The Society for Useful Knowledge (14 page)

As late as the momentous summer of 1776, officials in London were informed of the decision by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to declare independence about the same time that the news reached the residents of Savannah, Georgia. It is not surprising that in the preceding decades Bartram, Franklin, and Colden found it easier to correspond with the European virtuosi than to organize the members of their homegrown American Philosophical Society.

a
The title is a deliberate refernece to Aristotle's text on logic, cherished for centuries and known as the
Organon
.

Electricity has one considerable advantage over most other branches of science, as it both furnishes matter of speculation for philosophers, and of entertainment for all persons promiscuously.
—Joseph Priestly

Peter Collinson gradually began to soften his opposition to an American scientific society, and in a rare flush of enthusiasm the phlegmatic Quaker even permitted himself to muse aloud that America might one day pick up the torch of intellectual advance from an increasingly “exhausted” Old World.
¹
Perhaps inadvertently, Collinson went on to play a key part in helping to establish a true place for colonial science by nudging Franklin and friends toward the series of experiments that would electrify the scientific world.

His correspondence provided the Americans with regular updates from Europe on the latest findings and fads, ranging from the enigma of the hydra, a plantlike creature then known as the polypus, to the mysteries of the electrical fire. “As this may very justly be styled the age of wonders, it may not be disagreeable just to hint them to you,” Collinson wrote to Cadwallader Colden in the spring of 1745. “The surprising Phenomena of the Polypus Entertained the Curious for a year or two past but Now the Virtuosi of Europe are taken up in Electrical Experiments.”
²
A separate missive to Franklin's Library Company was accompanied by a two-foot glass tube and a basic account of how to use it to produce static electricity.

Franklin and his circle needed no further encouragement. They equipped themselves with the basic apparatus, pored over published reports from abroad, built their own crude generator, and otherwise buried themselves in explorations of this mysterious new subject. “I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done, for
what with making experiments … I have, during some months past, had little leisure for any thing else,” Franklin admitted.
³

Following the lead of the itinerant “electricians,” whose public lectures captivated European and American audiences by allowing onlookers to experience the power and wonders of electricity, the Philadelphia investigators even experimented on themselves. So, too, did one of the inventors of the Leyden jar, the Dutchman Pieter van Musschenbroek, who suffered numerous injuries from accidental discharge from this simple condenser.

Outlining a series of “Conjectures” that arose from these early experiments, Franklin invoked the decisive nature of bodily sensation to decide an important scientific point about the behavior of the electrical fire. “If any one should doubt, whether the Electrical Matter passes through the Substance of Bodies, or only over and along their Surfaces, a Shock from an electrified large Glass Jar, taken through his own Body, will probably convince him.”
⁴
This physical experience of electricity on the human body was central to the contemporary idea of knowledge, which was validated by both reason and experimentation, by both sense and sensibility.

It was an article of faith among Franklin and his colleagues that science has the power to open up the world of wonders all around us. It could also explain those wonders as the product of orderly natural laws, debunk superstition, and tame unreasonable fears of nature.
⁵
In the eyes of the virtuosi, wonders and marvels were not a threat to the moral, social, or religious order, as they had often appeared in earlier times; the only danger lay in the imperfect ways in which the untutored mind apprehended and then sought to explain them. The function of scientific institutions such as the Royal Society and France's Académie des Sciences was, according to the latter's secretary Bernard de Fontenelle, as much to “disabuse the Public of false marvels as to report on true ones.”
⁶

The “true marvel” of electricity spawned a vibrant cottage industry. Craftsmen on both sides of the Atlantic began to produce glass tubes and other specialty equipment, as well as custom-made generators, hand-powered devices that used a spinning wheel to create a static charge and widely known as electrical machines. Handbooks and manuals of electrical experimentation, aimed more at the layman and hobbyist than the serious investigator, proliferated. One popular volume, John Neale's
Directions for Gentlemen, Who Have Electrical Machines, How to Proceed in Making Their Experiments
, published in London in 1747,
dispenses with the theoretical niceties from the very outset, no doubt to the relief of his audience.

