the stories about it. It is
it is a thing that that manifests the presence in
the voice of God and uh, and therefore there are
a lot of dangers associated with misuse um even even

(05:49):
touching it, well, even even well meaning touching. Like the
idea here is that Usa wasn't trying to do, you know,
a blasphemy to the ark. He just reached out to
keep it from falling over because the oxen we're getting
all tipped around and so the arc might have fallen
on the ground. He reached out to steady it, and
that was enough that got him struck dead. So anyway,
I think, as with the arc stories that we discussed

(06:12):
last time, the most fruitful way of understanding these stories
is that they are legendary narratives, not based on actual events,
but rather to communicate values by telling a story. And
in this case, I think one of the values that's
primary here is that the commands of the Lord are
to be taken very seriously, and that even deviating from
God's commands in an accidental or well meaning way can

(06:35):
be met with extremely harsh consequences. Like Aaron's sons, they
screw up the rights of the tabernacle by offering alien fire.
They burned something in the sensor in a way they
weren't supposed to, and they get burned up themselves. USA
touches the arc even meaning well, just to prevent it
from falling over, and he gets blasted dead. I think
the lesson is pretty clear, right, Yeah, It's like it's

(06:56):
a basic Dungeons and Dragon's lesson as well. There is
a high, high level magical item in your presence, don't
touch it, don't don't, don't, don't do anything until you've
at least cast a few, you know, provisional spells, just
to see what's happening. Right is be very careful with
the commands of God to do everything you're told. But
in the last episode we discussed the concept of this

(07:18):
historical hermoneutic we were calling bronze punk, the desire to
for of modern interpreters with a little knowledge about science
and technology under their belt to look back at legends
like this assume that maybe they're based on some kind
of actual event, whether directly or in some exaggerated form,
and instead of assuming a magical explanation for the event

(07:40):
behind the story postulates some kind of lost world of
advanced technology hidden in the dust storms of history, which
again is of course risky because this is the place
where history and mythology can converge. So it's difficult to
really lean too heavily on anything that is described in
these stories. But at the same time we can't help

(08:01):
but do it right with the great example from the
last episode was was looking at the the plague of
mice and uh and tumors or emads and trying to
figure out, well, as this bubonic plague is that, what
is that? What's being described here? That's one of the
ways in which the Bronze punk hereameneutic, while not usually
a good method of explaining the origins of these legendary

(08:24):
tales and myths, does open up some interesting things to
consider about the ancient world. Like one of the things
we talked about in the last episode was, Okay, it
probably does not make sense to say that the legends
of the arc are caused by it actually being some
ancient bioweapon, But could there have been bioweapons in the
ancient world? Was their germ warfare before people had a

(08:46):
germ theory of disease, and we decided, you know, it
does seem like it's possible that that happened, and there's
even some evidence of specific cases where it looks like
it happened. Maybe not in this case, And for our
purposes here on the show, it's also just a great
excuse to talk about some of these things at the
end of the episode, and at the end of this
episode as well, we're probably gonna say, you know, I
don't think we should really um put a lot of

(09:08):
faith in this particular idea, but it does forces to
ask questions about about the inner workings of the world
in ancient times, applying what we know about science today
and sort of unwrapping it through an analysis of the past. Well,
there's an interesting question that's going to come out of
today's episode about what what causes major breakthroughs in the

(09:29):
progress of science in history. So we'll get back to
that towards the end of the episode. So last time,
we talked about the idea who could have been a
weapon of germ warfare. That's unlikely, but it's fun to consider. Um,
we talked about the pretty much impossible idea that it
was a bearer of some sort of radiation hazard. And
this has been popular with people like Eric von Danikin
and I don't know about him specifically, but some of

(09:49):
those ancient aliens. Yeah, anytime where you're like, oh, there's
some sort of of of crazy piece of technology. It's
a nuclear reactor or something. Uh. And then we of
course talked about the psychology of artifacts, like the arc
being a focal point for worship and how that affects
the altered states of consciousness, the mind and so forth.
But today we wanted to explore another very strange bronze
punk rabbit trail that many many authors have taken over

(10:12):
the years to explain stories like Errand's two Sons in
the Story of Uza, these people who are struck dead
in the presence of the arc, and that is the
idea of the electric arc. Yes, this is this is
a pretty fabulous notion because it doesn't really it doesn't
depend on aliens, it doesn't depend on any um, you know,
the alternative view of the evolution of consciousness or anything.

