Researches in Electricity 109 



the experiments, a relatively larger number of would-be 

 investigators took the subject up. Discoveries w^ere an- 

 nounced from day to day, and all sorts of theories, many 

 of them more or less obscure, were promulgated. 



The excitement over electricity appears to have 

 reached the American colonies in the spring of 1747. 

 Benjamin Franklin, in the first of the famous series of 

 letters in which his experiments on electricity are de- 

 scribed, writes to Peter CoUinson, Esq., of London as 



follows : 



" Philadelphia, March 28, 1747. 



^^ Sir: — Your kind present of an electric tube with 

 directions for using it has put several of us on making 

 electrical experiments in which we have observed some 

 particular phenomena that we look upon to be new. I 

 shall therefore communicate them to you in my next, 

 though possibly they may not be new to you, as among 

 the numbers daily employed in those experiments on 

 your side of the water, 'tis probable some one or other 

 has hit on the same observations. For my own part I 

 never was before engaged in any study that so totally 

 engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately 

 done; for what with making experiments when I can 

 be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaint- 

 ances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come con- 

 tinually in crowds to see them, I have, during some 

 months past, had little leisure for anything else. I am, 

 etc. " B. Franklin." 



