From the mid 18th century on, before there were batteries, experimenters used Leyden jars to store electrical charge. As an early form of capacitor, Leyden jars, unlike electrochemical cells, stored their charge physically and would release it all at once. Many experimenters took to hooking several Leyden jars together to create a stronger charge and one of them, the colonial American inventor Benjamin Franklin, may have been the first to call his grouping an "electrical battery", a play on the military term for weapons functioning together.