(10:36):
It basically just depends it basically asked questions about like
what were the what was the knowledge of electricity at
the time, and what were the capabilities and material capabilities
in many cases to construct a primitive device? I would
like to read with some abridgements, from an article published
in the Chicago Daily Tribune March five, ninety three by

(11:00):
the Reverend John Evans, called Scientists, says Sacred Box was
a condenser. Robert, will you help me read some sections
from this? Certainly, would you like to take the beginning here?
I shall It was a charge of some ten thousand
volts of static electricity, and not the wrath of God
that killed Uza when he touched the Ark of the Covenant. Such,

(11:21):
at least is the scientific conjecture of Dean Frederick Rogers
of the Department of Engineering at Lewis Institute of Technology,
concerning the mysterious powers of the Arc, which was not
only an object of reverence to the Israelites, but also
a troublesome possession. Right. So the article then goes on
to tell the story of Usa. As we told before,

(11:41):
the arc goes unsteady. Oxen were about to knock it over.
He touches it, he gets struck dead. Uh, And Evans writes,
quote Professor Rogers made a study of the construction of
the arc and discovered. Its design called for a perfectly
constructed simple electric condenser or Leiden john Are. And then
the article also goes on to tell the story of

(12:02):
the construction of the Ark of the Covenant. We talked
about that in the last episode. But basically the design
specifications are it's a big wooden box with gold on
the inside and the outside, and not just any wood
at shipham would right, Yeah, it's which I believe is
supposed to be the Acacia tree Acacia would uh. They
called it ship him wood and it's got gold on
the inside, gold on the outside, and then these gold

(12:25):
representative figures of Cherubim on the top. So going back
to the article, the scientific interest in the construction pointed
out by Professor Rogers was that the Acacia would box,
about forty inches long and slightly less than thirty inches
in width and depth, not only was lined with gold
leaf on the inside, but overlaid with the same metal without. This,

(12:46):
according to Professor Rodgers, is the first step that any
modern boy with a flare for electrical experimentation will take
to create a light in jar, and girls don't be
discouraged there. You can create ldon jars too. Also, I
don't never created a light in jar. I did the
potato battery, and that's about as far as I went
towards creating the arc. I never even made a potato battery.

(13:07):
But I should also say, boys and girls alike, if
you are actually constructing a light in jar, do some
with with proper safety precautions and adult supervision, because they
can actually be dangerous depending on their capacity. But anyway,
moving on, except that in a light in jar, a
glass receptacle is coated on the inside and the outside
with tinfoil instead of gold. Then with the aid of

(13:29):
a rod and a small knob at the top, and
a short chain at the bottom, which is inserted through
the cork so that the chain may make contact with
the bottom of the jar, a young experimenter is ready
to collect small charges of bottled lightning. Robert, would you
like to take over? In the section subtitled a condenser
of electricity? But the Ark of the Covenant was a

(13:50):
much larger condenser and thought by Professor Rogers to have
been capable of collecting death dealing charges. They divined erections
called for the creation of two chair, of them pure gold,
to be placed on a gold slab or mercy seat
atop the arc. These chairbim Professor Rodgers explained what he
believes to have been the positive pole of the circuit,

(14:11):
similar to the knob on the top of the light
and jar. When he was asked how the static charge
of electricity got into the arc, Professor Rogers admitted that
there was very little accepted authority among scientists concerning the
action and control of atmospheric electricity. He explained, however, that
it is known among physicists that a difference of potential
exists between the Earth and the air, which may be

(14:33):
collected in electrical charges under certain favorable conditions. The design
of the arc, at least as described in Exodus. Undoubtedly,
I love this certainty of people writing about these kinds
of kind of hair brained interpretations. Clearly there's no room
for for discussion here. That's what it was. Yeah. So
the article goes on to state that Rogers believes the

(14:55):
arc could have been electrically charged by air currents created
by smoke from the burning of incense and sacrifices, which
the Bible says often happened close to the arc. He
also says this could charge the light in arc enough
to allow it to deal fatal bolts of electricity, and
he cites a Hebrew commentary tradition that states that quote,

(15:15):
the wings of the golden Cherubim not only emitted fire,
but also an aura known among electricians as brush glow.
The fire emitted by the Cherubim could have been well
known electrical arc resulting from overcharge. Professor Rogers beliefs that
a number of accounts of destruction attributed by the scriptures
to the arc might be explained as being results of

(15:36):
purely natural phenomena, and he gives some examples that like
we talked about last time, the destruction of the Philistine
idol of Dagon quote a divinity supposed to be half
fish and half man. And just a side note, apparently
that association of the Canaanite god Dagon with fish that
I think that is supposed to be exonymic in origin,

(15:58):
meaning that the the ancient Hebrews related the name of
this god to the Hebrew word for fish. The original
Philistine Dagon appears to be more likely some kind of
grain and fertility gods. Sorry Lovecraft fans, Oh yeah, that
is kind of disappointment, because Dagon, of course is a
part of the Lovecraft mythos and uh and and then
it's one of those cool gods where you read about

(16:18):
it there, then you read about it in the Bible.
And if you, like I was, if you were a
you know, a high schooler who's who suddenly discovered Lovecraft
and then found one of these deities in the Bible
as well, it was a pretty awesome moment. Oh. I
can't help but think of the creatures of the sea
as the children of Dagon. I'm always going to go there,
even knowing what I know now that he probably wasn't
actually a fish god, right, But at the same time,

