Benjamin Franklin

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Man

As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others, by an invention of ours. And this, we should do freely, and generously. -

Narrator

But nothing he did as a scientist would do more to serve others and bring him more fame than his work in the fledgling field of electricity. "I never was before engaged in any study," Franklin wrote, "that so totally engrossed my attention and my time." -

Clay

Franklin had become interested in electricity, which at the time was certainly not understood, but it was also a sort of a parlor trick. People would come in with a glass rod and some silk, and shock each other and lift pieces of paper. -

Narrator

He and his Junto friends staged electricity parties, in which they used a charge to ring bells, and make a toy he called an Electrical Spider jump around. Men and women exchanged electrical kisses. Franklin also electrified a gilt edged portrait of King George the Second. That created what he called a high treason shock, if someone touched his crown. He used a more powerful shock to kill a turkey, and reported that it seemed uncommonly tender compared to one slaughtered the conventional way. -

Walter

He kept saying we have to find useful things to do with this electricity, he said one of the only useful things in his first year of experiments was that he would get shocked and knock him down, and he said electricity was useful for making a vain person humble. -

Narrator

As his studies turned more serious, and he began documenting his observations, he came up with new terms to describe electricity's mysterious properties. "It had two charges," he wrote, "positive and negative." And it could travel, by what he called a conductor. He grouped a collection of glass containers together, each possessing an electrical charge, and named it a battery, using the military term for an array of cannons. -

Walter

Benjamin Franklin comes up with the most important theory of the era, which is the single fluid theory of electricity. Which is, that it's not some substance, but it's a positive and a negative, and it flows from positive to negative. -

Narrator

But pure science had less appeal to Franklin than putting it to practical use. -

Philip

Lightning is seen as being divine retribution, of course the irony was that most of the buildings that were destroyed by lighting were churches, 'cause in a lot of communities in the 18th century, they were the highest structure. -

Walter

Franklin is convinced that lightning bears a similarity to an electrical spark. He's looking at electric sparks, he's looking at lightning, and he puts in his notebook all the similarities. And at the end of the page, he says "let the experiment be made." -

Narrator

Franklin detailed his theory that lightning was electricity, and that metal objects could draw off a charge. He proposed an experiment that involved placing a person in what he called a sentry box, on a high tower or hilltop, and raising a sharply pointed iron rod when storm clouds approached. He shared his observations with a London scientist, Peter Collinson, who had supplied him with equipment for his electrical studies. Franklin was planning to conduct the experiment on the new steeple of Christ Church off Market Street, as soon as its construction was completed. But the work went slowly, and Franklin grew impatient. He then came up with an alternative way to test his theory. He was less confident in this method, and decided to do it in secret, trusting only his son William to take part. In June of 1752, with storm clouds threatening, he and William went to a field with a silk kite, to which Franklin had attached a sharp pointed wire. Dangling at the end of the kite's long twine string was a metal key. They got the kite aloft, and Franklin maneuvered it toward the approaching clouds. -

Philip

What he was showing was that the atmosphere became electrified. Not that the kite had to be struck by a lightening bolt, which is often the way that it's depicted in illustrations. -

Narrator

Franklin suddenly noticed the individual strands of hemp along the kite's string stiffening, and standing on end. He moved his free hand toward the key, and felt a mild shock on his knuckle. When the rain began, and water started streaming down the twine, sparks flew off the key. Franklin was exultant. "Thereby," he wrote of his experiment, "the sameness of electrical matter with that of lightening has been completely demonstrated."