Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  Dr. Spencer was careful not to neglect his props. Within the blaze of stage fire, he showed how common objects, from amber to hemp twine, were alive with electrical fluid. He set up a large table and covered its surface with flakes of brass and gold; then he very slowly drew across it a gleaming aurora tube, and the glittering flakes, to the astonishment of the audience, would twitch and crawl and swirl up into the air. At the climax of his talk, Spencer had all but a few of the candles put out. In the dimness, a strange apparition could be made out: a young boy was floating in midair. (He was held up by silk ropes suspended from the ceiling.) Spencer stood beside the boy’s feet, holding out one of the aurora tubes. He intoned that the fire of electrical fluid suffused the entire universe and was spontaneously produced by all bodies everywhere on earth. He would now prove its presence right before the spectators’ eyes. He waved the aurora tube back and forth, and then, after a hushed interval, wild crackling bolts shot out from the boy’s head and outstretched hands.

  In the audience at the Boston performance was a celebrity: Ben Franklin. He was then in his late thirties. Almost everything that he is known for today—the inventions and scientific discoveries, the revolutionary politics, the long illustrious career as a diplomat—was still in his future. In 1743 he was a successful printer and newspaper publisher, and he was famous because he was the editor of Poor Richard’s Almanack, the great best seller of colonial America. The book had earned him so much money that he was already thinking of retiring, and he was looking idly around for a hobby to pass the time.

  Franklin was spellbound by Spencer’s show. Immediately afterward he introduced himself and offered to serve as a theatrical agent if Spencer ever came to Philadelphia. Spencer decided to take him up on it. Franklin proved to be as good as his word. He threw himself into the job. He booked lecture halls, arranged for private performances for Philadelphia’s aristocracy, talked the shows up in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and sold the tickets himself. He enjoyed himself so much that he thought of going on the road with Spencer as his full-time agent.

  But that was when Spencer made a confession. He was weary of the traveling life. He wanted to give up his act and return to his old career as a physician. Franklin wasn’t fazed. He at once decided to buy out Spencer’s props, master his stage techniques, and become an electrician himself.

  For a man who’d gotten rich extolling the virtues of temperance, prudence, and industry, Franklin was notorious among his friends for his wild and whirling enthusiasms. Each new idea may have looked from the outside like the soul of sober practicality, but it would last only as long as his excitement did and would be petulantly dropped as soon as he met with boredom or criticism or practical difficulty. Ocean navigation, the cultivation of hybrid grains, the ideal design for kitchen stoves—he seemed to take up subjects at random, burst out with a fireworks shower of innovative ideas, and then move on.

  His passion for electricity was almost throttled as soon as it began. His first look at what he’d bought was dismaying. Spencer’s props were shoddily made, and most of them were falling apart; Spencer himself, beneath his grand theorizing, proved to have no idea at all how any of them worked. The aurora tube, for instance: it was just a long, featureless hollow glass pipe, open at one end. Why it displayed such curious powers when rubbed by a silk cloth Spencer couldn’t begin to guess. In the same way, he could tell Franklin authoritatively that static charges were seen to best advantage in closed rooms lit by masses of candles and wouldn’t appear at all in the open air. But why was it true? Spencer could only shrug. Franklin wasn’t deterred. He was still in his first flush of excitement over the project; he decided to commission replacements for all Spencer’s gear and master the electrical trade from scratch.

  Philadelphia, like most colonial towns, wasn’t stratified into commercial and residential districts as cities are today; every street was a jumble of houses, stores, taverns, market stands, smithies, and workshops. Franklin could buy almost anything America had for sale within shouting distance of his front door. He hired a local potter who could fire the ceramic Leyden jars in large quantities. Glassmaking at that time was mostly done overseas, but Franklin found an ironworker who had some experience blowing glass and commissioned a sample set of aurora tubes from him, and when those proved satisfactory, he began snowing the man under with fresh orders. It was later said that Franklin created Philadelphia’s glassmaking industry single-handedly.

  Franklin wasn’t one to keep his passions to himself. When he had a new hobby, everybody was expected to take part—family, household servants, friends, neighbors, and random passersby. They became spectators, assistants, collaborators, and sometimes unwilling subjects. Franklin’s house became America’s first experimental laboratory in electrical research. The parlor was the theater where he’d reveal his latest innovations. One time he showed a large, lumbering marionette of a spider that would jump and jiggle and dance with alarming energy whenever it was goosed with a charged copper wire. Another time it was a Bible with raised metal lettering on the cover: when the curtains were drawn and the candles put out, the holy word could be seen burning weirdly in the dark and shooting out sparks whenever anybody got too close. The most elaborate stunt was called “The Lady’s Kiss.” The lady in question would sit in a chair while several aurora tubes were passed over and around her. Then a succession of young men would attempt to kiss her. Each time, the crackling static discharge from her lips and forehead would knock the suitor flat to the floor.

