On this day, June 10, 1752 was Ben Franklin’s famous kite experiment.
“That stormy night, Ben Franklin and his son William stood under a shed in a field outside Philadelphia and launched the kite. Franklin believed the wire on the kite would attract electricity from the storm, then conduct it down the wet hemp string. He made sure the silk cord at the end stayed dry, so that it would act as an insulator.
As the scientist Joseph Priestly wrote, “Dr. Franklin, astonishing as it must have appeared, contrived actually to bring lightning from the heavens, by means of an electrical kite, which he raised when a storm of thunder was perceived to be coming on.”
With the kite dancing amid the thunderclouds, Franklin noticed the loose threads on the hemp string were standing erect. He moved his hand near the key got the shocking result he had hoped for. Franklin’s Leyden jar, in Priestly’s words “collected electric fire very copiously.”
This experiment would lead to the invention of lightning rods the following year.
