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Essay on Benjamin Franklin

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Benjamin Franklin (An A+ Essays Original Paper, written by WeirdHTML)

Benjamin Franklin was one of the first and most famous scientists in America. He was a man of many talents and interests. Franklin was always curios about they way things work, and he always tried to find ways to make them work better. Even though he started out as a published, he was always interested in science. However this interest soon became a passion to Franklin. He even retired from his publishing business to work in a laboratory with his mostly homemade equipment. Throughout his life Benjamin Franklin made many important discoveries and theories which greatly influenced future scientists and inventors.

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston Massachusetts, on …show more content…

Franklin realized that if a piece of silk were rubbed against a glass, the glass would have a positive charge. Other scientists at that time believed that rubbing produced electricity, however Franklin said that it was just the "electric fluid" being transferred from the silk to the glass. This is known today as the law of conservation of change and it is one of the basic principles of physics.

Franklin published his theories in a book titled "Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia". It became a best seller in Europe as well as in the colonies. The main topic of this book was Franklin's theory that lightning was electrical energy. This was not a new idea, but Benjamin Franklin was the first to perform an experiment on it. He said that if a metal rod was to be placed on top of a tower or a tall building, it would be struck by lightning and hold an electrical charge. Many scientists in Europe tried this experiment, and some had successful results. When a French scientist, De Lor, attempted to repeat one of the proposed experiments from the book a huge crowd of curious people had gathered in Paris to see it.

In 1752 Franklin devised another experiment to test if lighting has an electrical charge. He flied a kite carrying a pointed wire in a thunderstorm and attempted to test his theory that atmospheric lightning is an electrical phenomenon similar to the spark produced by an electrical frictional machine (Bruno 406). To

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