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Benjamin Franklin and the [September, 
portion of Physical Science. The present writer, who, 
during the last few years, has been able to devote a consi- 
derable portion of his leisure time specially to the subject 
of thunderbolts, and to amass much information in regard 
to faCts and opinions connected therewith, being now 
engaged in compiling a work on Terrestrial Electricity, has 
thought that perhaps a few remarks bearing on the relation 
of Benjamin Franklin to the origin of so-called lightning 
conductors , and arising out of the studies he is pursuing, may 
be of service in paving the way for a clearer and more defi- 
nite idea, on the part of interested readers, of the history of 
these instruments, and of Franklin’s original intentions when 
he introduced them. 
Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, in British North 
America, in 1706. By trade a printer, his acute and enter- 
prising mind did not permit of this particular calling 
engrossing his whole attention ; for he added to his worldly 
resources by keeping a shop at Philadelphia for the sale of 
goods of a variegated nature, — an establishment locally 
known as a “ general store.” He appears to have first heard 
of the new science of electricity at a leCture delivered at 
Philadelphia by Dr. Spence, in 1746. Franklin was then 
40 years of age ; but he at once began to investigate the 
subject for himself, and to make experiments, and it was not 
long before the same idea that had occurred to Ward in 
1708, to Gray in 1729, and to Nollet in 1745, presented itself 
likewise to his imagination, viz., that lightning was the 
appearance of an eleCtric spark. 
Here, perhaps, we may be allowed to make a slight di- 
gression in order to call attention to the confusion constantly 
made between lightning and electricity, — i.e., between effect 
and cause. No less an authority than the President of the 
Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians tells us, in 
his Inaugural Address, delivered in January, 1883, that 
Franklin, by a bold experiment, “ proved that lightning and 
electricity were one, and consequently obedient to the same 
laws.” In a LeCture delivered at the Royal United Service 
Institution, on May 6th, 1881, on the same subject, the 
leCturer said that one of the forms of electricity was “ the 
state of activity (the work-producing state) as in lightning.” 
These dicta are in reality tantamount to affirming that a 
certain portion of the manifestation of the explosion of 
charge and the charge itself are one and the same thing. 
A similar derangement of cause and effeCt is evident also in 
a paper “ On Lightning and Lightning Conductors,” read 
by Mr. W. H. Preece, the well-known electrical engineer, at 
