Neither Poggendorf nor Schweigger seems to have ruled out, on logical grounds alone, the possibility of deflections greater than 90°, with the loop-plane in the magnetic meridian, though Poggendorf does add a vague note that if the needle deflected too far it would encounter forces of the opposing sign.
Poggendorf experimented with the size of the circuit wires, finding that larger wires led to greater deflections. He noted that the size of the cell plates and the nature of the cell's moist conductors would certainly have a great effect, but that to investigate these in detail would take undue time, and he therefore proposed to keep this part of the apparatus constant, using one pair of zinc and copper plates 3.6 inches in diameter, separated by cloth soaked in ammonium-chloride solution.
Poggendorf's principal quantitative study of his magnetic condenser used 13 identical coils, each with 100 turns. In order that the turns should all be at approximately the same distance from the needle, the coils were wound of the finest brass wire that could be silk-insulated, the wire diameter being 0.02 lines. On adding coils one at a time across the cell (i.e., connecting them in parallel), the deflections were as follows:
Turns 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 Deflection in degrees 45 50 55 59-60 62 63 64
Turns 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 Deflection in degrees 65 65-1/2 66 66 66 66
Adding some coils with fewer turns, and connecting various combinations "as a _continuum_" (i.e., in series), the deflections using the same cell were:
Turns 1 5 10 25 50 75 100 200 Deflection in degrees 10 22 27 30 35-40 40 40 40
Turns 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 Deflection in degrees 40 40 41 40 40 40 40 40
Making a few coils from wire with 1/8-line diameter, the deflections, again using the same cell were:
Turns 5 25 50 100 Over 100 Deflection in degrees 20-22 40-45 45 65 65
Since the needle used in these experiments was almost as long as the inside clearance of the coils, no simple tangent law can be applied, and it is not possible to discover an equivalent circuit in modern terms. However, the constancy of the deflections for large numbers of turns in each case indicates that the cell voltage and resistance were fairly constant, and a rough estimate suggests that the cell resistance was comparable to the resistance of one of the 100-turn coils of fine wire. Such a value means that cell resistance limited the maximum deflections for the parallel-connected multipliers, while coil resistance fixed the limit in the series case.