LIGHTNING in a BOTTLE
0. LIGHTNING in a BOTTLE - Story Preface
1. EARLY PIONEERS
2. EARLY EXPERIMENTS
3. THE LEYDEN JAR
4. LIGHTNING in a BOTTLE
5. ELECTRICITY and the TORPEDO FISH
6. MEET GALVANI and VOLTA
7. WHAT MAKES a FROG'S LEG TWITCH?
8. THE WORLD'S FIRST BATTERY
9. THE END and BEGINNING of an ERA
This image is a colorized version of "Franklin's Experiment, June 1752," published by Currier & Ives in 1876. An
original is maintained by the Library of Congress.
Living in Britain’s American colony of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin thought about the Leyden Jar. What
made it work? Why did some of its characteristics seem so strange?
Why, for example, was an electric shock greater when the electric fluid leaked?
Why wasn’t it more intense when all the electric fluid stayed in the jar?
How was it that electricity could spark, shock, move-around and be stored?
Franklin thought about some experiments which might answer his many questions:
What would happen if someone flew a kite during a thunder-and-lightning storm?
Was the lightning electricity?
If lightning were electricity, it had to be naturally produced electricity (instead of artificially produced like the
Leyden-Jar experiments). But ... could it really be that the same phenomenon—electricity—could be produced
both naturally and artificially?
If, so ... how??
In his autobiography, Franklin tells us that he personally flew a kite during a storm, but that was after other
individuals had tested his idea "for drawing lightning from the clouds." Two Frenchmen (Thomas-Francois
Dalibard and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon) translated Franklin’s theories which he’d published
around 1750. Then they put those ideas into motion during 1752.
Following Franklin’s direction, the Frenchmen set-up a 40-foot metal pole which they anchored, on the ground,
in a glass wine bottle near the town of Marly-la-Ville (northeast of Paris). Franklin’s idea was to capture
lightning to test whether it was electrically based.
The metal rod would start the process. The rod would capture the lightning, which would then pass through the
metal rod on its way to the glass wine bottle where the electrical charges could be stored (and then examined).
On the 10th of May, 1752, a storm passed by Dalibard’s gadget. Lightning hit the top of the metal rod,
producing a spark. The spark, which Dalibard reportedly touched with his finger, burned his hand. The
following year, Georg Wilhelm Richmann (1711-1753), a German experimenter working in St. Petersburg
(Russia), died (from a lightning strike) when he tried to repeat the experiment.
Franklin’s suggested experiment proved that lightning was the same type of electricity as that made by man. It
also showed that lightning, as a force of nature, was waiting to be tapped.
0. LIGHTNING in a BOTTLE - Story Preface
1. EARLY PIONEERS
2. EARLY EXPERIMENTS
3. THE LEYDEN JAR
4. LIGHTNING in a BOTTLE
5. ELECTRICITY and the TORPEDO FISH
6. MEET GALVANI and VOLTA
7. WHAT MAKES a FROG'S LEG TWITCH?
8. THE WORLD'S FIRST BATTERY
9. THE END and BEGINNING of an ERA
This image is a colorized version of "Franklin's Experiment, June 1752," published by Currier & Ives in 1876. An
original is maintained by the Library of Congress.
Living in Britain’s American colony of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin thought about the Leyden Jar. What
made it work? Why did some of its characteristics seem so strange?
Why, for example, was an electric shock greater when the electric fluid leaked?
Why wasn’t it more intense when all the electric fluid stayed in the jar?
How was it that electricity could spark, shock, move-around and be stored?
Franklin thought about some experiments which might answer his many questions:
What would happen if someone flew a kite during a thunder-and-lightning storm?
Was the lightning electricity?
If lightning were electricity, it had to be naturally produced electricity (instead of artificially produced like the
Leyden-Jar experiments). But ... could it really be that the same phenomenon—electricity—could be produced
both naturally and artificially?
If, so ... how??
In his autobiography, Franklin tells us that he personally flew a kite during a storm, but that was after other
individuals had tested his idea "for drawing lightning from the clouds." Two Frenchmen (Thomas-Francois
Dalibard and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon) translated Franklin’s theories which he’d published
around 1750. Then they put those ideas into motion during 1752.
Following Franklin’s direction, the Frenchmen set-up a 40-foot metal pole which they anchored, on the ground,
in a glass wine bottle near the town of Marly-la-Ville (northeast of Paris). Franklin’s idea was to capture
lightning to test whether it was electrically based.
The metal rod would start the process. The rod would capture the lightning, which would then pass through the
metal rod on its way to the glass wine bottle where the electrical charges could be stored (and then examined).
On the 10th of May, 1752, a storm passed by Dalibard’s gadget. Lightning hit the top of the metal rod,
producing a spark. The spark, which Dalibard reportedly touched with his finger, burned his hand. The
following year, Georg Wilhelm Richmann (1711-1753), a German experimenter working in St. Petersburg
(Russia), died (from a lightning strike) when he tried to repeat the experiment.
Franklin’s suggested experiment proved that lightning was the same type of electricity as that made by man. It
also showed that lightning, as a force of nature, was waiting to be tapped.
