Erekiteru (a power generator)

Gennai Hiraga developed this friction power generator around 1776. (This unit is a replica. The original is in the collection of Japan's Telecommunications Museum. It has been designated an important cultural property.) Erekiteru was the first electrical machine to be made in Japan. The process of rubbing a glass cylinder against a gilded pad generates static electricity. Electricity was thought to improve the constitution of the human body by taking excess "fire" from the body and adjusting its bakance. But this phenomenon gained popularity solely as a spectacle. In 1770, when Gennai Hiraga journeyed to the city of Nagasaki to study gor the second time, he procured a broken electrostatic generator from an interpreter of the Dutch language in the city, which at the time was Japan's window to the Western world. He succeeded in reconstructing the generator around 1776.