Thread: Is it possible for static electricity to be held in an object forever?

Hi,

Is it possible for static electricity to be held in an object forever?

If not, why not?

Thanks.

Great, thanks. Where can I contact one of the physicists to ask them?

I'm not a physicist either but I second PhDemon's answer. If you could keep the object perfectly isolated, then it would store the charge forever. But in the real world, it will eventually leak away. No vacuum is perfect and the object "whatever it is" would need to be supported (and there are no perfect insulators).

But you can store static electricity for quite a long time, if you are careful. A lot of the early research on electricity was done using charge stored in things like Leyden jars.

Thirded.
Any contact with anything but a perfect insulator will drain the charge.

Even something as large as Boeing 747 (which builds up a static charge by moving through the air at ~600 mph) manages to discharge that same static into the air behind it. They have special "long thin pointy bits" on the wing trailing edge specifically for that purpose.

Great stuff. So there would be no quick and easy way for example to just 'paint on' a something to give an object static electricity?

Not that I can see.
Unless you try catnip as a coating and let a herd of cats rub up against it constantly.