Did benjamin franklin discover electricity?
Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his many creations were the lightning rod, the glass armonica (a glass instrument), the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, and the flexible urinary catheter. Franklin never patented his inventions. His discoveries included his investigations of electricity He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge.
Search ushistory.org Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He was the tenth son of soap maker, Josiah Franklin. Benjamin’s mother was Abiah Folger, the second wife of Josiah. In all, Josiah would father 17 children. In part via Franklin’s popularity, the government of France signed a Treaty of Alliance with the Americans in 1778. Franklin also helped secure loans and persuade the French they were doing the right thing. Franklin was on hand to sign the Treaty of Paris in 1783, after the Americans had won the Revolution. Now a man in his late seventies, Franklin returned to America. He became President of the Executive Council of Pennsylvania. He served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and signed the Constitution. One of his last public acts was writing an anti-slavery treatise in 1789. Franklin died on April 17, 1790 at the age of 84. 20,000 people attended the funeral of the man who was called, “the harmonious human multitude.” His electric personality
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, soldier, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass ‘harmonica’. He formed both the first public lending library in America and first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist he supported the idea of an American nation. As a diplomat during the American Revolution he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the United States possible.
No, he demonstrated that the static electricity in the air was the same as the static electricity generated by the people who were using it in an entertainment way. Friction between two objects generates static electricity. You’ll notice this if you walk across a carpet and touch a metal doorknob in a dry atmosphere. They used to take a ball, and turn it over and over on an axis, rubbing against a fabric, then move a metal object close to the ball, and create a spark. Some would use the conductivity of the metal to send the spark some distance to perform some little trick. Michael Faraday had built what was called a Leyden jar, which was used to store an electrical charge. Franklin used the charge from the cloud, to draw the current into the jar to be stored. This jar, in a more compact form, is the capacitor you have in your computer. Franklin did this experiment, and lived, surprisingly, considering the temperature of a lightning bolt is actually hotter than the surface of the sun, b
