Ben Franklin's Electrifying Experiment

Good morning, it’s June 10, the day a phenomenon – revealed, literally, by Benjamin Franklin.

When Franklin became interested in electricity in the mid-18th century, everyone from scientists at London’s Royal Society to traveling carnival barkers in the New World knew something was in the air. They just didn’t know quite what.

In those days, a typical demonstration from itinerant “electricians” would be to suspend a boy from the ceiling with silken cords and then rub his bare feet with a glass tube, thereby eliciting sparks from his face and hands. To Ben Franklin, this was mere child’s play; he figured he could do better.

Forsaking the publishing business for a time, Franklin threw himself into his new passion. He was fascinated both with the basic research – what causes electricity in the first place? – as well as the applied science: i.e., how it could be harnessed.

Naturally, he had ideas in both areas. It was Franklin who correctly postulated in 1747 that particles in the atmosphere are charged positively and negatively, and his nomenclature is used to this day. The following year, he was writing to members of the Royal Society about a means of storing electricity in a device he called “an electric battery” and envisioning how it could power an electric motor.

It was while searching for ready sources of electric power that Franklin looked to the heavens. In a 1749 letter to a Royal Society member named John Mitchell, Franklin ruminated that during thunderstorms, water particles became electrically charged by violent movement during heavy winds, and that lightning was the result of this pent-up energy in the clouds. (He also noted that, if his theories were correct, the last thing someone caught in a thunderstorm should do is what they invariably do – seek shelter under a lone-standing tree.)

It was on this date, June 10, in 1752, that Franklin contrived his most famous experiment. He flew a kite during a thunderstorm, with a metal key tied to the string. When he noticed loose strands of the cord standing erect, he touched his knuckle to the key – and received a jolt that reverberates to this day.

In the ensuing decades, lightning rods inspired by Franklin’s experiments have saved thousands of ships and buildings from fire. But for our purposes, let us contemplate the scientific phenomenon of polarity - the tendency of similarly charged particles to repel one another to opposite poles – and how it turns out to be applicable to human beings, too.

Franklin himself had politically polarized - as historian H.W. Brands so poetically explained in his Franklin biography, “The First American" - by an unpleasant storm in the House of Commons at which he was the target.

Thirteen years later, as the U.S. Constitution was being printed in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia, Franklin wrote to his sister with the tone of a man whose fingers are crossed: “We have, however, done our best, and it must take its chance.”

Franklin probably did not utter the famous witticism for which he is often credited – the one about the Framers all hanging together lest they all hang separately -- but the Founders’ worries were not misplaced: almost immediately, the Constitution had a polarizing effect between the mercantilists in the cities who embraced it and the farmers who felt disadvantaged by it.

It was a Virginia planter who put aside his misgivings. “Since the bond of Union is now complete and we once more consider ourselves as one family,” proclaimed George Washington, “we must drive far away the demon of party spirit and local reproach.”

Washington’s words, like Ben Franklin’s experiments, are still apropos.