MDDM18: The Night's Main Drama

[Dave Monroe]

Schiffer, Micahel Brian.  Draw the Lightning Down:
   Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in
   the Age of Enlightenment.  Berkeley: U of
   California P, 2003.

Most of us know--at least we've heard--that Benjamin
Franklin conducted some kind of electrical experiment
with a kite. What few of us realize--and what this
book makes powerfully clear--is that Franklin played a
major role in laying the foundations of modern
electrical science and technology. This fast-paced
book, rich with historical details and anecdotes,
brings to life Franklin, the large international
network of scientists and inventors in which he played
a key role, and their amazing inventions. We learn
what these early electrical devices--from lights and
motors to musical and medical instruments--looked
like, how they worked, and what their utilitarian and
symbolic meanings were for those who invented and used
them. Against the fascinating panorama of life in the
eighteenth century, Michael Brian Schiffer tells the
story of the very beginnings of our modern electrical
world. 

The earliest electrical technologies were conceived in
the laboratory apparatus of physicists; because of
their surprising and diverse effects, however, these
technologies rapidly made their way into many other
communities and activities. Schiffer conducts us from
community to community, showing how these technologies
worked as they were put to use in public lectures,
revolutionary experiments in chemistry and biology,
and medical therapy. This story brings to light the
arcane and long-forgotten inventions that made way for
many modern technologies--including lightning rods
(Franklin's invention), cardiac stimulation,
xerography, and the internal combustion engine--and
richly conveys the complex relationships among
science, technology, and culture.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10002.html

Tucker, Tom.  Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and
   his Electric Kite Hoax.  NY: PublicAffairs, 2003.

Every schoolchild in America knows that Benjamin
Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm in the
summer of 1752. Electricity from the clouds above
traveled down the kite's twine and threw a spark from
a key that Franklin had attached to the string. He
thereby proved that lightning and electricity were
one. 

What many of us do not realize is that Franklin used
this breakthrough in his day's intensely competitive
field of electrical science to embarrass his French
and English rivals. His kite experiment was an
international event and the Franklin that it presented
to the world—a homespun, rural philosopher-scientist
performing an immensely important and dangerous
experiment with a child's toy—became the Franklin of
myth. In fact, this sly presentation on Franklin's
part so charmed the French that he became an
irresistible celebrity when he traveled there during
the American Revolution. The crowds and the
journalists, and the ladies, cajoled the French powers
into joining us in our fight against the British.

What no one 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 with the electric kite, he performed his
greatest hoax. As Tucker shows, it was this trick that
may have won the American Revolution.

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=1891620703

http://sciam.com/books/index.cfm?section=review&issue_date=01-FEB-04#1

"'So much for Harlequin,' cries Dr. Franklin, 'Let
us get out into the Night's Main Drama!-- There's
Weather-Gear for all, this Scythe here is the perfect
Shape to catch us a Bolt, perhaps a good many,--
better than a Key upon a Kite, indeed,-- think of it
as Death's Picklock,-- come, form your Line...all
here?' pulling his Hood up again, '-- felonious Entry,
into the Anterooms of the Cre-a-torr....'" (M&D, Ch.
29, p. 295)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65479&sort=date

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