(16:40):
we do have a lot of We've discussed some tremendous
ancient fish gods on the show before, right. But anyway,
So they tell the story in the article of this
philistine idol repeatedly getting knocked over or off of the arc,
and Roger says, quote, if the idol had been constructed
out of some poorer metal in combination with wood, an
electrical charge arched far below the capacity of the arc

(17:02):
would have been enough to have accomplished the destruction. So
I think they're saying that the arc could have knocked
over the the idol just by discharging electricity. I'm I'm
not sure about that, but okay, yeah, I'm gonna try
to include some art that I found on the landing
page for this episode a stuff to blow your mind
dot com, because they are a number of wonderful depictions
of like the glowing arc and a top old uh

(17:26):
statue of the deity Dagon sometimes with a fish tail
that of course is now broken because it fell over
and uh and of course this is uh. This kind
of thing was was also referenced in Rages of the
Lost Arc. Again, that's scene where the Ark of the
Covenant burns through the swastika on the crate that contains it. Yeah,
like like destroying another false idle. Yeah. Uh. So to continue,

(17:49):
and we're getting close to the end of this article,
but there's some other good stuff here. So Evans talks
about how all these kinds of miracles could be attributed
to electricity, and he talks about the tendency of people
to attribute, you know, processes they don't understand, to divine intervention.
And then he says, thus, if Moses accidentally stumbled upon
the principle of the leiden Jar, the device would instantly

(18:12):
be accepted as the conveying medium of divine favor or disfavor.
Sounds again like a little bit too much certainty in
this interpretation here, but the author tells a bunch more
stories of the arc, and then also points out that
the ark of the Covenant was not the only arc
given sacred significance in the ancient world, and he discusses
ancient Egyptian arcs, speculating that Moses could have learned about

(18:35):
the creation of electrical arcs from the Egyptians when he
was growing up in the pharaoh's court. Again, that's that's
a nice story, but I think once again the problem
is just that it's taking the biblical source at face value.
And what's more likely is that the biography of Moses
is a legend. But but yeah, there there. He does
point out that there are other arc like things in
other cultures around the ancient Near East, and and and

(18:58):
the Egyptians are a great example, right. But then again
we have to come back to perhaps the simpler explanation
that an arc like thing is a box. Yeah, and
and therefore, yes, the technology of box making was very
much in effect at the time, right uh. And so finally,
Robert do you want to read this very last paragraph here? Certainly,

(19:21):
while no historian would engage in such speculation, yet it
is the right of any man to fancy that it
was in Egypt that the properties of the gold coated
box were discovered by some hapless craftsman. He paid for
his discovery with his life, but gave his kinsmen a
home for a new and powerful god. Okay, so they've
got a theory here. Some Egyptian craftsman accidentally discovered how

(19:44):
to build alidon Jar by building boxes and covering them
with gold, and then that information was transmitted to Moses,
and then Moses carried the secret of how to build
alidon Jar, and that became the Ark of the Covenant,
and thus it gives us all these stories of like
people touching it and getting struck dead. Now, I think
it would be ridiculous to say that if the arc

(20:05):
actually existed, we're assuming something like it may have if
it existed, that it was best explained in these terms.
But well, I don't think we need to resort to
this to explain the Arc legend. I don't find it
implausible at all that someone in the ancient world and
someone in the ancient Mediterranean could have at some point
accidentally created a capacitor, which is what alidon jar is,

(20:29):
and that it could have injured or killed people. And
that is a really interesting thing to consider, right because
not I mean, not only, of course, the the accidental
creation of such a thing, but then the recreation such
a thing and the utilization of such a thing, either
as essentially a tool of divination, like what's going to
happen when I touch it? Like a fatal shock, as
a no, not dying as yes, you know that that

(20:51):
sort of thing, which which a lot of ancient practices
of religion and even modern practices of religion really boiled
down to that give me something to provide an answer
for some question I have, or or provide some sort
of a random answer to something that I am incapable
of generating my own random answer too. Yeah, and again
I think it's not hard to believe that that someone

(21:13):
could have accidentally discovered how to build something like this. Again,
like the discovery of the actual liden Jar was also
accidental somewhat and frightening someone. Maybe we should explore that
after a break. Thank alright, we're back. Okay, So we
mentioned before the break that in fact, the discovery of

(21:33):
the liden Jar itself. We've got these people saying that
the Ark of the Covenant was some kind of ancient
liden Jar, some kind of capacitor or condenser that would
store up electric charge and then discharge it all at once,
maybe killing somebody who touched it in the wrong way. Uh. So,
in Set there was this German Lutheran bishop named you all,

(21:54):
Georg von Kleist. I've also seen his name represented as
you want, Jurgen von Klist. I don't know if those
are variations on the same name or if that's discrepancy.
I don't know, but either way, whatever his middle name was,
von Kleist was performing experiments with an electrostatic generator. At
the time, this would have been something like the spinning

