The sky above Philadelphia began changing from the bright sunshine of a June day to a gloomy gray. Soon over the neat, red-brick colonial city rolled a wave of hulking black clouds. Windows slammed shut. Tradesmen closed doors left open to relieve the sweltering heat. Mothers called their children indoors. Idlers vanished from street corners into the nearest tavern. Philadelphia was about to experience that natural phenomenon known as a thunderstorm. People hoped it would lessen the humidity and the heat, which often made summertime Philadelphia feel like Equatorial Africa, but they also shivered with dread at the first rumble of thunder. Those black clouds carried in them dangerous bolts of lightning.
Only one person in the city greeted the oncoming storm with sheer delight. Benjamin Franklin had been waiting impatiently for conditions like these for days. In his comfortable home on the southeast corner of Race and Second Streets, he called excitedly to his twenty-one-year-old son William. Billy, as his family called him, soon appeared. He was a strapping young man, over six feet in height, two or three inches taller than his father, although he lacked his father’s almost bear-like chest and shoulders. William carried himself with the confident, martial erectness of a soldier. Handsome was the only word to describe his small but fine-featured face. He shared his father’s high forehead and firm chin, but his mouth was not as relaxed or as pleasing in appearance. Now it was attractive enough because William Franklin’s face was aglow with excitement.
Is everything done? Benjamin Franklin asked. William nodded. Quickly they slipped into their loose-fitting cloth coats and hurried into the next room. There on a long table stood a variety of strange machines and instruments - glass tubes and jars bound with strips of tin, glass globes on spindles, silk strings dangling from the ceiling. To anyone acquainted with eighteenth-century science, this apparatus - in particular, the tubes and the tin-encased jars - meant that this was the laboratory of someone investigating the mysteries of electricity. For the last four years, this exploration had occupied almost all of Benjamin Franklin’s days and nights. To find the extra hours he needed, he had resigned from his printing business, sacrificing half of his annual income, and moved to this house on the outskirts of Philadelphia where he was less accessible to his many friends.
When Franklin began his experiments, the world of science viewed electricity as a curiosity. Experimenters created “electrical fire” by rubbing glass tubes with silk. They then stored the accumulated charges in tin-lined bottles, called Leyden jars, named for the university where their creator first made them. But beyond the fact that electricity created magical effects - for instance, it could animate a piece of twisted wire so that it looked like a living spider or, in a darkened room, cause the gold border on an expensive book to glow - no one knew terribly much about it. In a series of classic experiments, Franklin had transformed electricity from a curiosity to a full-fledged branch of science. He had discovered the existence of plus and minus charges and invented such terms as battery, conductor, and condenser. Now he was about to challenge his most daring hypothesis - that electricity and lightning were identical.
As the first patter of rain pelted the windows, William Franklin took from a dark corner of the laboratory a strange looking kite made from a large, thin silk kerchief. To the top of the vertical stick he fastened a pointed wire about fifteen or sixteen inches long. Benjamin Franklin took a Leyden jar and concealed it under his loose coat. Then down the stairs and out the door the two of them went. They hurried through the scattering rain to an open field not far from their house, part of the “commons” or grazing grounds of Philadelphia. On one side of the field was a shed, where people who grazed their cattle could take refuge from rain or sun. While Franklin stood inside the shed, William ran across the pasture and got the kite aloft in the tricky, gusty wind of the gathering storm. Then he, too, retreated under the shed.
William Franklin must have felt a little foolish, flying a kite in the rain, but he did not look nearly as funny as his father would have prancing across the commons on the same errand. There was the strong chance that the hypothesis was wrong. If so, Benjamin Franklin did not want people laughing at him in the streets or asking where he got his outrageous idea about lightning. He knew William would keep quiet if the experiment failed.
There was another reason why William came along with his father. The experiment was dangerous. Franklin knew electricity could kill; he had killed animals with it in his laboratory. Twice, by accident, he had knocked himself unconscious with it and, in another experiment, had prostrated six grown men with a single charge. He also knew that lightning was far more powerful electricity than anything he had created in his laboratory. He had seen it reduce the metal part of a roof to molten jelly. This was not an experiment one could call on a friend to share. Only his son, who had already taken many lesser risks in the laboratory, could join Benjamin Franklin at this climactic moment.
In a few minutes, the kite was only a small dancing dot in the gloomy sky. William handed the kite string to his father. To the end of the twine was tied a silk ribbon. Silk did not conduct electricity; it was an insulator. This was the only safeguard Franklin used against the deadly amount of electricity in the clouds above him. Contrary to the traditional Currier and Ives print, which shows Franklin and his son (pictured as a small boy) gleefully rejoicing when a bolt of lightning hit the kite, this was the last thing Franklin wanted. The pointed wire at the top of his kite was designed to draw off some of the cloud’s electric charge, just as a pointed conductor attracted electricity from a charged body in the laboratory. There was no need, much less a desire, for the massive and dangerous discharge of a lightning bolt. Where the twine and the silk joined a small house key was fastened. This was where Franklin hoped the electricity would appear. Again and again, he touched the key with his knuckle. Nothing happened.
