Description
Was Benjamin Franklin's famous electric kite experiment a fraud? And did it determine the course of the American Revolution? Every schoolchild in America knows that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1752. Electricity from the clouds above traveled down the kite's twine and threw a spark from a key that Franklin had attached to the string. He thereby proved that lightning and electricity were one. What many of us do not realize is that Franklin used this breakthrough in his day's intensely competitive field of electrical science to embarrass his French and English rivals. His kite experiment was an international event and the Franklin that it presented to the world--a homespun, rural philosopher-scientist performing an immensely important and dangerous experiment with a child's toy--became the Franklin of myth. In fact, this sly presentation on Franklin's part so charmed the French that he became an irresistible celebrity when he traveled there during the American Revolution. The crowds and the journalists, and the ladies, cajoled the French powers into joining us in our fight against the British. What no one has successfully proven until now--and what few have suggested--is that Franklin never flew the kite at all. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiastic hoaxer. And with the electric kite, he performed his greatest hoax. As Tucker shows, it was this trick that may have won the American Revolution. From the start, Franklin's approach to lightning was local and secular. His path differed from that pursued by his rivals across the ocean. He approached lightning through his weekly editing of The Pennsylvania Gazette. Lightning death was common in America. Nocensus records or hospital tallies exist for the period but if you page through colonial newspapers. you will soon find yourself in some grim business. The lightning deaths seem as prevalent in colonial papers as traffic and crime deaths are in ours. Most of these 18th century lightning deaths occurred because of the labor culture. Men in the field were overtaken by thunderstorms or out raced the first assault only to take shelter under a lone tree or seek protection by ducking inside an open barn in an open field, a cover which when filled with moist, new-mown hay proved especially inviting to the fireworks from above. Indoors, women workers shared this vulnerability. When the air grew dark, for instance, one young Pennsylvania woman dragged her ironing board to the doorway for better light. Ironing boards were metal in those days. The bolt descended, fatally rippling under the palm of her hand as she pressed a handkerchief. Soldiers ran harrowing risks in a thunderstorm. When lightning struck an 18th century gunpowder magazine, the impact rivaled 20th century bombing damages. In 1763, a storehouse in Jamaica which stored 12.500 barrels of gunpowder was hit by lightning. Afterwards the survivors could find few human remains but estimated that more than 30 died, and counted more than 100 injured and maimed. Sailors did not fare much better. Under a storm cloud, nothing beckoned more alluringly than the point of a mast. For years, Franklin the editor was receiving, revising, and writing these reports of lightning death. Mysteries abounded. He must have puzzled them. No one could predict with Newtonian mathematics the path of lightning. No one could track its zig zags down. One 18thcentury author suggested, likely tongue in cheek, that lightning's shifting path as it descended was the force altering its direction as--perhaps influenced by sudden prayers from below--it looked for the worst offender to reduce to toast.
