De Lor repeated the experiment in Paris eight days later. Louis XV, King of France, was so moved that he sent congratulations to the Royal Society, to be relayed to Messieurs Franklin and Peter Collinson. The first successful experiment in London was made by John Canton. Soon it was being repeated throughout Europe. The name of Benjamin Franklin was on everyone’s tongue. No news of all this had yet been brought on the slow sailing ships when, in June 1752, Franklin decided not to wait for the completion of the Christ Church spire for his experiment. He had another scheme. Why not try to draw electricity from the skies with a kite? “Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to reach to the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief when extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross.” Thus he later described the body of this world famous kite. Like ordinary kites, it had a tail, loop, and string. At the top of the vertical cedar strip, he fastened a sharp pointed wire about a foot long. At the end of the string he tied a silk ribbon. He fastened a small key at the juncture of silk and twine. With this child’s plaything, he and his tall full-grown son, William, took off across the fields one threatening summer day. They let the wind raise the kite into the air and they waited. Even before it began raining, Franklin observed some loose threads from the hempen string standing erect. He pressed his knuckle to the key—and an electric spark shot out. There were more sparks when the thunderstorm began. After the string was wet, the “electric fire” was “copious.” He must have grinned triumphantly at William, and perhaps said casually, “Well, Billy, we’ve done it.” There is no evidence that he realized his experiment might be dangerous, even deadly. The first account of the “Electrical Kite” appeared five months later in the October 19, 1752, issue of the _Gazette_. _Poor Richard’s Almanack_ for 1753 contained complete instructions on how to build a lightning rod. He had already put one up on his own chimney. It had small bells which chimed when clouds containing electricity passed by. The bells rang in his house for years. News of his triumphs abroad were now flooding in. The praise of the French king, he wrote a friend, made him feel like the girl “who was observed to grow suddenly proud, and none could guess the reason, till it came to be known that she had got on a new pair of garters.” The Royal Society, making up for lost time, published an account of his kite in _Transactions_, their official paper, and in November 1753, gave him the Copley gold medal for “his curious experiments and observations on electricity.” They conservatively held off making him a member of the Society until May 29, 1756. At home, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary College in turn gave him honorary degrees of master of arts.