(22:14):
globe generator of Francis Howkesby or of Benjamin Franklin, which
was essentially like a glass sphere that you would rotate
rapidly against a wool cloth by turning a crank, charging
the sphere by friction, essentially gathering up electrons from the cloth. Now,
once this principle had been demonstrated, uh, lots of people

(22:36):
were messing around with them, and von Kleist had a
glass medicine bottle that was filled with liquid. It was
water or alcohol, with a cork top and a nail
driven through the cork, poking down into the liquid inside.
And while he was doing his experiments, Von Kleist held
the outside of the bottle with his hand and he
touched the nail to the generator that was, you know,

(22:59):
the friction generator. And after charging the inside of the bottle,
he found that when he held the bottle with one
hand and touched the nail with his other hand, he
received a shock. Why because he just used his body
to complete a circuit and thus the spark the shock. Yes. Uh.
And then there's another guy around the same time, Peter
van mussen Brook of Leiden, Holland, who discovered the same

(23:22):
principle the following year, which is where the Lyden jar
gets its name. It's it's spelled like l e y
d e N. But I think Leiden Holland is with
like an ei, so I'm saying Lyden. I've heard people
say Leyden. I think I read it in my mind
is laden for years and years I may have said
laid in the past. Whichever way it is, I'm going
to be saying, lyden. If you don't like that, you
can email and complain. So von mussen Bruck was able

(23:48):
to charge up a glass jar full of water with
a metal rod plunging inside it. And he also discovered
that when you touched the rod while holding the outside
of the jar, you got this terrific shock. So the
principle here is the one of creating this electrical potential difference.
You know, by charging it up in this way and
having the insulator of the glass there between the inside

(24:10):
and the outside, you're creating this difference potential where one
side is positively charged, one side is negatively charged, and
they desperately want to equalize. And whenever you complete that
circuit circuit, they will equalize. And if you are the
thing that completes that circuit, that equalization can be unpleasant
for you. It can be bad for your body. Now
let's talk about how unpleasant because uh, we we experience

(24:30):
static shock all the time, especially during the winter in
our modern world. My son and I when we go
to a playground, we always do this thing called electric
high five where if there's if there's you know, static
electricity is generated when he goes down the slide because
because of friction, I wait at the bottom and he
gives me a high five, and sometimes there is an
alarming shock to it, like it's it's it's pretty intense,

(24:51):
but it's fun, right, It's not something that I would
attribute to the to the wrath of of of an
ancient god. When he goes down slide, he's becoming an
electrostatic generator and you, you are the You are the
ground terminal. So yeah, the question though, is could that
high five be dangerous or fatal? You bet? Actually, well,

(25:13):
not on the slide, but given given how much charge
you could store up under various circumstances, yeah, it's entirely possible.
Van Musson Brook reportedly said I would not take a
second shock for the Kingdom of France. And Benjamin Franklin,
We've talked about this on the show before, but the
year old American hero Benjamin Franklin, hanging out in Philadelphia,

(25:35):
loved experimenting with light in jars. He began to get
more power by chaining them together in a circuit so
that their combined capacity could be discharged all at the
same time, giving even more power, and Franklin kind of
turned into a mad scientist in this regard, he became
temporarily enthralled with the idea of using the powerful shock

(25:56):
from this parade of jars to deal lethal shocks to animals.
And he compared this row of lden jars all strung
together to a battery of cannons or military artillery, giving
us the term we still used today for a slightly
different form of storage for electrical potential. The battery is
like a you know, it's a battery. In the seventeen forties,

(26:17):
Benjamin Franklin told a friend of his that he had
figured out that the discharge of two lden jars was
quote sufficient to kill common hens outright. He even said
that since the electric shock killed so quickly, it might
become a more humane way of slaughter for butchers, so
that the birds that they butchered suffered less. And he
proposed that a butcher could kill a turkey by stringing

(26:40):
together six Lden jars into a battery, and then tied
the chain, which was one terminal, around the turkey's legs,
and then lift the turkey so that its head touched
the other terminal. Whether or not this was actually more
humane as a method of butchery. It probably wasn't the
safest method for butchers to use, because when Franklin himself
was trying to perform experiments like this, like there was

(27:02):
a time he wanted to have a turkey barbecue where
he was trying to kill turkeys with liden jars, he
ended up accidentally shocking himself horribly and he was like
knocked back and he felt bruised for days. Uh he
and he explicitly said that he was afraid that a
blow like that could easily kill a man. Yeah, I mean,
Benjamin Franklin here is really sounding like a man who

(27:22):
has never observed, who has never watched someone who knows
what they're doing kill a chicken or a duck, because
generally it is just I've seen like food documentaries where
you see like a loving, caring a duck farmer just
you know, one second they're holding the duck and then
it's like just a quick twist of the wrist and

(27:43):
they've rung its neck and it's dead. Yes, far better
than risking your own death. And it's like burning the
house down in the process. Well, and then it didn't
even always work, because he said so he was trying
to instantly and humanely kill turkeys this way, but he
would like knock them unconscious and sometimes they'd come back,
they'd be kind of woozed. Uh. It just sounds horrible,
what are you doing, Ben? But anyway, so eventually people