  Franklin’s friends and collaborators started calling themselves the American Philosophical Society. Franklin used this grand title as his entrée to correspondence with the leading natural philosophers in Europe. He admitted that he felt out of his depth in such company: he was just an amateur playing around with toys; he really knew even less about the mystery of static charges than Spencer did. But he soon discovered that none of his illustrious correspondents were that much more knowledgeable about the subject than he was. They were eager to hear of his experiments, no matter how frivolous or extravagant they seemed. Some of his letters were read aloud at meetings of the Royal Society of London and found their way into its journal, Philosophical Transactions (which was still going strong, after seventy-five years; in fact it’s still being published today).

  The letters brimmed over with dazzling new ideas. Franklin was the first person to grasp the existence of conservation of charge, one of the core principles of modern physics. He discovered the phenomenon of electrical polarity: he named the two poles positive and negative, and represented them with a plus and a minus, as is still routinely done today. The loud bangs and crashes from discharging Leyden jars reminded him of an artillery battery firing, which is why, more than two centuries later, we call the successors of Leyden jars batteries.

  But there was something else in his letters, especially after the first few years: a growing impatience. By the end of the 1740s, he was complaining that he couldn’t come up with any practical use for electricity, except the creation of new parlor tricks. Grasping at straws, he wrote to one correspondent that he’d found it was possible to kill turkeys and other small fowl with electrical current—a breakthrough that might, he hoped, result in a juicier and more tender bird.

  It was only in this mood of frustration that he at last took up the larger question of what electricity was.

  He had only a few notions. He was inclined to think that Dr. Spencer had been right: electricity was a “subtle fluid” that imbued the whole universe. That led him to consider a novel idea: whether static electricity might be related to lightning.

  Lightning was at that point still mysterious. It was generally believed to be some form of fire; lightning strikes did start fires, after all, and they often left behind the smell of brimstone. But lightning also deranged compasses and lodestones, as a strong static charge sometimes would, and also the two phenomena just looked so similar it was hard to believe they weren’t related. So Franklin weighed the evi
dence. He knew by then that static electricity was created by friction—the friction of a silk cloth rubbed on an aurora tube, for instance, or of a cat’s fur petted in a dry room on a winter’s day. Could lightning simply be the same phenomenon of friction occurring on a much grander scale? If so, then where did the friction come from? This could be explained by the theory, first published by the Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli less than twenty years earlier, that the atmosphere was made up of countless discrete molecules jostling against each other. Franklin got the idea that the atmosphere might be a kind of ocean of electrical charge, where shapeless domains of positive and negative energy, generated by friction, were continuously arising and dissipating.

  The idea wasn’t wholly original with him; many natural philosophers were investigating the nature of the atmosphere then, and they had begun to think along similar lines. The difference was that Franklin immediately saw a way of testing it.

  He outlined his idea in a series of letters to his correspondents at the Royal Society. He proposed that a platform be erected at the top of a cathedral spire. A man should be stationed there with a metal rod; Franklin thought the rod should be thirty or forty feet long. If the theory was right and lightning was caused by the agitation of air molecules, then the static charge should be greatest when the air was at its most turbulent, and that seemed most obviously to be during a thunderstorm. Therefore the man on the platform should wait till a storm approached and then hold the rod up as high toward the clouds as he could. An electric charge should flow down the rod to its base, and a Leyden jar connected to the rod with a wire would collect it. (There was, Franklin conceded, some small danger in the experiment; he recommended that the platform be insulated and the man wear insulated gloves and boots.)

  Franklin regretted that he was unable to carry the experiment out himself. He was up against a practical problem: at that time, Philadelphia simply didn’t have any cathedrals or towers that were tall enough. All he could do was invite the members of the Royal Society to try it themselves, in one of England’s old cathedral towns.

  He sent off the letters. He knew it would be months before he would get any response. And as he waited, it occurred to him for the first time that there was another, much simpler way of sampling the electrical energy of the sky.

  So this was how the most famous moment of his life came about. On a blustery afternoon in the spring of 1752, he and his son William went riding around the open country outside Philadelphia, looking for a suitable place to fly a kite. The kite was one that Franklin had constructed himself. He’d stretched silk cloth across a wooden frame—silk was a tougher material than parchment paper, which is what kites were usually made from—and alongside its knotted tail he’d hung a metal wire. The kite string was several hundred yards of hemp twine, and at the other end of the roll he’d tied a large iron key.

  Franklin and his son found a wide windswept pasturage near a stand of trees. They set up their experiment there during a golden late-afternoon lull between storms. The sky overhead was mottled white and blue; a strong fresh spring wind was blowing. Even though the kite was heavy, it went up almost at once. Big purplish clouds were building again in the southwest, and a few sprinkles were already blowing across the field. They waited. The rain was falling in fitful gusts. Franklin and his son took shelter in a small shed near the trees. There they stood in the open doorway, allowing the hemp line to unspool and the kite to wander wildly in the gulfs of darkening sky.

  For a long while nothing happened. The rain was falling more heavily. The iron key remained dead to the touch. Franklin decided that the experiment was a washout. He got ready to take the kite down and to pack away the Leyden jar he’d brought with him to collect the charge. Then he noticed that a few strands of hemp in the line, now thoroughly wet with rain, were slowly rising up and sinuously undulating like snakes. He reached out cautiously to touch the key, and a small bright crackle jumped the gap to the tip of his finger. Quickly he held out the Leyden jar to the key and charged it.

