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By Root 984 0

reached toward the gun barrel. The shock knocked him to the floor. Unwittingly, he had invented what became known as the Leyden jar, which could build up charges of remarkable strength. One experimenter used the jar to knock children off their feet, and another reported that his wife could not walk for a time after being shocked. The discharge (a new word coined to describe the Leyden jar shock) could be communicated through several people. In France, to amuse the king, a powerful Leyden jar was discharged first through a circle of 140 courtiers, then through 180 gendarmes. Two hundred Cistercians felt the jolt in their Paris monastery and leaped toward the heavens in unison. The experimenters found they could make the shocks even more powerful by linking several jars to form a battery. One man wrote, "Would it not be a fatal surprise to the first experimenter who found a way to intensify electricity to an artificial lightning, and fell a martyr to his curiosity?"4

ATMOSPHERIC LIGHTNING—the type that shot from the heavens—posed greater dangers and provoked nearly as much curiosity. According to prevailing theories, lightning resulted from colliding clouds or some unknown chemical reaction in the atmosphere, but no one knew for sure what it was. A few believed that it was composed of electrical fluid—the spark and crackle of electricity made the connection obvious—but this theory had not been proved. Inspired by an itinerant lecturer, the Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin began experimenting with electricity in 1745. A few years later he proposed an experiment to "determine the Question, Whether the Clouds that contain Lightning are electrified or not." He attached a silk handle to the end of a kite string and tied a key where silk and string met. Standing in a doorway to keep himself and the silk dry, he flew the kite into a "Thunder Gust." Electricity tingled down the wet string, and Franklin drew sparks from the key first with his knuckle, then with his tongue.5*

Many experimenters in Europe tried variations on Franklin's experiment. Most survived the dangerous test unscathed, either through dumb luck or because they carefully insulated themselves from the lightning. In 1753, however, Georg Wilhelm Richmann, a German working in St. Petersburg, drew a bolt directly through his body. He became the first man to sacrifice his life in the pursuit of electrical knowledge.6

Franklin himself knew something about death from electricity. Not long after he proposed his famous lightning experiment, he informed a friend that the discharge from a battery of two Leyden jars was "sufficient to kill common Hens outright." The birds died so quickly, he said, that "compassionate persons" might adopt it as a method of killing. Butchers could build a battery of six Leyden jars, link the battery to a chain, wrap the chain around the thighs of a turkey, and lift the bird until its head touched the prime conductor. "The animal dies instantly," Franklin wrote. He warned experimenters to be cautious. While killing turkeys, he accidentally administered the shock to himself: "It seem'd an universal Blow from head to foot throughout the Body. . . . My Arms and Back of my Neck felt somewhat numb the remainder of the Evening, and my Breastbone was sore for a Week after, [as] if it had been bruiz'd. What the Consequence would be, if such a Shock were taken thro' the Head, I know not." But electrical slaughter, Franklin averred, was worth the danger: "I conceit that the Birds kill'd in this Manner eat uncommonly tender."7

FRANKLIN ALSO GAVE Leyden jar shocks to people in an attempt to cure them of paralysis. Like others caught up in the electrical mania of the mid-eighteenth century, he believed that the remarkable new force could be used as a medical therapy. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was one of England's strongest advocates of electrical cures. Some physicians sealed a drug inside a glass wand, electrified it, and applied sparks to patients, claiming that the essence of the medicine penetrated the body along with the subtle electrical