You are going to have to forgive me but your subtitle made me do it.

From glass jars to tantalum powder, these are the devices that really power your phone or electric car.

I consider this technically inaccurate, they don’t provide the power they are parts of the circuit that regulates the power. I suspected that you would have other technical inaccuracies as well.

It did not take me long to find another, minor error.

it is estimated the jars could hold a charge between 20,000 and 60,000 volts.

The proper unit for charge is Coulombs. The power or pain of a discharge is not so much dependent on the voltage as it is the amount of stored charge. Higher voltages do make for longer sparks but power is what causes the pain and capacitors have two ratings, voltage, don’t exceed the voltage or you could damage (it could even explode) the capacitor and its capacitance in Farads. Multiply the Farads by the voltage and you have the stored charge in Coulombs. More Farads and more voltage, stores more Coulombs.

It seems an error crept into one of your references.

“Today we see additional materials opportunities in enhancing aluminum foils and plastic films as these dielectrics still have a long way to go in reaching the threshold of their ability,

Aluminum foils are not dielectrics they are conductors, dielectrics need to be insulators.

Our devices could be powered by capacitors. You briefly mentioned Super Capacitors. There is an issue with the shape of the discharge curve that makes them less attractive than batteries even if they had good capacity to weight performance. There is also talk of giant capacitors for Electrical Grid Storage.

I don’t really think the errors detract from the story and I suspect they are not caused by ignorance just negligence.

TEK