Many of us know the legend of Franklin flying a kite in a thunderstorm (which by the way, he never wrote about though he kept copious notes on his other experiments). But this supposedly took place in 1752, and Franklin had already been experimenting with electricity for five or more years. Franklin even constructed his own battery to generate electricity, although he told a friend he wasn’t sure what could be done with it (!).
So he was very practical and turned his brilliant mind to try to figure out how to protect people and property from the devastation of lightning strikes, which he theorized (note: theorized) were electrical. He had thought there was a connection between electricity and lightning based on visual observation alone. The color, noise, crookedness of both led him to suspect a connection. Franklin thought if he could draw the electrical fire “out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike” he could protect structures. He knew that in his lab metal was a good conductor of electricity. He had accidentally noticed that an iron sewing needle could conduct electricity away from a charged metal sphere. and so he came up with a sharply-pointed metal rod, originally 8 to 10 feet in length that was mounted on the highest points of buildings and connected by wire to the ground.
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