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PrintCollection Name: Drachen Foundation Collection
Collection Number: 2190
Post Type: Book
This item was entered by Matthew Sutton. They assume full responsibility for all content.
Artist or Author: Tom Tucker
Creation Year: 2003
Length: 0.00
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ISBN: 1-891620-70-3 Language: English Description: Nearly every schoolchild in America knows that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1752. The kite conducted electricity and threw a spark from a key that Franklin had attached to the kite's string. He thereby proved that lightning and electricity were one.
What many of us do not realize is that Franklin used this breakthrough in the intensely competitive field of electrical science to embarrass his French and English rivals. Electrical science was the hot science of his day. Experiments were both parlor tricks and serious investigations while advances, rivalries, and speculations were followed in the popular press as well as the journals of the most distinguished scientific societies.
In Bolt of Fate Tom Tucker revisits the scientific scene of the mid-eighteenth century, a jostling experimental arena that attracted philosophers, aristocrats, celebrated beauties, wheeler-dealers, and social climbers. He introduces the reader to England's William Watson and Joseph Priestley, France's Buffon and the Abbe Nollet. Russia's doomed Georg Rikhman, and the genius Franklin who thought further and with more clarity than the competition and who could not resist any opportunity to tweak a rival's pride. Tucker illuminates the questions and issues then being explored in this sometimes playful science and shows how these fascinating men and their cutting-edge pursuit created the world we live in today.
Franklin's kite experiment was an international event and the Franklin that is presented to the world- a homespun, rural philospher- scientist performing an immensely important and dangerous experiment with a child's toy- became the Franklin of myth. In fact, this very deliberate presentation on Franklin's part so charmed the French that he became an irresistible celebrity when he traveled there during the American Revolution. It was the crowds and the journalists, and the ladies, who cajoled the French powers inot joining us in our fight against the British.
What no one else has successfully proven until now- and what few have suggested- is that Franklin never flew the kite at all. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiastic hoaxer and his quick wits and natural mischievousness served him well throughout his career as he launched a number of pranks and deceptions. With the electric kite, he managed the greatest hoax of them all. As Tucker shows, it was this trick that may have won the American Revolution
297 pgs
Materials: Cotton, Dowel
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