Over the city, the storm increased in fury. Thunder rumbled, and lightning glinted. Then William pointed excitedly toward a massive cloud moving downwind toward them. On it came, booming thunder while it passed directly over their heads. The little kite danced and dived in the gusts of turbulence. Again Benjamin Franklin touched the key with his knuckle - surely now. His face fell. The key was as cold as it had been the day it was cast.
Now the sky was so black it was impossible to tell one cloud from another. More rain began to fall. The kite whirled and twisted and dived. Close to despair, Franklin gave up touching the key and stared disconsolately up at the murky sky. He thought about the hundreds of experiments he had conducted, the studies he had made of the effects of lightning on houses and trees, trying to see where he had gone wrong. Then his eyes drifted toward the string in his hand. With an exclamation of triumph, he clapped his son on the back and pointed excitedly at the twine.
The loose threads were standing erect, separate from each other, just as if they had been electrified when he had suspended them on a laboratory conductor. Cautiously Benjamin Franklin moved his knuckle toward the key. Through his hand and up his arm rushed that familiar tingling, shocking sensation that experimenters called an electric spark. Again and again he touched it, and then he let William touch it.
Now the storm began in earnest. As sheets of rain swept across the field soaking the string, Benjamin Franklin picked up the Leyden jar and touched its wire to the key. Electricity from the charged air within the cloud poured into it.
This was the moment of maximum danger. If the kite had been struck by a lightning bolt at this point, most scientists agree, the charge would have leaped the strip of silk and both Franklins would have become charred corpses, there on the Philadelphia common. But father and son, enthralled by their discovery, weren’t going to worry about the danger now. It was true! Electricity and lightning were one and the same. It meant that if people could
control this no longer so mysterious fire in the laboratory, they could also tame its brother from the heavens.
A few minutes later, the storm passed. An exultant Franklin reeled in his kite and warned William to tell no one about their triumph. He must first communicate it to the scientific world. For the better part of the summer, father and son shared the momentous secret that was to catapult Benjamin Franklin to world fame.
It is difficult for people today to understand why and how Benjamin Franklin’s electrical achievements transformed a little-known Pennsylvania printer into the most famous American of his time. Today many scientists work anonymously in laboratories, their activities known only to a select few. In the eighteenth century, though, scientists were celebrities whose writings were read by every educated person. When Franklin made his celebrated experiment with the kite in June 1752, he had already written Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America. The book was soon translated into French, German, Italian, and Latin. Scientists all over Europe attempted to prove or disprove his discoveries.
There is another reason why people today find it hard to fathom this scientist Franklin. He is not the person who appears in the pages of Autobiography.
The famed nineteenth-century clergyman Phillips Brooks wrote that anyone who read Franklin’s Autobiography had, “always afterward,” an impression of “the boy-man who wrote it clear and distinct among the men he knows.” This comment pays tribute to the enduring power of the Autobiography, a book so immensely popular throughout Brooks’ time that it inspired an inevitable reaction. When essayist and lecturer Theodore Parker complained, “Franklin thinks, investigates, theorizes, invents, but never does he dream.” When Herman Melville sneered that Franklin had “a bookkeeper’s mind,” they were talking about the man portrayed in Autobiography. Even Mark Twain wrote that Franklin had “brought affliction to millions of boys . . . whose fathers had read (the) pernicious biography.” Perhaps the most complete rejection of Franklin came from D.H. Lawrence, who accused the American of fencing off the human soul for the sake of profit. “He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom,” Lawrence wailed. But it is not the older Franklin about whom they are talking; it was the struggling, self-made man of Autobiography. Nor has this bias subsided. William Carlos Williams made a highly influential literary attack on Franklin in one of his novels. The American critic, John Sisk, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, remarked that, for most Americans, the Franklin of Autobiography “is likely to come through as a smug, hypocritically venal, and meanly rational person.”
Of course, this and previous harsh judgments could be contested. But there may well be some grounds for accepting them as an indication that the young Franklin, living his success story, is no longer as relevant to us as he was to an America facing the challenges of a raw, untamed continent. Beyond the man portrayed in Autobiography is another Franklin, the wise man who more than any other single person, presided over the birth of the American republic. That is why this book, with the exception of a few overlapping years, takes up Franklin’s story where the best known part of his autobiography ends, where the poor boy and the stingy young tradesman are absorbed by an distinctly more complex and extraordinary person.
In Benjamin Franklin’s account of his laboratory experiments, he had suggested another way to verify the connection between lightning and electricity: Erect a sentry box on a mountaintop or inside a church steeple. On the roof should be a metal rod connected inside to a Leyden jar. Because there was neither a church steeple nor a high mountain in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Franklin had not conducted the experiment himself, and only afterward had the idea of a kite occurred to him. Now, before he had time to publish his report, letters from Europe informed him that a half dozen French and English scientists had successfully performed the “Philadelphia experiment,” as it was soon called, using sentry boxes. Later, from Russia, came news that emphasized the danger of Franklin’s approach. A scientist in St. Petersburg had tried a variation on Franklin’s sentry box suggestion and placed a rod on top of his house. He had failed to ground it properly and had been killed by a direct hit from a lightning bolt.
