“Electrical fire would ...be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike."
Benjamin Franklin, statesman and scientist
American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was particularly interested in electricity and set up a small laboratory in his house to investigate its properties. His interest soon switched from electricity to lightning after he noticed similarities between the two. Many scientists had previously noticed a link, but none had managed to prove it.
On a stormy night in 1752, he conducted a life- threatening experiment to demonstrate that lightning is the result of an electrical buildup. He constructed a kite that carried a metal spike and flew it into the thunderstorm. The kite had a key attached near the bottom of the ribbon and Franklin noticed that it sparked as he brought his knuckles close to it. Franklin had shown that lightning was a form of electricity and he went on to use this knowledge to design a lightning rod to protect buildings. The iron rod was between 6 and 10 feet (2 and 3 m) in length, and provided a path of least resistance for the lightning, channeling it safely to the ground. He later showed that sharp rods were better than blunt ones for the purpose.
Recently it was suggested that the kite experiment was a hoax and that Franklin would have been killed if he had actually been struck by lightning. Some suggest the experiment was real but the sparks observed were actually from an electrical field and not a lightning strike.
