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The connection between electricity and lightning was known but not fully understood. By conducting the kite experiment Franklin proved that lighting was an.
Table of contents
- Citation Information
- The great debate about Benjamin Franklin and his kite
- Ben Franklin and His Kite Experiment, The Real Story
- More on Franklin and the electrical kite () | Skulls in the Stars
To demonstrate, in the completest manner possible, the sameness of the electric fluid with the matter of lightning, Dr.
Franklin, astonishing as it must have appeared, contrived actually to bring lightning from the heavens, by means of an electrical kite, which he raised when a storm of thunder was perceived to be coming on. This kite had a pointed wire fixed upon it, by which it drew the lightning from the clouds. This lightning descended by the hempen string, and was received by a key tied to the extremity of it; that part of the string which was held in the hand being of silk, that the electric virtue might stop when it came to the key.
At this key he charged phials, and from electric fire thus obtained, he kindled spirits, and performed all other electrical experiments which are usually exhibited by an excited globe or tube. As every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery as this the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton cannot but give pleasure to all my readers, I shall endeavour to gratify them with the communication of a few particulars which I have from the best authority. The Doctor, after having published his method of verifying his hypothesis concerning the sameness of electricity with the matter of lightning, was waiting for the erection of a spire in Philadelphia to carry his views into execution; not imagining that a pointed rod, of a moderate height, could answer the purpose; when it occurred to him, that, by means of a common kite, he could have a readier and better access to the regions of thunder than by any spire whatever.
Preparing, therefore, a large silk handkerchief, and two cross sticks, of a proper length, on which to extend it; he took the opportunity of the first approaching thunder storm to take a walk into a field, in which there was a shed convenient for his purpose. But dreading the ridicule which too commonly attends unsuccessful attempts in science, he communicated his intended experiment to no body but his son, who assisted him in raising the kite.
The kite being raised, a considerable time elapsed before there was any appearance of its being electrified. One very promising cloud had passed over it without any effect; when, at length, just as he was beginning to despair of his contrivance, he observed some loose threads of the hempen string to stand erect, and to avoid one another, just as if they had been suspended on a common conductor.
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- Ben Franklin's electricty experiments: How Franklin made his kite.
Struck with this promising appearance, he immediately presented his knucle to the key, and let the reader judge of the exquisite pleasure he must have felt at that moment the discovery was complete. He perceived a very evident electric spark. Others succeeded, even before the string was wet, so as to put the matter past all dispute, and when the rain had wet the string, he collected electric fire very copiously.
Citation Information
This happened in June , a month after the electricians in France had verified the same theory, but before he heard of any thing they had done. The best discussion of this entire topic is I. See above, III , — See above, III , —3. See above, pp. See above, p. See below, —2.
BF to Collinson, September Text edit. See below, p. Notably Cohen in the works cited in the first two footnotes to this headnote, and Carl Van Doren in Franklin , p. The paragraph could be from some now missing letter of later date than about Nov. At this point Priestley inserted a footnote reference to Exper.
This gives him, and his legend, endless vitality. If you were a child growing up in Philadelphia in the nineteen-sixties, Franklin was still alive, everywhere you looked. At night, his electric profile, wattles outlined in neon, hovered above the city in the sign for the Benjamin Franklin Hotel. He was known in Philadelphia the way St. Francis was known in Assisi, as both presiding deity and local boy. Central to his myth was the story of the Kite and Key. An honors society at the University of Pennsylvania still has that name. He went out to a field in a thunderstorm, flew his kite, saw it struck by lightning, and then watched the lightning sparkle around a key held in a jar at the end of the kite twine.
If he put his knuckle on the twine, he could feel the spark. In fact, he had shown that lightning was a form of electricity, and that ingenuity could hold its own against book learning. There was no kite, no key, no bolt, no knuckle, no charge. He let people believe that he had been places he never went, done things he never did, and seen things that never happened. In the past three years, we have had Edmund S.
The great debate about Benjamin Franklin and his kite
Two more Franklin biographies are supposedly on the way. There are no bad biographies of Franklin for the same reason that there are no bad Three Stooges movies, or, for that matter, demolition derbies: something always happens. Just when Franklin is getting becalmed in diplomatic squabbles, say, or running a tedious printing business in a provincial city, he writes about farts or invents bifocals.
