File:Faradays ice pail experiment.png

English: A drawing of the apparatus used in Faraday's ice pail experiment, a simple electrostatics experiment performed by British scientist Michael Faraday in 1843, from a 1917 electrical engineering book. The apparatus he used is a metal ice pail (A) supported on a wooden stool (B) to insulate it from the ground. A brass ball charged with electricity hanging from an insulating silk thread (C) can be lowered into the pail. The outside of the pail is connected by a wire to a gold-leaf electroscope (D) which can detect charge on the pail. As the ball is lowered into the pail, the electroscope indicates that the outside of the pail becomes charged with the same polarity charge as the ball. The inside of the pail, if tested by the electroscope, is charged with an opposite charge, due to electrostatic induction. If the ball is then touched to the inside of the pail, both the ball and the inside of the pail are left uncharged, indicating that their charges cancelled each other. This demonstrates that a charge inside a conductive container induces a charge of the exact same size on the inside of the container. Alterations to image: romoved caption and replaced the letter labels on the drawing with the ones Faraday used in his description of the experiment.