The Society for Useful Knowledge (15 page)

In fact, Franklin harbored something of a forensic interest in lightning strikes, personally inspecting homes, churches, and other damaged buildings in order to trace the burn marks and other clues to the path of this fearsome force. At other times he sent his son, William, to report back on particularly damaging cases. He was also intrigued by accounts of visible electrical disturbances in the rigging of ships at sea, what mariners called St. Elmo's fire.

As part of his continuing investigations, Franklin appealed for assistance from readers of the
Gazette
: “Those … who may have an Opportunity of observing any of the Effects of Lightning on Houses, Ships, Trees, &c. are requested to take particular Notice of its Course, and Deviation from a straight
Line, in the Walls or other Matter affected by it, its different Operations or Effects on Wood, Stone, Bricks, Glass, Metals, Animal Bodies, &c.”
¹⁸

For some time now, the Philadelphians had been steadily noting ways in which electricity in the laboratory and lightning in the great outdoors appeared to share a number of distinct qualities. According to their laboratory notes of November 7, 1749—that is, less than seven months after he bemoaned the lack of progress toward practical applications—this list of common properties had already grown to a dozen. Among the most notable were a “crack or noise in exploding,” the emission of a “Sulphurous smell” and “swift motion [and a] crooked path.”
¹⁹

The colonial researchers had already discovered the ability of bodkins or other pointed rods to “draw off,” or attract, the electrical charge. Might not lightning also be subject to such an effect? The time had come, Franklin declared, to find out. “We do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since they agree in all particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable they agree likewise in this? Let the experiment be made.”
²⁰

It was also possible to use a silversmith's sturdy iron punch to draw off, or neutralize, a substantial charge held by a powerful collector fashioned from a pasteboard tube some ten feet long, producing the characteristic “snap” of an electrical strike. “If a Tube only 10 Foot long, will strike and discharge it's Fire on the Punch at 2 or 3 Inches Distance, an electrified Cloud of perhaps 10,000 Acres may strike and discharge on the Earth at a proportionally greater Distance,” Franklin reckoned.
²¹

The eventual result was, of course, the development of the lightning rod, essentially a grounded metal point or needle that could protect buildings and anyone inside from the dangers of lightning bolts by safely discharging the electrical strike into the earth. In the spring of 1751, a notice in Franklin's
Gazette
alerted the general public to the workings of this new invention: “How to secure Houses, Ships, &c. from being hurt by its destructive Violence.”
²²

Franklin affixed a lightning rod to his own home and even rigged up a series of bells and clappers that would ring out whenever an electrical current ran through the system—to the acute alarm of the rest of the household. “If the ringing of the Bells frightens you,” he later wrote to his wife, Deborah, from London, “tie a Piece of Wire from one Bell to the other, and that will conduct the lightning without ringing or snapping, but silently.”
²³

Given the slow pace of eighteenth-century communications, as well as the need for further experimentation, testing, and verification, it would take several years before the lightning rod became a common feature in the colonies and in Europe. Adoption of the new technology was also delayed by scattered opposition. Religious traditionalists tended to see lightning as a weapon of divine retribution and worried that the electricians were meddling in God's affairs, although many clerics, eager to preserve their church steeples from lightning damage, expressed support for the new invention.
²⁴

The superstitious joined the fray, many fearing that the newfangled rods would merely attract dangerous lightning bolts and thus increase the danger rather than ward it off or actively protect against it.
^b
They generally preferred the old method of ringing church bells during thunderstorms to invoke God's protection and deter any danger. Even some prominent electricians, including one of the creators of the Leyden jar, thought that loud noises—the peal of bells or perhaps thunderous cannon fire—might better disperse lightning.
²⁵

Franklin himself later became embroiled in an almost comical debate over whether his pointed rods were more effective than “blunted” versions preferred by his leading British critic. With the War for Independence looming, political considerations impelled King George III, by then fed up with the increasingly obstreperous Americans, to overrule Franklin and the near-unanimous views of the virtuosi of the Royal Society, and order rods with blunted ends be erected to protect such valued buildings as St. Paul's Cathedral and the government powder magazine at Purfleet.

The king became the immediate target of London's coffeehouse wags, who savagely lampooned his ruling in satiric verse while at the same time extolling the views of Franklin:

While you, great GEORGE! for safety hunt,

      And sharp conductors change for blunt,

      The Empire's out of joint.

FRANKLIN a wiser course pursues,

And all your thunder fearless views,

      By sticking to—
the point
.
^c

By then an ardent convert to the American revolutionary cause, Franklin noted coolly that protecting the gunpowder that helped fuel the British war machine was no longer his concern. For John Pringle, president of the Royal Society, the dispute over pointed or blunt rods proved a more serious matter. Royal prerogative was one thing, but, as he reportedly told the king, the “laws and operation of nature” were quite another.
²⁶
Caught between the immovable power of the throne and the irresistible forces of physics, Pringle resigned his position.

On the last day of November 1753, those men of science and invention at the Royal Society of London did something they had never done before: they awarded their highest honor to a complete outsider—and not just any outsider, but a resident of a colonial outpost, some thirty-five hundred miles to the west of the British imperial capital. Delivering the ceremonial oration, the president of the Royal Society took pains to point out that the absentee winner of the year's Copley Medal, albeit neither “a Fellow of this Society nor an Inhabitant of this Island,” was nonetheless a British subject as well as a member of that more expansive republic, peopled by “learned Men and Philosophers of all Nations.”
²⁷

The recipient of the Society's award for 1753, then the world's greatest prize for scientific achievement, was none other than “Benjamin Franklin Esqr. of Pennsylvania,” in recognition of his “curious Experiments and Observations on Electricity.” These included the “easy method” of confirming the identity of electricity and lightning, later memorialized in the Currier and Ives print of Franklin wielding his electric kite in a thunderstorm, as well as a host of related
findings on a subject that was then the latest fashion in salons, workshops, and lecture halls across Europe.

