the.com/capacitance
a material's talent for hoarding electric charge, then dumping it all at once
means Capacitance is the measure of how much electric charge a system can store for a given voltage, telling you how greedy a capacitor is at soaking up charge.
from From 'capacity' plus the '-ance' suffix that turns a quality into a measurable noun. 'Capacity' traces back through French to Latin 'capacitas,' from 'capax' ('able to hold'), rooted in 'capere,' 'to take' or 'to seize' — the same grasping root behind 'capture' and 'capable.' The specific electrical sense was coined in the 19th century as physicists needed a word for a conductor's charge-holding talent, building it on the older, broader idea of sheer holding-power.
- unit
- measured in farads, named after Michael Faraday
- camera flash
- capacitors stockpile energy then unleash it in milliseconds
- defibrillators
- store a jolt big enough to restart a heart
- no contact
- two plates store charge without touching, only an electric field
- earth scale
- the planet itself has a capacitance, roughly 700 microfarads
farad — si unit of capacitance; one farad = one coulomb per volt
microfarad — common capacitor rating; 1 millionth of a farad, used in audio equipment
picofarad — trillionth of a farad; typical range for rf circuit capacitors