Benjamin Franklin’s turkey shocker…
Stories from Physics
for 11-14
14-16
Though his experiment with a kite in a thunderstorm is well known, Benjamin Franklin put electricity to some other strange uses.
He describes an attempt to electrocute a turkey with a shock from a Leyden jar, resulting in the unfortunate scientist inadvertently shocking himself. He reports that those with him observed: “…that the flash was very great, and the crack as loud as a pistol”, but that “his senses being gone”, he didn’t see or hear anything. He described a “universal blow throughout my whole body from head to foot, which seemed within as well as without.”
References
J. Sparks, The Works of Benjamin Franklin: Containing Several Political and Historical Tracts, Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1840, p. 187, pp. 255-257
E. Wright (Ed.), Benjamin Franklin. His Life as He Wrote It, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 117