(28:06):
figured out that there are multiple ways of constructing alidon jar.
You can make one with a simple conductive foil on
the inside and the outside of a glass jar, or
you can make one with water on the inside. In
the eighteenth century, it became common to cram the inside
of the jar with gold leaf, and they're just a
bunch of ways to do it. But essentially what you
need is a thin layer of what's known as a dielectric,

(28:28):
which is an insulating non conductive material like glass, with
a way of charging up the potential difference between the
conductors on each side of that dielectric layer. You've got
the negative charge on the inside and the positive charge
on the outside. And so back to the idea of
of our friend professor Frederick Rodgers. He was saying, Okay,

(28:49):
that's how the arc is working. Right. You've got dielectric,
which is the wood, and then you've got the gold layering,
the gold plating on the inside and on the outside,
and those are forming the conductive foils like in a
liden jar. All you really need is like a way
of charging up the inside and having that potential difference.
And it's very possible that you have a lethal electro

(29:10):
static discharge machine capable of killing people who touch it
the wrong way. Now, our friend professor Frederick Rogers, who oh,
I just realized he's Fred Rogers, this is Mr Rogers. Well,
it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day
for electrocution. Uh So, Mr Rogers wasn't the first person

(29:31):
to propose that the arc was a capacitor or a
liden jar. Actually found earlier evidence of different versions of
this theory, including one from one of my favorite discourse
communities of all time, late nineteenth century American Spiritualism. Remember
our old friend John Murray Spear, of course, Yes, yeah,
the spiritualist agitator for the spirit Land building that tremendous

(29:53):
contraption that was going to was was that a radio
for speaking to God? Yes? Essentially, I mean it was
very complicated his theology about that. But John Murray Spear
was a spiritualist who thought he was getting messages from
the spirits of the dead telling him how to build
an electro mechanical Messiah called the New Motor, which would
be a channel for the new motive power, which was

(30:15):
God's energy poured into the universe through the lens of
the Sun, which would be enlightening and would cause wisdom
and a new human that would be created by essentially,
what this machine was was like a coffee table with
like a bunch of metal stuff on top of it.
I remember looking at illustrations of this and it was
no arc, that's for certain. I remember exactly what you

(30:35):
said about it, which is that you said it looked
like if a coffee table mate it with a dalek. Yeah. Yeah,
it's pretty much what it looked like. No chair of him.
But anyway, I think we should explore some spiritualist bronze punk.
So I wasn't able to find an original version of
this article, but I want to talk about an article
that's reproduced in a book by the spiritualist author Moses Hull.

(31:00):
Whole quotes the entirety of this article, which was published
sometime in the eighteen nineties and a spiritualist periodical called
The Progressive Thinker, which has a great little subtitle, it's
science supplemented by an exalted morality, the Bible of the future.
And so you've got all these strange currents in nineteenth
century American spiritualism, which as in this case, often featured

(31:22):
like a combination of belief in the existence of spirits
and our ability to receive communications from them, but then
also like progressive politics, often abolition of slavery, women's suffrage,
that kind of thing, a kind of futuristic embrace of
scientific and technological progress, skepticism about some traditional doctrines of

(31:43):
religion while still embracing others. Given all this kind of stuff,
it's not surprising to me that spiritualist authors would be
embracing an electrical theory of the arc legend. They sometimes
had this sort of rationalism supernaturalism hybrid that made them
want to read the Bible as in some ways literally
true and in other ways like revealing hints of technologies

(32:05):
that we would later discover, maybe through the revelations of spirits.
Like remember John murray Spears belief that he was getting
messages from the Association of Electrizers. Who were these people
like Benjamin Franklin and all these dead people who were
giving him technological messages from beyond the grave. But anyway,
let's look at this article from the Progressive Thinker. So
the the author of this article says, there is nothing

(32:28):
new on the face of the earth, and there is
no doubt that electricity was well known to the Israelites
and probably to the Phoenicians. Again, no doubt. Why why
is it always no doubt uncertainty? We'll come back to
that particular question. Because on one hand, yes, there was
some knowledge of electricity, but was it working. I don't
know if we know that it was known to the Israelites. Yeah,

(32:50):
because I mean I have to admit I don't really
know what the what the weather, weather patterns are necessarily
like uh, in the Middle Middle East, like it to
what extent lightning is observed, But the observation of lightning
would be one slight level of knowledge of electricity, not necessarily,
I mean, not a working knowledge. You can look at

(33:11):
at a lightning storm, you can be impressed by it
and have no idea what it is. Sure given a
broad definition, okay, yeah, yeah, uh. And there's certainly what
the Greeks knew, which we'll get to a little bit.
So The author explains the story of the construction of
the arc, points out that the special type of wood
that was that was used to build the arc. They say, quote,
was this choice accidental on account of the great value

