CAPACITORS

In the most common form, capacitors are two metal objects arranged in a certain distance to each other. Often, there are special insulators between the two metal objects (for example, a capacitor may be built like a sandwich of metal foil (connected to one contact), paper, and another metal foil (connected to the second contact)).

For explanatory purposes, those two metal objects are in most cases represented by two metal plates standing opposite to each other. This is what we see in the circuit symbol, which consists of the connecting wires and the metal plates, divided by a space of - lets say: nothing - or: void. Not that this is the most common sort, but history happened to decide: 'Oh, if it's that easy, lets put the difficulties into the function of the device, not in the symbol of it'. This is why we won't even try to explain all the features in these little parts of the size of some few milimetres to some few phone boxes. A short note on what may be inside that 'big nothing' we called 'empty space' or 'void': There IS something inside, if you can call an electrical field a 'something'.