Fraudulent Franklin?
POLITICAL WRITERS OF A CERTAIN stripe like to assert that the institution of marriage creates many benefits for society. That’s true, and one of the most important of them has nothing to do with morals, economics, or stable family relationships. Instead it lies in marriage’s main byproduct—waiting time—and its beneficial effect on creativity.
Consider the experience of Donald Bitzer, who, as described elsewhere in this issue, invented the plasma display screen for use in the PLATO educational computing system. In 1964 he and a colleague were waiting for their wives to pick them up at the end of the day. “Both wives were late in arriving,” Bitzer recalls, “so we began a discussion focused on reducing the early work [on the display] to as simple a configuration as possible, utilizing the natural capacitance characteristics of a glass panel.” This proved to be the key breakthrough. “Our wives still think that they and their tardy arrival deserve part of the credit for the invention,” Bitzer says.
In similar fashion, the garagerock anthem “Pushin’ Too Hard” was composed in 1966 by Sky Saxon, lead singer for the Seeds, while waiting for his wife (well, his girlfriend) to finish shopping. Most recently, Michael Brian Schiffer, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, was wrestling with a half-written book on electricity that “lacked a coherent framework.” He couldn’t figure out how to tie it all together, he writes, until “one day, while waiting for my wife, Annette, in a shopping mall in Flagstaff, Arizona, it finally came to me. I would recount the early history of electrical technology and then trace the changes it underwent as people adapted it to the performance requirements of different activities in various science and nonscience communities.”
The result of Schiffer’s mall-rat epiphany is Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (University of California Press, 383 pages, $34.95). As promised, the book devotes a chapter to each of the transatlantic intellectual communities that developed around the mysterious new phenomenon, including lecturers/ showmen, physicians, lightning-rod inventors, atmospheric scientists, and electrochemists. Since the author is also an archeologist, he takes an artifact-based approach, examining the instruments and apparatus used by each community to see what they tell us about the spread of electrical knowledge and how it was seen by practitioners and outsiders.
Ubiquitous throughout Schiffer’s book, of course, is the figure of Franklin, whose pre-eminence in the early days of electrical research remains unchallengeable. Is it conceivable, however, that the wily Franklin used his talents and reputation to give himself more credit as a discoverer than he deserved? That possibility is examined in Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax , by Tom Tucker (Public Affairs Books, 297 pages, $25.00).
As the title says, Tucker believes that Franklin, an inveterate perpetrator of hoaxes and practical jokes throughout his life, never made the famous kite-flying experiment in 1752 that proved the equivalence of lightning and electricity. The author is not calling Franklin a complete fraud: There is no question that he had previously suggested a similar demonstration in a published paper and that a pair of French scientists performed the kite experiment that same year. But a few months after the Frenchmen reported their results, Franklin wrote that he, too, had recently flown a kite in a thunderstorm and used it to collect the “electric fire.” Suspiciously, there were no witnesses, and Franklin didn’t even give the day when it happened. Tucker thinks he never flew the kite and merely said he had in order to dispute the French claim of priority.
Delving deep into historical sources, Tucker examines the shaky chronology of the episode, as well as the apparatus Franklin supposedly used. His conclusion: The experiment could not have worked. The string would have burned up, the key would have been too heavy, and Franklin’s description of the kite does not make sense in terms of the materials available at the time.
Tucker is not the first to make such a claim. As he acknowledges, similar suggestions have been around for almost a century, though Franklin scholars have usually dismissed them. Whether his evidence is strong enough to establish Franklin as a hoaxer is up to each reader to decide, for while the depth of his research is impressive, none of his points is dispositive in itself. Yet even if Tucker is correct, it does little to harm FrankHn’s position as a pioneer of modern science. Rather, it just makes him look more human and less like the allegorical figure to be found in countless paintings and statues.