(33:34):
of the resinous would or was it in the choice
of the best known nonconductor among the great number of
various timbers. I don't know if that is correct. I
sort of doubt that premise, but you know who knows um.
I was wondering, is would a good insulator? And I
looked this up. It basically depends on factors about the

(33:54):
wood itself, such as the type of wood and the
moisture content. So, of course, the author points out correctly
that it is said that the inside and outside of
the arc were covered in beaten gold, and that this
is a good conductor of electricity. It is true that
gold is a good conductor of electricity. Quote. So much
is certain that if Edison or Tesla had lived in
those days, they could not have improved upon the choice

(34:17):
of material, and the result was a powerful leiden Jar.
I think they actually could have improved on it. For instance,
silver is an even better conductor than gold. Also, Sarah
the them a higher rank of angel saying they could
go from Cherban oh Toche. So the author also claims
that the arc was charged by the smoke of burnt offerings,

(34:37):
which is the same thing Roger said. Uh. The author
says that after Moses died, others improved upon the design
of the electrical arc by placing it in a temple
surrounded by a hundred and fifty foot poles covered in
gold to charge the arc with electrical storms. And then
we get to my favorite part, which is that the
author says that he essentially implies that Aaron in the

(34:58):
Bible stories used the arc as a murder weapon. Robert,
would you like to read this passage? I've got here, certainly,
and we'll just pretend that we threw in the law
and order sound effect right here, or maybe maybe we
can do that. I don't know. We'll see any coroner's
jury of today if it were to sit on an
inquest over the bodies of Aaron's sons, would it once

(35:20):
bring a verdict of death by discharge of electricity. Aaron
knew this power, and to make it effective. All he
had to do to deal death from this apparatus was
to remove the costly camel's hair carpet, which are almost
perfect non conductors of electricity and make the culprit stand
on terra FIRMA death would result instantly by fire breaking

(35:44):
out and leave no wounds or burns to account for
his death. That several members of revolting tribes of israel
Lites were thus electrocuted is also a matter of record
in the Bible. I wouldn't call them revolting necessarily. That
seems a little harsh. Oh means rebel, Yes, that is
again matter of record. It is just a certainty. What

(36:08):
what is with this? Well, I mean there's probably a
lot to unpack their interns. I mean, we haven't packed
this to a certain extent, uh, for instance, looking at
the uh the Great flood and the idea of a
biblical great flood and its effect on the study of
geology for so long, you know, I mean, the the
Biblical record as it was uh certainly influenced even scientific

(36:29):
understanding of the world for for quite a while. Well,
I just think it's so interesting that you've got this
weird hybrid approach of looking at the Bible here where
the person is saying, I'm going to question and interrogate
the source of this power. But I'm going to absolutely
take the story at face value except where it sort
of doesn't really match what I'm saying. But also I'm
going to take God completely out of the equation or

(36:51):
replace it with a device. But I'm also going to
treat the text this, uh, this translated text as if
it is a pleet historical records, as if it's just
a security cam footage of the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah,
that is exactly what I was, maybe inarticulately trying to say.
And then they in the article by saying, Franklin, the
electric chair in the state of New York, and the

(37:13):
discovery of the light in Jar itself in light in
Germany are all back numbers. History only repeats itself, whether
recorded or not. And then here's a here's an even
crazier one. It seems that none other than Nicola Tesla
toyed with this idea as well. In a nineteen fifteen
essay called The wonder World to be Created by Electricity,

(37:34):
Tesla wrote, the superstitious belief of the ancients, if it
existed at all, can therefore not be taken as a
reliable proof of their ignorance. But just how much they
knew about electricity can only be conjectured. A curious fact
is that the ray or torpedo fish was used by
them in electrotherapy. Some old coins show twins, stars, or sparks,

(37:56):
such as might be produced by a galvanic battery. The records,
though scanty, are of a nature to fill us with
conviction that a few initiated at least had a deeper
knowledge of amber phenomena. To mention one, Moses was undoubtedly
a practical and skillful electrician, far in advance of his time.
Undoubtedly the Bible describes precisely and minutely arrangements constituting a

(38:20):
machine in which electricity was generated by friction of air
against silk curtains and stored in a box constructed like
a condenser. It is very plausible to assume that the
sons of Aaron were killed by a high tension discharge,
and that the vestal fires of the Romans were electrical.
The belt drive must have been known to engineers of

(38:42):
that epoch, and it is difficult to see how the
abundant evolution of static electricity could have escaped their notice.
The words of Nicola Tesla impressive, I had no idea
that he ever commented on this again is certainly undoubtedly,
and then more recently, of course, the idea of the
electric arc as. I think we've mentioned this at the beginning.
If not, you will not be surprised to learn that

(39:03):
it seems popular with people operating in the ancient alien
cinematic universe. Eric van dani Can claimed this, while also
claiming that it was as part of his whole ancient
alien technology thing. It was. It was alien gift motif.
I think he said that it was like a radio.
Somebody said that it was a nuclear reactor. I know Rile,
the founder of the Aliens, had some idea that it

