Lightning Conductors. F.C.S. Richard Anderson
He was not a man of genius, in the accepted sense of the word; nor was he even a man of high talents. But he was nevertheless a decidedly great man, his greatness consisting in the largest development of that undefined faculty known as common sense. Benjamin Franklin was the very ideal of a ‘practical’ man, that is, a man valuing thoughts only as leading to actions, and new ideas only as the road to visible results. The success of his career in life was but an illustration of his thoroughly practical character. Born at Boston in January 1706, the son of a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler, he was destined by his parents to follow the same trade, but not relishing the melting pots, he got apprenticed to an elder brother, a printer at Boston. Harsh treatment drove him away from this place before the terms of his apprenticeship were over, and with scarcely a penny in his pocket, and the experience of only seventeen years in his brain, he made his way to Philadelphia. A year after, when eighteen years of age, he was induced to sail for England, and was fortunate enough to find employment as a compositor in a printing office in London, but so poor as to be compelled to take a lodging for eighteen-pence a week. However, his self-reliance never deserted him; he managed to go unscathed through all the perils of poverty and friendlessness in a great city, and after a few years went back to Philadelphia, with a small stock of money and a wealth of experience. He now set up as a master printer, and gradually, though by very slow degrees and ceaseless toil, devoted to multifarious objects, rose into prosperity. For upwards of twenty years, from 1728 to 1748, he was the most energetic and active man of business in Philadelphia. He was not only a printer, but an author, an editor of newspapers, a compiler of almanacks, a publisher, a bookseller, a bookbinder, and a stationer. He made lamp-black and ink; he dealt in rags; he sold soap and geese feathers; also, as he frequently made known to his fellow-townsmen in printed notices, he had always in stock ‘very good sack at six shillings a gallon.’ To dispose of the numerous articles in his store he invented the art of advertising, unknown before him at Philadelphia. All the inquiring minds of the ‘Quaker City’ assembled regularly in the shop of Benjamin Franklin, ‘the new printing office near the market,’ which came to form the centre of intelligence, and the source from which all public movements went forth.
The reward for all this activity was that at the end of twenty years Benjamin Franklin had accumulated a handsome fortune, his average income amounting to over two thousand pounds sterling a year: then considered a very large sum, and of probably three times the purchase value it would possess at the present day. With increasing wealth, the active printer, happy in all his family relations, thought himself justified to seek a little occasional leisure, which he found chiefly in visits to Boston, his native town. It was on one of these visits, made in the summer of 1746, that he went with a friend to a lecture-hall, scarcely knowing what was to be the intellectual entertainment prepared for him. It proved a discourse, with illustrative experiments, upon electricity, by a Dr. Spence, duly armed with a three-feet glass rod and silk pocket-handkerchief. Benjamin Franklin was not merely interested: he was startled. It was to him, as he afterwards declared to one of his friends, the opening of a new world.
Perhaps the subject which attracted so suddenly the attention of Benjamin Franklin might have escaped it again, in the pursuit of his many vocations, but for another accidental circumstance. It so happened that, immediately after his return to Philadelphia, there came a parcel of books from England, accompanied by a present in the shape of an electrical tube. The sender of it was the London agent of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Mr. Peter Collinson, a member of the Royal Society, and as such sharing the general interest in the electrical experiments of Dr. Watson. The tube, which was accompanied with full directions for its use, was no sooner unpacked, than Franklin seized it eagerly and began experimenting, at the same time inspiring the most sanguine of his friends to follow his example. Glass tubes, made similar to the one sent from London, were soon procured from a local manufacturer, and then began a general rubbing. ‘I never before,’ Franklin wrote, early in 1747, ‘was engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done; for what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have, during some months past, had little leisure for anything else.’ To the greater number of those friends and acquaintances who came flocking in crowds to the shop of the Philadelphia printer, the electric tube was, probably, only looked upon as a new toy; but it was vastly different as regarded himself. His keen practical eye seemed to discern at once that the manifestations of the mysterious force on which he was experimenting contained the germ of something that might be utilised by men, or brought into obedience to the human will.
It is not very clear from the published correspondence of Franklin what his earliest views on the subject were, but there are many indications that he conceived for a while that the ‘electric fire’ might be employed in arts and manufactures. In his usual humorous style he spoke of these utilitarian aims of his in a letter to Mr. Peter Collinson, written in the early summer of 1747: ‘Chagrined a little that we have not been able to produce hitherto anything in the way of use to mankind,’ he wrote, ‘and the hot weather coming on, when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, it is proposed to put an end to them, for this season, in a party of pleasure on the banks of the Schuylkill. Spirits at this party are to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river, without any other conductor than the water: an experiment which we some time since performed, to the amazement of many. Then a turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle, when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France, and Germany are to be drunk in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery.’
The longer he experimented, the more fascinated grew Benjamin Franklin with his study of the phenomena of electricity. In order to be able to devote himself completely to his darling science, he sold his printing and publishing business in the year 1748, and went to live in a suburb of Philadelphia, not far from the banks of the Delaware. At the same time he purchased a complete set of electrical apparatus, the best that had yet been manufactured, which had been brought over from Europe by the same Dr. Spence who had given him his first ideas about electricity at Boston. With these more perfect means he now continued his investigations, arriving before long at results that formed an epoch in the history of electricity.
The results achieved were wholly of a practical kind. With that strong common sense which formed the most marked feature of his character, Benjamin Franklin, at a very early period of his experiments, came to the conclusion that of the actual nature of electricity we know nothing, and, in all probability, never can know anything, with our finite senses. But, never losing sight of this starting point, he treated electricity as astronomers do the movement of the heavenly bodies. Of the incomprehensible forces that keep countless worlds in their courses through measureless space, astronomers know no more than the most ignorant of mankind; still they are able to arrive at very accurate calculations concerning the directions followed by stars and planets, and the amount of time consumed in their wanderings through the inconceivable universe. To such astronomical endeavours Franklin limited all his researches, and it was precisely because he so limited them that he achieved greater successes than any other investigator of the phenomena of electricity.
Together with many smaller matters, Benjamin Franklin added three great discoveries to the knowledge of electricity. The first was that the electric fluid—so called for want of a better word to express the action of the mysterious force—will run its course more easily and quickly through sharply pointed metals than in any other way. This had never before been demonstrated, nor, probably, been ascertained. The second great discovery of Franklin was that of positive and negative electricity, or, as he called it for some time, plus and minus, the latter names being really the most descriptive. Of the actual existence of these two divisions of the great and marvellous agency, now attracting and now repelling each other, much was known previous to Franklin, but he was the first to make them clearly understood, and to bring their effects within reach of calculation. To these two discoveries Benjamin Franklin added a third, the greatest of all. He established the identity between the electric force and lightning, and upon it based one of the noblest inventions of all ages, that of the lightning conductor. And perhaps there never was any invention acknowledged more deeply by mankind. The French Academy expressed it when, on Franklin’s