Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790 -- Juvenile literature
Among his disciples was an unemployed Baptist minister named Ebenezer
Kinnersley. Franklin suggested he might both serve science and earn his
living if he held electrical demonstrations. Kinnersley’s first
announcement of a lecture, held in Newport, described “electrical fire”
as having “an appearance like fishes swimming in the air,” claiming this
fire would “live in water, a river not being sufficient to quench the
smallest spark of it.” He promised his audience such wonders as
“electrified money, which scarce anybody will take when offered ... a
curious machine acting by means of electric fire, and playing a variety
of tunes on eight musical bells ... the force of the electric spark,
making a fair hole through a quire of paper....”
Kinnersley lectured in the colonies and the West Indies and was hugely
successful. Neither he nor any of the other collaborators could rival
Franklin’s own achievements.
Early in 1747, he gave the names of positive and negative (or plus and
minus) to the two types of electricity, to replace the unwieldy terms,
resinous and vitreous. Positive and negative electricity became part of
the scientific vocabulary. He was the first to refer to the
_conductivity_ of certain substances. Electricity passed easily through
metals and water; they were _conductive_. Glass and wood were
_nonconductive_, unless they were wet. He also noted that pointed metal
rods were wonderfully effective “in drawing off and throwing off the
electrical fire.”
After he retired in 1748, he spent much more time on electricity. To
Peter Collinson in London he wrote, “I never was before engaged in any
study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has
lately done.” He kept Collinson informed in detail of his experiments,
not because he thought he had the final word but in the hope that his
experiments might possibly prove helpful to English scientists.
It was to Collinson he described an electrical party to be held on the
banks of the Schuylkill River in the spring of 1749: “A turkey is to be
killed for our dinner by the electrical shock, and roasted by the
electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle; when
the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France,
and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers, under the discharge
of guns from an electrical battery.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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