(39:26):
was a nuclear reactor or something like that. But to
what end, What good does it do to have a
nuclear reactor and just trot it about the desert. I'm
not sure that it does, because really the whole point
what makes this subject actually interesting is that building a
form of a capacitor is technically possible for the ancients
without supposing any kind of alien nonsense or intervention. That's true,

(39:50):
and then ultimately the use of it as religious technology
is also reasonable as well. I mean, we've discussed religious
technology in the show before. In the way that various
religions throughout history have used some sort of new technology
as ritual. All right, let's take one more quick break,
and then when we come back, we'll finish up our discussion. Alright,
we're back. So there are all these ideas people have had,

(40:12):
as we've been talking about about the Ark of the
Covenant as a capacitor some form of electrical device. And
while I think you don't need to go to these
kind of bronze punk explanations to explain the origin of
these legends, it is really interesting to think about the
idea and the possibilities for electrical technology in the ancient world. Now,

(40:33):
there isn't really much or any evidence of electrical technology
in the ancient world, but there is some indication that
there were the beginnings of understanding of electricity in the
ancient world. Yeah, I mean there again. Obviously, aspects of
our electrical world that are unmistakable. Lightning is probably the strongest,
clearest overt sign of electricity in our world. But of

(40:56):
course merely observing lightning is a far cry from having
a decent underst standing of what it is. Likewise, certain
circumstances can cause us to produce our own electrostatic discharge.
And the ancient Greeks knew about some of this. They
knew about the triboelectric effect. For instance, this occurs when
materials become electrically charged after they come into frictional contact

(41:18):
with a different material. This is the concept behind the
electrostatic generator infraction generator. Yeah. Again, rub a balloon on
someone's hair and you can witness this holy power. Uh,
do the electric high five with a six year old
and you can also feel the divine spark. They may
not have had our level of advanced playground equipment in
ancient Greece, but they've probably had some stuff you could

(41:41):
rub your butt on that would give you static discharge. Yeah,
because there's a whole list of materials that can, under
the right circumstances, produce this effect on the positive charge
side of things. The list includes human skin, hair, leather,
rabbit fur, cat fur, and wool. You know, think of
all those electric cats in ancient Easia. Right. And then
on the other side of the equation you have would

(42:04):
gold balloons and of course amber. We alluded to the
amber effect earlier in one of the quotes that that
I believe you were reading. Yeah, and amber is a big,
big issue here. Yeah, the ancient Greeks certainly knew about
the amber wool combination. Daileys of Melitis reported on this.
Uh He was a mathematician and astronomer from the Greek

(42:24):
city of Militis in uh Ionia, which is modern day Turkey,
and he lived from six four through five six b c.
He discovered that static electricity could be generated by rubbing
fur on a piece of amber, and the Greeks noted
that the this through a charged amber buttons as well,
especially because these could attract you know, light objects such

(42:47):
as hair. And I think this is this is key
to thinking about what ancient people's knew about electricity is
the materials they used and sort of the everyday circumstances
in which they would, through continual usage, have the uh
encounter the chance of creating that spark. Yeah, and it's
still there in the language we used to discuss electricity today,

(43:08):
like the word electron and electricity comes from the Greek
word electron, which means amber. Yeah, so you know some
level of understanding regarding static discharge as a property of
material interaction in the ancient world, even three thousand BC
is certainly not crazy. It would seem just a natural
result of, again, of working with those materials of human

(43:28):
invention and toolmaking exactly. Yeah, so the principles of friction
generators for electricity, much like Franklin's and Hawksby's friction generators
had it had basically already been discovered in ancient times
and didn't require any modern materials or technology to produce.
And then you've also come you compound that with the

(43:48):
rest of our discussion, which makes it seem that while
these stories of the arc probably have nothing to do
with this, the storage of electricity and some kind of
crude capacitor could also have been managed in the acient
world via basic types of Leiden jars. You've got to
you know, dielectric insulator, and you've got some kind of
like gold or something on either side of it. It
might have even been built by accident at some point.

(44:11):
This also doesn't require any kind of great crazy bronze
punk sci fi. So this kind of leads us to
a big question. If the ancients had pretty much all
they needed to generate and store electricity, at least in
the crudest sense, why didn't they harness these earlier. Why
didn't this lead them to to perform the step up

(44:32):
in in the next experiments, in the next experiments like
it did in say the eighteenth century. Uh, that would
lead to the subsequent development of electrically based technologies in
the ancient world. What if by the time of the
Roman Empire the world had electric power? How different would
the world be? Well, that is at once a tantalizing

(44:53):
question and a frightening question. Knowing knowing what inevitably occurs
as humans new technological breakthroughs. Yeah, I don't know that
I would have trusted the Romans with electricity. I got
I scarcely trust um any modern day cultures with electricity. Well,
as Carl Sagan said, humanity has become powerful before humanity

