Benjamin Franklin
THE experiments began with a gift. In 1746 Peter Collinson, the London Quaker merchant who acted as the Library Company's agent, sent the Company a glass tube and an account of the new German electrical experiments. Franklin took the tube home. Within a year he was writing to Collinson to describe what he had found — that electricity was a single fluid, not two; that a body could carry a surplus or a deficit of it, which he called positive and negative; that pointed conductors drew it off quietly; and, most daringly, that the crackle from a charged jar and the lightning in a summer sky were the same thing.
Collinson read the letters to the Royal Society, which was unimpressed, and then had them printed as a pamphlet in 1751, which changed everything. Within a year the French naturalist Dalibard had translated the letters and, following Franklin's proposal, drawn lightning from a cloud with an iron rod at Marly-la-Ville. The king of France sent his compliments. Harvard and Yale gave the Philadelphia printer honorary degrees. The Royal Society, reconsidering, gave him its Copley Medal in 1753 and its fellowship in 1756. No American before him had been famous in Europe for anything.
The German-speaking world read Franklin too, and the collection holds his letters on electricity in German translation, together with the Italian treatise by Tiberius Cavallo that carried Franklin's single-fluid theory into the textbooks of the 1770s. Alongside them sits the apparatus: a Leyden jar, a discharger, an insulating stool, and the instruments with which any gentleman of the 1760s could repeat the Philadelphia experiments in his own parlour.
Read the full chapter: The Electrical Philosophy (Catalog IV)
33 objects in Benjamin Franklin
(FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN). [NATTER, Johann Lorenz]. Apologie pour L'Ordre des Francs-Macons
Deborah Franklin Parial LS
Des herrn Benjamin Franklins Esq Briefe von de Elektricitat
[Franklin, Benjamin] Des Hocherleucheten Theologi
Experiences et observations sur electricite Faites a philadelphie en Amerique
Experiments and Observations on Electricity
Experiments and Observations on Electricty
Franklin Print
FRANKLIN, Benjamin. Correspondance Inedite et Secrete Du Docteur B. Franklin
Franklin, Benjamin: Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin
FRANKLIN, William. A Letter from His Excellency William Franklin, Esquire; To the Honorable the Gentlemen of His Majesty’s Council and to the Gentlemen of the House of Representatives of His Majesty’s Province of New-Jersey
FRANKLIN, WILLIAM. Autograph letter addressed “Dear Friend” [Thomas Wharton], dated 19 September 1769, Burlington, NJ
Franklin- treaty
Galloway Joseph THE SPEECH OF JOSEPH GALLOWAY, ESQ:
The Life of Dr. Benjamin Franklin
The Life of Dr. Benjamin Franklin,
Memoires de la Vie Privee
Memoires de la Vie Privee de Benjamin Franklin, Ecrits par Lui-Meme at Adresses a Son Fils
Memoirs of the Life and Writing of Benjamin Franklin
The New-Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine
[FRANKLIN] OPERE POLITICHE
Ouvres de M. Franklin
[Franklin, B] Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces
The Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin
[FRANKLIN] Scelta di Lettere
[FRANKLIN, Benjamin, or Joseph GALLOWAY]. A True and Impartial State of the Province of Pennsylvania
The Works of Benjamin Franklin, First german Edition
The Works of the Late Dr. Benjamin
The Works of the Late Dr. Benjamin Franklin
Works of the Late Dr. Benjamin Franklin