“I shall not take up my reader's time with enquiring into, or defining what electricity is.… Nor shall I go about to enumerate its several laws and properties,” Neale writes. Instead, he simply sketches out the basic equipment and precepts required and then immediately turns his attention to the real business at hand. “A good part of the most entertaining phenomena in electrical experiments arises from electrifying human bodies.”
⁷

The subject, of course, must first be insulated from the earth to avoid discharging the electrical fire prematurely. Neale reports that the Germans preferred to suspend silk cords from the ceiling and create a sort of bench or small hammock, a method he says condemns the subject to swaying “inconveniently.” The French and English, meanwhile, tended toward construction of insulating platforms made of pitch and rosin. Neale himself recommends that readers construct their own electrical stand by using three bottles made of glass, a nonconductor, to serve as legs for a triangular wooden stool.

Neale then leads his readers through twenty exercises with “electrised” bodies.
^a
Experiment XII, for example, illustrates the body's conductivity, as well as the use of pointed rods, in this case a long needle, to draw down the charge and render it harmless. “If an electrised person draws his sword and extends it, a brush of blue fire will be seen to issue from the point in the dark. But let an un-electric person present the point of a needle against the sword's point though a yard from it, and the fire will instantly disappear.”
⁸
In another scenario, the “electric mine,” an unsuspecting observer holding a rod or wire attached to the generator felt a sudden jolt from an electrical contact hidden under the carpet, after unwittingly closing the circuit.

Jean-Antoine Nollet, the leading French authority on the subject, tended toward lavish public demonstrations to illustrate the enormous speed of electrical transmission. Formally the head of a monastery but best known for his scientific work, Nollet once sent a virtually instantaneous shock through a mile-long line of hundreds of monks, each linked to his neighbor by iron wire.
He later repeated the experiment for the edification of the French king, this time using a chain of 180 royal soldiers.

The Philadelphians were not to be outdone. They invented the game of Conspiracy, in which anyone rashly attempting to remove an electrified gilt crown from a portrait of the British king received a powerful shock for his temerity. On one well-planned outing, Franklin led a celebratory picnic during which they toasted their fellow electricians worldwide with electrised gilt glasses and then slaughtered a turkey with an electrical charge and roasted it with electrical fire. “I conceit that the Birds killed in this Manner eat uncommonly tender,” Franklin later recounted.
⁹

Franklin also began to promote traveling electrical shows as a sideline to his growing publishing business. These and similar diversions were not simply frivolous pastimes for idle ladies and gentlemen. The electrical shows and their offshoots introduced the new scientific wonders to a growing audience that extended well beyond the traditional educated elite. Franklin's investigations also established a direct connection between controlled experimentation for public consumption and the wider world beyond the walls of the laboratory, the salon, or the lecture hall. His famed electric kite, for example, applied the logic and techniques of experimentation to nature itself, which could now seemingly be studied and even manipulated almost at will.
¹⁰

Franklin encouraged one of his most valued experimental collaborators, the out-of-work Baptist minister Ebenezer Kinnersley, to take their latest findings on the road as a way to earn a living and to spread the gospel of science and useful knowledge. “Among these the principal was Mr. Kinnersley, an ingenious Neighbor, who being out of Business, I encouraged to undertake showing the Experiments for Money, and drew up for him two Lectures,” Franklin wrote in his
Autobiography
.
¹¹

Kinnersley first came to public attention with his condemnations of the evangelical enthusiasm unleashed in the Great Awakening, the religious revival movement in full swing across American colonies by the 1740s. He used the pulpit of Philadelphia's Baptist Church to dismiss the emotional preaching of the revivalists as “unbecoming a Minister of the Gospel.” Such holy histrionics, Kinnersley warned the congregation, proceeded “not from the Spirit of God, for our God is a God of Order, and not of such Confusion.”
¹²

