The following is a paper by H. Aspden presented in a Poster Session at the Institute of Physics (U.K.) conference, ELECTROSTATICS '87, held at Oxford University on 8-10 April, 1987.
The following paper was written in 1984. It describes an experiment performed when the author was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton in England. The paper was not published at that time but a summary account of the experiment was presented in a poster session at the above conference. It was shown that, contrary to standard belief, it is possible for charge to exist on metal objects within the cage that are connected to the cage by copper wire. The effect is small but attributable to the incidence of thermal radiation. It affects certain measurements of G, the constant of gravitation.