Kleist was convinced that a substantial electric charge could be collected and held within the glass which he knew would provide an obstacle to the escape of the 'fluid'. He received a significant shock from the device when he accidentally touched the nail through the cork while still cradling the bottle in his other hand. He communicated his results to at least five different electrical experimenters, in several letters from November 1745 to March 1746, but did not receive any confirmation that they had repeated his results, until April 1746. Daniel Gralath learned about Kleist's experiment from seeing the letter to Paul Swietlicki, written in November 1745. After Gralath's failed first attempt to reproduce the experiment in December 1745, he wrote to Kleist for more information (and was told that the experiment would work better if the tube half-filled with alcohol was used). Gralath (in collaboration with ) succeeded in getting the intended effect on 5 March 1746, holding a small glass medicine bottle with a nail inside in one hand, moving it close to an electrostatic generator, and then moving the other hand close to the nail. Kleist didn't understand the significance of his conducting hand holding the bottle—and both he and his correspondents were loath to hold the device when told that the shock could throw them across the room. It took some time before Kleist's student associates at Leyden worked out that the hand provided an essential element.