Where John Adams comes before us in all his bad-tempered intelligence, and Washington in his thin-lipped realism, Franklin is elusive: he can at times be Santa Claus or William James, bubbly and intelligent, and at times he is Franklin Roosevelt, with a carefully composed affability overlaying a character essentially calculating and remote. In part, this is because he had to adapt to two different times, one of which, at least, he helped to make. His career, as Isaacson suggests, bridges two centuries of sensibility: in the first half of his life, up until the seventeen-fifties, we are in a largely seventeenth-century world of nascent capitalism and virtuous upward mobility.
Franklin is an ambitious early capitalist operator at the edge of the empire, a provincial Pepys. He starts a business from scratch and chases women, and both the culture and the science around him feel skin-thin. By the end of the Franklin biographies, we are in a late-Enlightenment world of fully fledged science and sensibility—where the reign of violence and feeling is beginning.
This is partly a question of place, Philadelphia traded for Paris, but it is also an effect of growing knowledge and an expanded universe, and science is the crossing point. The electrical experiments are the link between the early Franklin and the later Franklin—between the young striver and the Papa Savant. Franklin was born in Boston in , to a family of freethinking artisans, and was apprenticed as a boy to his half brother James, a printer.
Ben Franklin and His Kite Experiment, The Real Story
Benjamin picked up the newspapering habit—for a brief period, still an adolescent, he ran the paper while his brother was in jail over a censorship dispute. Compared with Mathered Boston, it was. Franklin, tall and physically formidable—he was a terrific swimmer and runner—almost immediately brought himself to the center of Philadelphia life. He earned a reputation as the publisher and editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette , a newspaper begun by a printer whom he helped drive out of business.
Like Dr. Johnson, his almost exact contemporary, he made his way by sheer force of talent as a miscellaneous journalist; unlike the bulldoggish Dr. Johnson, he understood, and pioneered, the American principle that it pays to be liked. But he had world-class ambitions, and he understood that those ambitions were probably best served by achievement in natural philosophy—the sciences.
No one in London gave a damn about Philadelphia politics, but they cared about Philadelphia lightning. Distance lends authority to experiments: if it can be done out there, it can be done anywhere. Electricity was not yet a serious science. Though everyone agreed that it was a phenomenon, no one was sure at first if it was a phenomenon like the hula hoop or a phenomenon like gravity. People played with it for fun. Then, in the seventeen-forties, the Leyden jar, an early capacitor, showed that an electrical charge could be held in place and made to pass through glass.
Essentially, you could collect and store electricity; and in Franklin reported to the Royal Academy in London that he had created the first electric battery. In his correspondence with the academy, he understood that he would inevitably be viewed as a provincial, and that it paid to play the clown a little.
He electrocuted at least one turkey, and boasted of how tender it was, a thing typical of the way he could turn a joke into a fact. Previously, it had been proposed that there were two different kinds of electricity, both fluid: one generated by glass and one generated by resin. He was, of course, a politician and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
More on Franklin and the electrical kite () | Skulls in the Stars
He was an author, printer, and publisher. He served as a postmaster, a patent officer, and a diplomat. He studied complex scientific principles and was extremely knowledgeable in the areas of natural science, physics, and more. As an inventor, he is credited with developing bifocal glasses, the Franklin stove, and lightning rods.
As a community leader, he started the library system in the U. He was known as a great dancer, bit of a womanizer, a Freemason, and a downright funny guy. A Baghdad battery.
Source: science Humans have known about electricity for thousands of years and, in fact, there may have been attempts to harness electricity as far back as antiquity. Archaeologists have unearthed a strange artifact that dates back to around AD. It is a ceramic vase that holds a copper tube and iron rod. It was discovered that, if an acidic liquid like vinegar was poured into the vase, an electrical charge is generated. This discovery has been named the Baghdad battery. Many other scientists have studied electrical energy and wrote about their experiments. Peter Collinson. Source: amazon.
He sent Franklin an electricity tube.