Did Franklin intentionally plan to study electricity?

Answer 1

Franklin studied electricity quite deliberately. Most people know only about his famous kite experiment, but he was actually one of the foremost electrical scientists of his day.

He became fascinated with the topic when he saw some electrical experiments performed in 1746. He acquired a Leyden jar (a device that stores static electrical charges) and began to perform experiments and formulate theories - he didn't just use electricity to play parlor tricks as most of his friends did. Franklin made an electrical battery, roasted a fowl on a spit turned by electricity, sent a current through water to ignite alcohol, and ignited gunpowder with an electrical charge.

Before Franklin, electricity was generally thought to be the result of certain types of friction, such as rubbing silk over amber. Franklin thought that in fact, electricity was spread lightly throughout most substances, and that certain types of friction were able to organize or collect it in some way. Franklin was also the first person to develop the theory of positive and negative electricity.

Franklin began to think about the possibility that lightning was in fact a huge electrical spark that consisted of the same type of electricity as that produced by rubbing amber with silk. In 1752, he performed his famous kite experiment, flying a kite up into the clouds during a storm and creating a spark when he put his knuckle near the key at the end of the kite string, proving that lightning was indeed electrical. He also stored electricity gathered from the clouds in a Leyden jar and found it able to do all the things that electricity gathered from silk and amber could do, proving that both types of electricity were really the same. Note that Franklin did not stand around waiting for the unlikely possibility that lightning would strike the kite; he simply flew it up into the clouds where he surmised an electrical charge was building, and he was correct.

Building fires caused by lightning striking a house were a tremendous problem at the time, with so many all-wooden buildings and limited means to fight the fire - a bucket brigade, not a pressure hose. Franklin began the use of lightning rods, tall pointed iron rods sticking up from the roofs of houses and carrying the electrical charge down into the ground, where it could be dispersed harmlessly. As with the kite, the rods did not need to be struck directly with lightnng to be effective; they merely had to pass through a low-lying cloud to draw off its electricity and lessen the possibility of a lightning strike.