THE VERY MUCH NEGLECTED BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (x-y)

Oh, sure. We have stories about his life as a printer, particularly his influential Poor Richard's Almanac, and his part in the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. (The 1972 film of the Broadway musical, "1776" -- revived in 2000 -- with Howard Da Silva as Franklin, dramatizes this.) And a TV series, with various actors playing his part, tell of Franklin's diplomatic career. The one scientific achievement of Franklin that has been repeated in the media and in popular talk is Franklin's dangerous experiment with a key-on-kite-string during a highly electrical thunderstorm. But Franklin's greatest scientific and technological achievements are ignored!
  1. While still a printer, Franklin learned from farmers come to town that a storm in Philadelphia had occurred in the county some time before. This was the beginning of dynamic meteorology and synoptic weather observation and forecasting (my field for 5 years in the Army Air Corps, during World War II).
  2. Franklin invented the lightning rod, to divert lightning from houses and barns.
  3. Franklin invented bifocal spectacles.
  4. Franklin invented an improved cookstove.
  5. Franklin invented the improved "Pennsylvania fireplace".
  6. By his experiments with static electricity, Franklin established the notion of positive and negative electrical charges.
  7. These experiments contributed to the beginnings of dynamic electricity, although his notion of electric flow was "backwards".
  8. Most importantly, this led to the Principle of Conservation of Electricity, which founded the science of electricity.

(You may read about Franklin's inventions, and those of other neglected American inventors, in a neglected book by the Dutch-American mathematician, Dirk Struik, Yankee Science in the Making, Dover Publications. And you may read about Franklin's "conservation principle" in another neglected book, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, V. I, by Sir Edmund Whittaker, Dover Publications. The book jacket quotes the noted quantum physicist, Freeman Dyson, writing in Scientific American, as saying about Whittaker's work, "... the most scholarly and authoritative history of the period that we shall ever get.")