An Appraisal of the Origins of Franklin's Electrical Theory

Abstract

IT HAS BEEN ASSERTED that Benjamin Franklin owed his achievements in electricity in large part to his isolation, to the fact that he was not contaminated by European prejudices. As early as 1759 Pieter van Musschenbroek suggested that would go on making experiments entirely on your own initiative and thereby pursue a path entirely different from that of the Europeans, for then you shall certainly find many other things which have been hidden to natural philosophers throughout the space of centuries.' But even if one grants the plausibility of such a statement, the questions remain: in what way was he isolated, what prejudices was he freed from, and how did this actually affect his scientific development? In this paper I shall attempt to show that Franklin's acquaintance with European developments was severely limited and that this was probably an important factor in the development of his views. But it is interesting to note that not only was he unprejudiced by certain European theoretical approaches, he was also ignorant of some important experimental evidence; and the two combined their effects in a most fortuitous manner. Benjamin Franklin's entrance on the electrical scene in the spring of 1747 occurred at a critical moment. The Leyden jar, which dramatically increased the amount of electrical energy available at one time by two or three orders of magnitude, had just been discovered, and the friction electric machine was rapidly being developed. Almost from the beginning, therefore, Franklin knew of electricity in the form of violent shocks and easily obtained sparks.2 The importance of this can be understood better by considering the theoretical views of his European predecessors, who had been trained with a glass rod and a piece of silk. It is not surprising that these early electricians were primarily concerned with the phenomena of attraction and repulsion, since the most remarkable and unique characteristic of an electrified body was that it attracted and (to the close observer) then repelled small pieces of paper, threads, and other light bodies. To explain electricity was to explain these phenomena. J. T. Desaguliers, Benjamin Martin, Pieter van