This immediately reminded me of the slightly infamous and almost certainly apocryphal "box" of the phreaking era for supposedly overloading and destroying your adversary's phone, or even taking down the local POTS switch. It was called a urine box most commonly, or sometimes a copper box or assassin box if I recall correctly.
This [1] seems to indicate the urine box and the assassin box were actually different, even though they seemed to achieve similar results. I'd be curious to find circuit diagrams.