But the danger only made Franklin’s success greater in the eyes of an admiring world. The king of France sent his personal congratulations across the ocean. The Royal Society - the elite of the English scientific world - elected Franklin a member by unanimous vote and bestowed upon him its highest accolade, the Copley Medal. Yale University, then Harvard, gave him honorary degrees of Master of Arts. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest philosopher of his time, called him the modern Prometheus, who had brought down the fire from heaven.
Kant’s words underscore one interpretation of Franklin’s popularity. In 1752, most people still believed that there was something divine about lightning. Emanating from the sky, striking with arbitrary yet lethal force, it was easily associated with the vengeance of an angry God. It is no surprise that the person who tamed it acquired an formidable, almost superhuman image.
But instead of capitalizing on such a potentiality, Franklin avoided it. He announced the practical application of his discovery in an offhand, matter-of-fact way in a publication that had already gained him some moderate notoriety in America, Poor Richard’s Almanack.
It has pleased God in his goodness to mankind at length to discover to them the means of securing their habitations and other buildings from mischief from thunder and lightning. The method is this: provide a small iron rod (it may be made of the rod-iron used by the nailers) but of such a length that one end being three or four feet in the moist ground, the other may be six or eight feet above the highest part of the building. To the upper end of the rod fasten about a foot of brass wire the size of a common knitting needle, sharpened to a fine point; the rod may be secured to the house by a few small staples. If the house or barn be long, there may be a rod and point at each end and a middling wire along the ridge from one to the other. A house thus furnished will not be damaged by lightning, it being attracted by the points and passing through the metal into the ground without hurting anything. Vessels, also, having a sharp pointed rod fixed on the top of their masts, with a wire from the foot of the rod reaching down, round one of the shrouds, to the water, will not be hurt by tightening.
Although it would be difficult to patent a device as uncomplicated as a lightning rod, it was typical of Franklin not to give away his invention. When he invented a stove in 1742 that heated a room instead of allowing most of the warm air to rise up the chimney, the governor of Pennsylvania proposed to give him a monopoly patent. Franklin not only refused the favor, he published a pamphlet that described in detail the construction and operation of the stove so that any good blacksmith could construct one. He redesigned the street lights of his time, discarding the glass globe and substituting “four flat panes with a funnel above to draw up the smoke.” This meant that the lamp did not grow dark in a few hours, but remained bright until morning. When one of his older brothers came down with a bladder disorder, Franklin invented the rubber catheter that is still in use today. When his eyes began troubling him, he invented bifocals, which enabled him to manage with only a single set of glasses. All of these ideas he donated to the world. “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” he said, “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any inventions of ours.”
Cities around the world: Boston, London, Paris, and Philadelphia, began; over time, to sprout these small, sharp pointed spires called lightning rods. There was some inevitable opposition from those who made it a business to manage the relationship between people and God. When an earthquake struck Boston in 1755, one preacher assured his followers that it was a message from on high; too many in the city, he claimed, were defying the divine will by resorting to those works of the devil, lightning rods.
In Europe, what made Franklin even more popular was the last part of the title of his celebrated treatise on electricity. That such dis
coveries could be made by a person from “Philadelphia in America” was doubly surprising to Europeans, who had become accustomed to thinking of the New World as an area inhabited primarily by savages and frontiersmen with little more sense than it took to swing an ax, plow a furrow, and fire a gun. To his fellow Americans, who knew him better, Franklin was remarkable in yet another aspect. Here was a man who had astonished the civilized world, yet his formal education had ended in the second grade. He had arrived in Philadelphia at the age of sixteen, with a Dutch dollar and a few pennies in his pocket, a dirty, hungry, runaway printer’s apprentice from his native Boston. At the age of forty-two, he had made enough money from his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and from Poor Richard’s Almanack to retire from business and devote himself to science.
Yet, with all his fame, Benjamin Franklin remained the same charming, genial man his friends had always known. Commenting on the congratulations from the king of France, he told one of his New England correspondents that his feelings reminded him of the story of a young girl who suddenly began prancing about in a proud and pompous manner. No one could figure out why “till it came to be known she had got on a pair of silk garters.” Although his honors were not covered by undergarments, Franklin decided he had “not so much reason to be proud as the girl had; for a feather in the cap is not so useful a thing, or so serviceable to the wearer, as a pair of good silk garters.”
At home, Franklin delighted in entertaining his friends and acquaintances with electrical showmanship. He placed a lightning rod on his chimney and connected it to two bells on his staircase. Between the bells was a small brass ball suspended by a silk thread. When the wire was charged, the ball would sway back and forth, striking the bells and announcing that the house was electrified. Often the bells rang when there was neither lightning nor thunder, making visiting ladies squeal with alarm. One night so much electricity rushed down the rod that Franklin was able to see it “in a continued dense white stream seemingly as large as my finger” between the bells. The whole staircase was “in-lightened as with sunshine,” he said, “so that one might see to pick up a pen.”
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