111 
. 
France and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers under 
the discharge of guns from the electrical battery.” 
It was in 1749 that Franklin came to the conclusion that light- 
ning and the electrical fire are identical. ‘‘To determine the 
question,’’ he says,* ‘‘whether the clouds that contain lightning 
are electrified or not, I would propose an experiment to be try’d 
where it may be done conveniently. On the top of some high 
tower or steeple place a kind of centry box big enough to contain 
a man and an electrical stand. From the middle of the stand let 
an iron rod rise and pass, bending, out of the door and then up- 
right twenty or thirty feet, pointed very sharp at the end. If the 
electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a man, standing on it when 
such clouds are passing low, might be electrified and afford sparks, 
the rod drawing fire to him from acloud. If any danger to the 
man should be apprehended (though I think there would be none), 
let him stand on the floor of his box and now and then bring near 
to the rod the loop of a wire that has one end fastened to the leads, 
he holding it by a wax handle; so the sparks, if the rod is electri- 
fied, will strike from the rod to the wire and not affect him.”’ 
On the roth of May, 1752, M. D’Alibard, the translator of Frank- 
lin’s letters to Collinson, placed in a garden at Marly, near Paris, a 
pointed bar of iron, forty feet high, supported upon an electrical 
base. At twenty minutes past two in the afternoon, a storm cloud 
passed over the rod, and the observers drew sparks from it and ob- 
tained with it all the common electrical phenomena. tf 
Shortly after, M. DeLor, who had repeated many of Franklin’s 
experiments before the king, Louis XV, raised at his house, in 
Paris, a bar of iron ninety-nine feet high, placed upon a cake of resin 
two feet square and three inches thick. On the 18th of May be- 
tween four and five in the afternoon, a storm cloud passed over the 
bar, and M. DeLor drew sparks from the bar which produced the 
same noise, the same fire, and the same crackling ; the longest of 
these sparks being nine lines. 
On July 20, Canton erected upon his house in London, a tin 
tube between three and four feet in length, fixed to the top of a 
glass one of about eighteen inches. To the upper end of the tin 
tube, which was not so high as a stack of chimnies on the same 
* New Observations and Experiments on Electricity, p. 66. 
+See the letter of the Abbe Mazeas, New Experiments and Observations on Electricity, 
p. 107. 
