Bolt of Fate; Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax

New York, N.Y.: PublicAffairs, 2003. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xx, 297, [3] pages. Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Author's Note. Prologue. Epilogue. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tucker is an award-winning author who writes often about the history of invention. Benjamin Franklin's 1752 electric kite experiment, using lightning to throw a spark from a key, made him a celebrity, winning sympathy in France for the fight against the British. This text shows Franklin to be a great hoaxer and the fabled experiment his greatest hoax. Nearly every schoolchild in America knows that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1752. What many of us do not realize is that Franklin used this breakthrough in the intensely competitive field of electrical science to embarrass his French and English rivals. Electrical science was the hot science of his day. Franklin's kite experiment was an international event, and the Franklin that it presented to the world--a homespun, rural philosopher-scientist performing an immensely important and dangerous experiment with a child's toy--became the Franklin of myth. In fact, this very deliberate presentation on Franklin's part so charmed the French that he became an irresistible celebrity when he traveled there during the American Revolution. It was the crowds and the journalists, and the ladies, who cajoled the French powers into joining the fight against the British. What no one has successfully proven until now is that Franklin never flew the kite at all. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiastic hoaxer. With the electric kite, he managed the greatest hoax of them all. As Tucker shows, it was this trick that may have won the American Revolution. Derived from a Publishers Weekly review: According to Tucker, Benjamin Franklin's "multifaceted genius" had a hidden side:"He was also a splendid master of the hoax." And, notes Tucker, Franklin had reason to perpetrate a hoax on the scientific establishment, then embodied in Britain's Royal Society, where the colonial printer was not taken seriously as a scientist. Franklin's legendary electric kite experiment, Tucker asserts, was a myth propagated by Franklin himself that had repercussions even for the Revolution: the British feared that Franklin had created an electric superweapon that, in the words of Franklin's contemporary, Horace Walpole,"would reduce St. Paul's to a handful of ashes." Tucker bases his hoax theory on a reading of primary sources.