Talk:Body capacitance

Here is something I cannot understand about body capacitance: in a capacitor, there must be a positive side and a negative side. Electrons are put into one side of the capacitor and taken away from the other side. Why, with touch lamps and switches, can they detect body capacitance when only one piece of metal (one terminal) makes contact with the human body? Where is the other terminal to complete the circuit? The air?

Commercial capacitors always need two metal terminals, + and -. I need help understanding the full flow (complete circuit) of electrons, and it would help the article to illustrate where the + and - is.
 * I believe the human part of the circuit is both. X [' Mac Davis '] ( SUPERDESK | Help me improve ) 18:20, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, electrolytic capacitors can be charged only with one polarity; they are damaged if charged the other way. The polarity marking show how they have to be connected.

I don't really know about touch switches and lamps, but, very likely, they respond to modest capacitance (on the order of 100 pF) between them and ground (earth). When a human touches them, it's the capacitance of the human combined with the surroundings that creates the capacitor effectively to ground. The human's body capacitance (human is one electrode, surroundings the other) creates the needed capacitance to operate the lamp or such. More than likely, touch switches and lamps respond to AC, not statically-changed human bodies (DC). When a human touches, body capacitance causes a modest amount of AC to flow and operate the device. HTH! Nikevich (talk) 09:15, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Body capacitance. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160304033545/http://www.nevaelectromagnetics.com/ElectrostaticsModeling.html to http://www.nevaelectromagnetics.com/ElectrostaticsModeling.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 08:12, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

How can 'push' button switches bw operated using body capacitance??
It's given that body capacitance can be used to operate pushbutton switches. How? It's clear in it's name 'push'button, i.e. it needs to be pushed for operating it. How can body capacitance be used to operate it?

I've added a 'clarification needed' at that sentence. Snath03 (talk) 13:33, 5 March 2019 (UTC)


 * The touch sensor (not really a push button in the strict sense) has a small amount of capacitance which is part of a circuit which monitors this capacitance (it could be a bridge circuit for example). When a person touches the sensor, they add their body capacitance to the sensor's capacitance which the monitoring circuit detects (e.g. in the case of a bridge circuit: it unbalances the bridge). Capacitance type touch screen work exactly the same way but, obviously, the screen has a large number of individual sensors. Now if I could find a source for this, I would add it to the article (though no one else seems to have bothered much). Vuehalloo (talk) 15:31, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Should "Body Capacitance" be a Wikipedia entry?
I have looked for "Body Capacitance" in several other reference books, but I do not find it. I looked for it in Webster's New World Dictionary, World Book Encyclopedia, Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, Cambridge online dictionary, and in The Bantam Medical Dictionary, but none of them have an entry for "Body Capacitance." I have noticed that Wikipedia does not have entries for "Body Resistance" nor "Body Inductance", either. I am pleased it doesn't. I don't think Wikipedia should have those entries. Anything that can store excess charge can display characteristics of electrical capacitance, but that doesn't mean that there should be an entry for it. Of course, capacitance is actually the amount of charge stored per unit of potential difference between the thing on which the charge is stored and a reference point. So, capacitance depends to a large extent on what is in the vicinity of the object on which the charge is stored. It is not merely a property of the charged body alone. I suggest that "Body Capacitance" be removed from Wikipedia. Reticulum271 (talk) 17:14, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
 * The term shows up in IEEE Std. 100 "Dictionary of IEEE Standards Terms" and in a very old "Modern Dictionary of Electronics Third Edition " edited by Rudolf F. Graf (Howard W. Sams Publishing, 1970) that I bought at Radio Shack with my paper route money. You can bring this up using Wikipedia's "Articles for Discussion" procedure. You could keep very busy nominating things even more obscure than this. --Wtshymanski (talk) 02:15, 29 February 2024 (UTC)