  That was all. He and his son reeled the kite in and rode back into town. Franklin didn’t even bother to tell anybody what he had done. The story of the kite didn’t become known for several years afterward. For once he was content with the private knowledge that he was right.

  Franklin’s letters to the Royal Society about the proposed electricity experiment were immediately published as a pamphlet and circulated among the natural philosophers of Europe. In France, one group of noblemen at the court of Louis XV (a famous patron of electrical research, mainly because he liked electricians’ shows) decided to be the first to try it. They didn’t bother with the platform on the cathedral. Instead, they simply erected a forty-foot metal pole in a village green outside Paris and waited for a thunderstorm. It didn’t take long for the blustery summer weather to oblige. The pole was struck one afternoon with a dazzling, deafening bolt. The noblemen dealt with it cautiously; they were mindful of Franklin’s advice about insulating themselves from the charge. But they resorted to a more traditional and aristocratic form of insulation. They paid a local citizen to make the final approach for them. He held out a copper wire to the pole. Immediately there was a flash and a bang that knocked him flat. The noblemen paid him off (he was shaken up but otherwise appeared unharmed), and they rode back in triumph to Versailles.

  In Russia, a Swedish natural philosopher named Georg Richmann, a professor at the prestigious Academy of St. Petersburg, devised yet another and more elaborate version of Franklin’s experiment. He set up his metal pole on the roof of his house—an incongruous glint among the peaked stone of St. Petersburg’s skyline. He attached it to a brass chain that ran down the exterior wall and through his study window. In the study the chain was connected to an iron rod suspended by wires from the ceiling. Below the rod was a large compass needle on a spike. Below the spike was a bowl of water in which Richmann sprinkled iron filings.

  He did all this in the summer of 1753, which happened to be unusually dry, with only a few fleeting rainstorms. For weeks the whole apparatus remained silent. But Richmann was gratified to notice that the iron filings did mysteriously shift and rearrange themselves slightly in the bowl of water whenever threatening clouds glided overhead.

  St. Petersburg didn’t see a big storm until August. Richmann was attending a lecture at the academy when he heard the thunder. He hurried home, accompanied by a colleague named Sokolaw—an engraver at the academy who had been hired by Richmann to illustrate the book he was writing about his experiments. Richmann wanted him there to document the moment of his triumph. They reached Richmann’s house before the storm broke. The apparatus was still motionless; the iron filings hadn’t stirred. Richmann told Sokolaw there was no danger yet—although, he said, he wouldn’t swear to how safe it would remain when the storm hit.

  As Richmann was talking, he was leaning toward the bowl of iron filings. The compass needle twitched slightly. Then Sokolaw saw something strange: the air around the iron rod began to shimmer. A little sphere of dazzling light congealed in midair. Sokolaw described it as “a globe of blue and whitish fire, about four inches in diameter.” It floated up from the iron rod, hovered for a moment, and then arrowed directly into Richmann’s forehead.

  There was a deafening thunderclap. The room imploded: papers and books and glass jars on Richmann’s shelves were hurled to the floor; the door to the study was blown inward off its hinges; Sokolaw ended up flat on his face with charred debris and shards of glass pummeling his back. Then there was silence. Sokolaw roused himself cautiously and surveyed the room. Scraps of hot metal from the wrecked apparatus were scattered everywhere. Everything made of glass was shattered, and everything made of paper or fabric was singed—even Sokolaw’s clothes were singed.

  Richmann’s body was lying beneath an overturned table. His hair had been burned off, his skin scorched a deep ruddy red, and one shoe had been blown apart—marking the place on the sole of his foot where the brilliant blue and white globe, after t
earing through his flesh, had burst out into the air again and melted away in the universal ocean of electrical fire.

  When Franklin heard the news of Richmann’s death, he was inspired to create a new prop for an electrical show. It was a wooden toy house, about the size of a doll’s house. There was a metal rod fixed to its chimney and a wire running down to the ground. The electrician would stand on the other side of the stage and direct a static discharge toward it; the charge drained away harmlessly. He then removed the rod and wire and repeated the display. The house (which had been secretly filled with gunpowder before the show) promptly exploded. Franklin called it the Thunder House. The electrician would conclude the show by urging audience members to install lightning rods on their houses. The lightning rod was Franklin’s invention—his first success at finding something useful to do with electricity.

  Meanwhile, the death of Richmann made Franklin world famous. It was taken as a spectacular confirmation of what the natural philosophers of Europe were calling, in honor of Franklin’s hometown, the “Philadelphia experiment.” After that, they were all rushing to try the experiment for themselves. From everywhere came reports of success; one group in England independently had the idea of using a kite, and they, too, returned with a charged Leyden jar. Franklin himself, in a somber account of Richmann’s death written for The Pennsylvania Gazette, couldn’t help but add that, tragic as it was, it did prove the theory correct.

  Franklin was now a universally respected natural philosopher, the world’s authority on all things electrical. But he was soon discomfited to realize that because of the Philadelphia experiment, everybody also thought of him now as something more—the great authority on a subject he knew almost nothing about: the weather.