The adulation of the Royal Society marked a quick reversal of fortune for Franklin and for colonial science. The initial reception toward the work of the Philadelphian electricians had been dismissive, a fact that still rankled Franklin many decades later, while their subsequent findings were “laughed at by the Connoisseurs.”
²⁸
The Frenchman Nollet, whose own theories and scientific reputation were seriously undermined by Franklin's new approach, refused to believe his eyes. Overwhelmed by the absurdity of an
American
scientist, Nollet confided to an ally that this “Benjamin Franklin” was surely the fictitious creation of his own jealous rivals in England.
²⁹

With the success of the Philadelphia experiments, the Europeans were forced to take notice of the colonials as scientists in their own right. This marked the start of an American revolution against an economy of knowledge that had been in place for centuries. Unlike Bartram, Garden, and the other North American naturalists, whose work could be absorbed seamlessly into existing European conceptions of plant and animal life, Franklin and his fellow electricians presented a true achievement in basic science, one that featured a revolutionary theory to explain observations derived from experimentation. This, says Brooke Hindle in his classic study of early American science, represented “the most important scientific contribution made by an American in the colonial period.”
³⁰

Among Franklin's recognized innovations were the distinction between positive and negative electrical charges; a plausible explanation of the workings of the mysterious Leyden jar, a simple condenser capable of storing electricity; the design and naming of the electrical “battery”; and the use of bodkins and other sharp points to “
throw
off, as well as
draw
off the Electrical Fire,” the first step toward his development of the lightning rod.
³¹

Franklin was showered with honors, awards, and public acclaim. In addition to the Copley Medal, the Royal Society elected him a fellow, in an unprecedented unanimous vote and after waiving the usual formalities. The Académie des Sciences, in Paris, made Franklin just one of eight foreign members. Allies on the Continent helped ensure that his theories and findings crowded out competing views, including those of the Nollet. Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary all awarded him honorary degrees, and henceforth he would be known universally as Dr. Franklin.

The ever-ambitious Franklin was delighted to go along. He had already met the Europeans more than halfway by studiously structuring his ideas and their presentation in ways acceptable to the members of the Royal Society and their Continental colleagues. And he would spend much of the rest of his life, whatever his other pressing political, commercial, or diplomatic duties, gladly playing the part of America's first scientist, and serving as intermediary between the upstart colonials and the Old World virtuosi.

Yet, the experiments of the Philadelphia electricians and the later work of their American heirs contained the seeds of a new approach to useful knowledge, one that challenged the increasing demands of the Europeans that it be subordinated—tamed, even—through application of quantitative methods, mathematical modeling, or mechanical representation. Before Franklin's groundbreaking experiments, researchers in England and France had already proposed the same, as yet untested, analogy between lightning and electricity. Nollet had noticed that the innards of a sparrow electrocuted in his laboratory closely resembled those of a man killed by lightning.
³²
It was, however, the particular genius of the Americans that allowed them to cut through the theoretical disputes and arrive at a workable solution.

Distrustful of systems and unbeholden to the centralized political, social, and economic interests that held sway over the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences, Franklin and his fellow Leather Aprons felt free to draw on a lifetime of common sense and experience as independent craftsmen and mechanics to solve the riddle of lightning. In a flurry of creativity unleashed by Franklin's discoveries, a new generation of American experimenters such as the itinerant physician Dr. T. Gale and the medical inventor Elisha Perkins began to apply electricity to everything from medical therapies and psychological treatments to spiritual regeneration. All the while they spurned formal scientific theory, which they equated with dangerous, centralized power.
³³

This American approach, essentially a victory of common sense over elite science, came at a time when the Europeans were moving to eliminate the wonder at the heart of natural phenomena and to remove such knowledge from the drawing room, the public lecture hall, and the mechanic's workshop and preserve it instead in the disciplined world of the university, the academy, and the professional laboratory. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that American science at last began to come under firm institutional authority.
³⁴
By then, this resistance on the part of early American practitioners
of useful knowledge to centralized control had carved out lasting space for the independent tinkerer, the inventor, and the industrial visionary—future Edisons, Taylors, and Fords—and inspired the revolutionary generation that would overthrow British rule in the name of “self-evident” truths.

No doubt, members of the Royal Society were only marginally aware of the full implications of their decision, and it is only in hindsight that we can recognize an early demarcation in the coming shift in the balance of scientific and technological power from Old Europe to the New World. To smooth over what was in truth a radical overhaul of the established intellectual order of things, the Royal Society bent over backward to portray Franklin and his circle of American experimenters as citizens of very same “learned Republic” already peopled by the European virtuosi.

The Royal Society could also rely on the shared notion of the uniformity and regularity of nature, one of the most dearly held ideas of the Enlightenment. This marked a significant departure from the older, more traditional world-view, in which nature and its mysteries expressed God's awesome power and as a result were to be feared and respected rather than examined, analyzed, and understood. Isaac Newton sealed this metaphysical transition at the dawn of the 1700s by establishing that nature obeyed certain identifiable physical laws that operated identically on earth and in the heavens.

True, opinion was divided over whether God would—or even could—override natural laws of his own creation, a point on which Franklin himself was deeply ambivalent. But this controversy did little to undermine the general unanimity among the learned that the physical world was knowable, quantifiable, and efficient. The rise of natural philosophy based on experimentation completed this gradual refutation of medieval and early modern ways of thinking.