Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume 2 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own WritingsBruce, Wiliam Cabell
History
Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume 2 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
Bruce, Wiliam Cabell
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
ingenious neighbor, Kinnersley, who chanced at the time to be out of
business. Franklin advised him to exhibit the experiments for profit, and
followed up the advice by preparing two lectures for him, in which the
details of the experiments were clearly set forth. Kinnersley himself
employed skilled workmen to make the necessary electrical apparatus for
him, modelled upon the rough agencies designed by Franklin for himself, and
used in his own exhibitions. The lectures, when delivered by him in
Philadelphia, were so well attended that he made a tour of all the chief
towns of the Colonies with a considerable degree of pecuniary success. Some
years later, similar instructions given by Franklin to Domien, a Greek
priest, proved so useful to him on a long tramp that he wrote to his
benefactor that he had lived eight hundred miles upon electricity, and that
it had been meat, drink and clothing to him. When Franklin last heard from
him, he was contemplating a journey from Havana to Vera Cruz, thence
through Mexico to Acapulco, on its western coast, and from Acapulco to
Manila, and from Manila through China, India, Persia and Turkey to his home
in Transylvania; all with electricity as his main _viaticum_.
Franklin's own experiments fortunately ended in something better than
vagabondage, however respectable or profitable. Grateful to Collinson for
his timely gifts, he wrote to him several letters, laying before him the
results of the Philadelphia experiments. Collinson procured for these
letters the privilege of being read before the Royal Society, where they
did not excite enough notice to be printed among its Transactions. Another
letter, one to Kinnersley, in which Franklin propounded the identity of
lightning and electricity, he sent to Dr. Mitchell, an acquaintance of his,
and also a member of the Royal Society, who replied by telling him that it
had been read before the Society, but had been laughed at by the
connoisseurs. Then it was that the happy obstetric suggestion of Dr.
Fothergill that the letters were of too much value to be stifled led
Collinson to gather them together for publication by Cave in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_. They were not published in this magazine, but Cave
did bring them out in pamphlet form with a preface by Dr. Fothergill. The
event showed that he and the general public had more acumen than the sages
of the Royal Society, for the letters, when subsequently published in a
quarto volume, with additions by Franklin, ran through five editions,
without the cost of a penny to Cave for copyright. It was from France,
however, that they first received the full meed of prompt approbation that
they deserved. A copy of them happened to fall into the hands of Buffon,
who prevailed upon D'Alibard to translate them into French. Their
publication in that language provoked an attack upon them by the Abbé
Nollet, Preceptor in Natural Philosophy to the Royal Family, and the author
of a popular theory of Electricity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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