The thundercloud came late in the afternoon of the fourth of July, 1752, and Franklin sallied out with his kite, accompanied by his son, and taking with him a common door-key and a Leyden jar. The kite was soon high in air, and the philosopher awaited the result of his experiment, standing, with his son, under the lee of a cowshed, partly to protect himself from the rain that was coming, and partly, it is said, to shield himself from the ridicule of passers-by, who, having no sympathy with his philosophical speculations, might be inclined to regard him as a lunatic. To guard against the danger of receiving a flash of lightning through his body, he held the kite by means of a silk ribbon, which was tied to the door-key, the door-key being itself attached to the lower end of the hempen string. A flash of lightning soon came from the cloud, and a second, and a third; but no sign of electricity could be observed in the kite, or the hempen cord, or the key. Franklin was almost beginning to despair of success, when suddenly he noticed that the little fibres of the cord began to bristle up, just as they would if it were placed near an electric machine in action. He presented the door-key to the knob of the Leyden jar, and a spark passed between them. Presently a shower began to fall; the cord, wetted by the rain, became a better conductor than it had been before, and sparks came more freely. With these sparks he now charged the Leyden jar, and found, to his intense delight, that he could exhibit all the phenomena of electricity by means of the lightning he had drawn from the clouds. In the following year a similar experiment, with even more striking results, was carried out, in France, by de Romas. Though it is said he had no knowledge of what Franklin had done in America, he, too, used a kite; and, with a view of making the string a better conductor, he interlaced with it a thin copper wire. Then, flying his kite in the ordinary way, when it had risen to a height of about 550 feet, he drew sparks from it which, we are told, were upwards of nine feet long, and emitted a sound like the report of a pistol.