(45:15):
has become wise. And you know this is true even today,
I'd say, I'd venture a guest. We were even less
wise in the times of the Romans, or at least
the Roman Empire was less wise. How many chickens would
have been fried by by by by Roman Benjamin Franklin's
at the time, One can only imagine. Yeah, so there
must be some kind of answer to this question. Like,

(45:37):
it's not like there's some kind of magical ingredient they
did not possess that would not allow them to start
this chain of research to gain power over the electrical world.
I have to guess that the main impediment. Maybe there's
something I'm not thinking of here. I have to think
the main impediment is just like they didn't have the
proper ecosystem of scientific investigation, like all these different people

(46:01):
in different places doing their independent experiments and then all
coming together to compare notes. You know, this reminds me
of a discussion that we had for our new show,
our new podcast that is launching I believe next week,
UH invention podcast, all about inventions where they come from,
and uh, we're talking about the X ray, I believe,
and we were talking about, Okay, you have the materials

(46:24):
and the parts that were necessary to create the X ray,
the understanding limited as it was at the time, uh,
to create this machine. And yet there were a few
decades there before somebody actually really did, before they really
cracked the mystery of what was going on. And kind
of like the Leiden Yard, the discovery was partially an accident.

(46:46):
I mean, somebody was Uh. The discoverer of the X
ray machine was messing around with with electrical equipment. So
it wasn't like they were just like, you know, cleaning
their garage and they discovered the X ray machine, but
they weren't setting out to discover a way to look
inside the body, right, And part of it too was
like was also very literally where were they looking and
there when they were creating some sort of an effect?

(47:07):
What how are they trying to understand it? And so
I think there might be an answer there if and
again we're making a few different leaps here, but if
assuming for a second that the Arc of the Covenant
was indeed a light in jar and uh, and then
this was an electrostatic discharge that people were observing and experiencing,

(47:28):
what were they observing? How were they trying to observe it?
And what were they looking for? What answers were they
looking for in playing with this technology. Well, one of
the things that the people who were doing this kind
of like pseudohistory about the arc do is they say, well, okay,
clearly Aaron started using the arc as a murder weapon,
and they were using it as a weapon of war

(47:50):
or something like that. I would tend to think if
it actually were the case that there was an arc
and the arc was actually a light and jar. Again,
I am not at all saying I think this is likely,
but just suppose, I would think the most likely used
for it would be a piece of religious technology. The
purpose of it is to demonstrate some sort of supernatural

(48:10):
power by letting off this discharge or whatever it is
indication that something you don't understand that is powerful and
is unexplained is happening. And this gives you a kind
of like peek behind the curtain of reality and you
can see the powers that lie beyond. And really that
would be the most powerful application of the technology at
the time, because no matter what the stories are about

(48:31):
the arc um, you wouldn't be able to bring down
the walls of Jericho with this thing. You wouldn't be
able to stop the flow of the river Jordan's. Maybe
you could murder your nephew, maybe, But that's kind of
small potatoes compared to giving yourself some some powerful force
that not only was able to help like shore up

(48:51):
your religion, but also convince those that needed convincing that
you were privy to the divine word of God through
this device. Well, in fact, about the primary ways that
lead in jars were used. When people first started making them,
they became like a parlor game, entertaing thing. Yes, it
was entertainment. In fact, it was almost a form of

(49:12):
religious technology. There would be the stories of people they
get a bunch of light in jars together, or I
don't know about a bunch, maybe just one. They'd have
some kind of capacitor, and then they would get a
bunch of monks to hold hands, and then they'd shock
them all at the same time in a chain so
that they all felt it at once. It was almost
like a strange ritual. Yeah, you get into the power
of the performance, right, and it's it's it's a part

(49:34):
of religion, it's a part of entertainment. It's just a
part of the human experience. It was primarily useful, not
for work it would do in the material world, before
the work. It would do on the minds of the
people taking part and observing. It was performative. Yeah, all right,
so there you have it. Um. I hope everyone leaves
these episodes like maybe a little more interested and a
little more enthralled by the arc, you know, because ultimately

(49:56):
we can't explain what it actually was. If it was
a thing. I mean, it's just again, this is a
place where history and mythology converge. Yeah, but I do
love it as a jumping off point. It's almost like
it's the way station to all these strange bronze punk
planets you can visit that that are revealing once you
start thinking about them. Indeed, and we would love to

(50:17):
hear everyone else's thoughts on on the arc. Yeah, people
who learned about it from Raiders of the Lost Arc
first of all, and and from people who learned about
it in uh, you know, uh their history class, or
their Bible class, or uh, whatever kind of a religious
study they were involved in. Um, perhaps you have a
particular favorite theory. Perhaps you have your own brand new

(50:37):
theory that we haven't thought of. Maybe it contained a
giant squid. I don't know. I will leave it to
you to provide us with those new theories. But in
the meantime, be sure to check out Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where
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(50:57):
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Stuff Big Thanks as always to our excellent audio producers

(51:19):
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(51:49):
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