Franklin shared this distaste for displays of religious fervor, and he recognized a kindred spirit in Kinnersley, with his strong identification with an
orderly universe—that is, one whose natural laws were the legitimate subject of scientific investigation. Franklin used his
Pennsylvania Gazette
to advance this notion, even as he drummed up public enthusiasm for his collaborator's commercial displays of the electrical fire. “As the knowledge of Nature tends to enlarge the human Mind, and give us more noble, more grand and exalted ideas of the Author of Nature, and if well pursued seldom fails producing some things
useful
to man, 'tis hoped these Lectures may be thought worthy of Regard and Encouragement.”
¹³

Despite the reserved demeanor of Kinnersley the preacher, Kinnersley the itinerant electrician proved something of a sensation. He was, says his biographer, “the greatest lecturer in colonial America.”
¹⁴
With Franklin's backing, Kinnersley roamed the British colonies, from New England to the Caribbean, sharing with his audiences the latest findings of the Philadelphia circle. These included the first public hints of the identification of electricity with lightning, presented in Annapolis, Maryland, in the spring of 1749.

Meanwhile, Franklin and his associates back home continued their basic research with the use of iron shot, small cork balls, glass bottles, and a long bodkin or similar piece of pointed metal. The American electricians discovered that the electrised iron shot, resting on the mouth of a glass jar as an insulator, would unfailingly repel a nearby cork ball suspended from the ceiling by silk thread. “When in this State, if you present to the Shot the Point of a long, slender, sharp Bodkin at 6 or 8 Inches Distance, the Repellency is instantly destroyed, and the Cork flies to it.” Further investigation revealed that the bodkin could both “
throw
off, as well as
draw
off the Electrical Fire”—a first important step toward what would become Franklin's most famous invention, one that stood at the intersection of science and utility.
¹⁵

For the time being, however, Franklin was not satisfied with the results of this intensive study of electricity. The newly established uniformity in nature, backed by reason and confirmed by bodily experience, had already opened the way to another of the central notions of the Age of Enlightenment—that the value of learning and knowledge could be determined by its practical utility and its contribution to the common good. After all, an orderly, uniform, and efficient universe was certainly worthy of a more orderly, uniform, and efficient society.

Ever since his return from England, Franklin had faithfully honored this claim on utility, so much so that he even invoked it when giving way to initial
frustration at the complexity of electrical phenomena and his seeming inability to understand and master them. “If there is no other Use discovered of Electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may
help to make a vain Man humble
,” he confessed in 1747 to Collinson, the invaluable go-between for the Royal Society and the Philadelphians.
¹⁶

Franklin concluded a detailed list of his latest findings, forwarded to Collinson for distribution to the European virtuosi, with a doleful note of failure: he and his colonial colleagues had so far been unable to hit upon any practical applications of their work on the electrical fire. As a result, they decided to call a temporary halt to their research. Besides, the imminent arrival of the hot Philadelphia summer meant the air would soon be too humid to permit efficient production of the static electricity that was central to their experiments. “Chagrined a little that We have hitherto been able to discover Nothing in this Way of Use to Mankind, and the hot Weather coming on, when Electrical Experiments are not so agreeable; 'tis proposed to put an End to them for this Season.”
¹⁷

Ever since his early days as a printer and publisher, Franklin had been acutely aware of the hazards surrounding extreme weather. The colonial economy rested on the twin pillars of agriculture and shipping, both vulnerable to dangerous climactic conditions. The towns and cities, their homes made almost exclusively of wood, were particularly susceptible to terrible fires ignited by a stray lightning bolt. The readers of his
Poor Richard's
almanacs, largely farmers, demanded long-range forecasts of heavy storms, cold fronts, and frosts, while the
Pennsylvania Gazette
regularly chronicled the deaths and destruction produced by lightning, floods, and other natural phenomena.