What are these carbon rods used for?

I've dug a lot of these.


Rick

Don't know the scale so this guess may be way off but maybe a dry cell battery core?

It's 7/8" dia and 5 1/2" long.

Rick

What do nuclear reactor graphite rods look like?

Here in the UK, we occasionally find carbon rods from arc lamps, they are about 1/2 inch diameter. One I found had a German manufacturers name on it. They had a roughly-pointed tip on one end.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2016 01:54AM by Pimento.

From old batteries my dad and I used to dig bottles in old dump sites and we used to find them he told me that they indeed were from old batteries. Like you would charge with a gas or wind powered generator so when you had no wind or weren't running the engine you would still have power for a couple lites and the radio. There's a really neat article in farm collector magazine about the old on farm power plants their engines and the many kinds and designs of storage batteries. One of the more popular models was made by Delco and used glass case batteries.

Thank you. That's good to know.

Rick

Learn something new every day.

I know I haven't dug any of those-- not yet anyway.

I have found many of those at ghost town sites. The smaller ones are usually about .375" x 2.5". The larger rods like you have, I usually find at railroad sidings and towns near the tracks. The railroad used large batteries for some of the switches and those batteries were the glass jar type mentioned above. They also used Battery oil in these batteries by pouring the oil on top of the electrolite solution to help keep the solution from evaporating. Lots of time you'll find the small battery oil bottles in the same location as the rods. Most battery oil bottles are marked Edison Battery Oil and measure about 3" tall.

Funny how dug-up carbon in a slightly different form is major news:
[www.bbc.co.uk]

Sadly our detectors can't find this form of carbon.....

Yep batteries, I've found many of them at ghost towns and old 1800's parks. Typically the top is pinched thin with a hole to connect a wire.

I dig those by the hundreds in old dumps, batteries