Best Capacitor

Manufacturers

Best Capacitor Manufacturers

Capacitors were first used on a commercial scale, and then it was in connection with the electric
telegraph. Somewhat later came their use in the telephone. During the intervening 140 years,
research, spurred by the invention of the Leyden Jar, continued to reveal the properties and
behaviour of capacitors and dielectrics. Notable was the work of Michael Faraday, in honour of
whom is named the "farad," the practical unit of capacitance. Various investigators had observed
that the ability of a capacitor to store charge depended on some specific property of the dielectric. It
was Faraday who made a systematic study of this property and named it "Specific Inductive
Capacity" or "Dielectric Constant." More than any other factor, the nature and condition of the
dielectric determine the character of a capacitor.
Dielectric materials as diversified as paraffin wax and Gold Beaters Skin were the subject of
experimentation. The year 1845 brought a capacitor made by piling alternate layers of mica and tin
to provide the prototype of the modern mica capacitor manufacturers . In 1876 came a capacitor
consisting of Interleaved layers of conductor and paper, wound to form a cylinder and subsequently
impregnated with paraffin. Present-day paper capacitors are still made in this form. We read that, in
1893, paraffin-paper capacitors were used in commercial power circuits, but became so hot they had
to be taken out, an incident foreshadowing the considerable study which would be required to adapt
the paper capacitor to low-frequency power uses. By the end of the last century, capacitors were
finding Increasing use in industry.
Lord Kelvin and others had shown how the discharge of a capacitor might become oscillatory in
character, a property which makes possible the oscillating circuit and the generation of electric
waves. At the turn of the century we find Marconi using Leyden jars of elementary form to help
generate electric waves in the first successful wireless transmission experiments. Later came the
electron tube; it is through the electron tube circuit and its auxiliaries that the capacitor has seen its
greatest expansion. The swift succession of developments in telephone, radio and elsewhere which
the electron tube made possible created an urgent demand for better, smaller and cheaper
capacitors.
As a result, during the past quarter century, the making of capacitors has grown to be a major as
well as a highly specialized branch of the electrical art. Rare is the electric circuit which does not
employ at least one capacitor. The Bell System alone uses over 100,000,000 of them. From almost
every angle, the circuit designer or builder of electronic circuits is confronted by the need to use a
capacitor in one form or another.
To him it is likely to appear as that unavoidable package of microfarads to which space is reluctantly
allotted, or the thing which must be added to a circuit after it has been fully designed and which
could not be squeezed into the already overcrowded chassis even under hydraulic pressure. To the
harassed capacitor specialist, it seems to be damned by all, intelligently used by few and adequately
understood by none. All of this reflects both the inevitability of capacitors and the growing
complexity of the art.

Too few of us realize that the provision of capacitors capable of meeting today's requirements of
high-grade electronic circuits demands systematic engineering effort, aided by chemical and physical
research and supported by rigid standards of manufacture. Naturally, this rapid growth has entailed
marked growing pains and the problems have multi- plied in step with the relentless pressure on
apparatus designers to accommodate more apparatus and more power in less space. In 1943 the
urgent need for high capacitor quality and for the standardization of types culminated in an
extensive study by the American Standards Association and the War Production Board to establish
national standards for the control of capacitors for military uses. Later the Army-Navy Electronics
Standards Agency extended these efforts and issued improved standards for joint Army and Navy
use.