Kite experiment

The kite experiment was a scientific experiment which was proposed and may have been conducted by Benjamin Franklin with the assistance of his son William Franklin. The experiment's purpose was to uncover the unknown facts about the nature of lightning and electricity.

In 1750, the electrical nature of lightning was the subject of public discussion in France, with a dissertation of Denis Barbaret receiving a prize in Bordeaux; Barbaret proposed a cause in line with the triboelectric effect. The physicist Jacques de Romas also wrote a memoir that year with similar ideas. Franklin had listed a dozen analogies between lightning and electricity in his notebooks at the end of 1749. Speculations of Jean-Antoine Nollet had led the issue being posed as a prize question at Bordeaux in 1749. De Romas later defended his own electrical kite proposal as independent of Franklin's.

In 1752, Franklin proposed an experiment with conductive rods to attract lightning to a Leyden jar, an early form of capacitor. Such an experiment was carried out in May 1752 at Marly-la-Ville in northern France by Thomas-François Dalibard. An attempt to replicate the experiment killed Georg Wilhelm Richmann in Saint Petersburg in August 1753; he was thought to be the victim of ball lightning. Franklin himself is said to have conducted the experiment in June 1752, supposedly on the top of the spire on Christ Church in Philadelphia.

Franklin's kite experiment was performed in Philadelphia in June 1752, according to the account by Priestly. Franklin described the experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette in October 19, 1752, without mentioning that he himself had performed it. This account was read to the Royal Society on December 21 and printed as such in the Philosophical Transactions. A more complete account of Franklin's experiment was given by Joseph Priestley in 1767, who presumably learned the details directly from Franklin, who was in London at the time Priestley wrote the book.

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