He wrote, "the electrical fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike." Two years later, Franklin decided to try his own lightning experiment. Franklin described an iron rod about 8 or 10 feet long that was sharpened to a point at the end. This grew into his idea for the lightning rod. There were other scientists who believed that lightning was electricity, but Franklin was determined to find a method of proving it.īy 1750, in addition to wanting to prove that lightning was electricity, Franklin began to think about protecting people, buildings, and other structures from lightning. Later the same year, he explained what he believed were similarities between electricity and lightning, such as the color of the light, its crooked direction, crackling noise, and other things. ![]() By July, Ben used the terms positive and negative (plus and minus) to describe electricity, instead of the previously used words "vitreous" and "resinous." Franklin described the concept of an electrical battery in a letter to Collinson in the spring of 1749, but he wasn't sure how it could be useful. He wrote down all of his results and ideas for future experiments in letters to Peter Collinson, a fellow scientist and friend in London who was interested in publishing his work. In one of his letters, he described the shock as ".a universal blow throughout my whole body from head to foot, which seemed within as well as without after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick shaking of my body." (He also had a feeling of numbness in his arms and the back of his neck that gradually wore off.)įranklin spent the summer of 1747 conducting a series of groundbreaking experiments with electricity. During one experiment, Ben accidentally shocked himself. He quickly turned his home into a little laboratory, using machines made out of items he found around the house. It was in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1746 that Franklin first stumbled upon other scientists' electrical experiments. If he were alive today, we could probably add "storm-chaser" to his long list of titles. Ben was fascinated by storms he loved to study them. Well, if you lived in the 1700s and knew Benjamin Franklin, this is just what you might see during a terrible storm. What would you think if you saw a man chasing a thunder and lightning storm on horseback? You would probably wonder what on Earth he was trying to do. Scientific Journals of The Franklin Institute. ![]()
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