Ben Franklin DID fly a Kite in a Storm But Wasn't the First to Prove Lightning is Electric
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- Опубликовано: 3 окт 2024
- The true story of Franklin's kite experiment: He really did fly a kite, but he wasn't hit by lightning and he didn't discover electricity! In fact, he wasn't even the first person to prove that lightning is electric!
Franklin was beat by a month by a Frenchman who was doing the experiment to humiliate a rival. How did an experiment humiliate a rival? And how did it end up making Franklin famous? Well, watch the video and find out!
Music in the background and the beginning and the end are by the fabulous Kim Nalley and...
"Marty Gots a Plan" by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommon...)
Source: incompetech.com...
Artist: incompetech.com/ 
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You are doing a great job, these things are never taught in schools in this way.
Great series, I'm watching the videos one after the other and simply can't stop! I'm a physicist and knew some of these stories, but your series puts everything in a broader context.
Lots of fun!
It's kinda funny, I'm a plumber and can't stop watching this series either.
Great story! I never knew the whole story of Franklin and the kite, a bit of a revelation. Thanks.
Glad you liked it
Thank you for sharing about Ben Franklin, and for sharing your love for these wonderful and important stories.
You have the best mix of history and physics / chemistry / engineering.
Fascinating story. Makes me think of Miracle Max. Doesn't care a lick about Wesley, but jumps at the chance to humiliate Humperdinck. So cool that Ben Franklin was kinda like an 18th century meme in Paris.
I am now feeling bad that I didn’t reference “The Princess Bride” in this video. Wasted opportunity to mention one of my favorite movies and books.
I am a project manager for a lightning protection company in Tampa Florida. For me the history behind this is incredible. Even today on all the skyscrapers Around the world we still use Some of the same methods they came up with in the late 1700 's. These men truly were remarkable people.
Can you give us a simple rundown of how lightning protection is done. My understanding is that you strap all corners of a building and goto earth and then have a z shape of copper buried in the earth. Not sure if you have 4x z shapes or just 1. Keen to have a rundown of the basics. Thanks
Thank you for your videos and knowledge
Your personality is beautiful ❤️
How do you know all these stories? Glad you do!
Sheila Sugar I usually start at Wikipedia and then see where they get the information. I also found a list of personal letters to and from Franklin in the web which was cool.
Kites are used, primarily by Ham Radio people, to get antennas aloft. In this setup, on a clear and not stormy day, it's important to have "Bleeder Resistors" which bleed the charge to a ground. Without this voltages can build up, harm equipment or even kill someone. Charging a leyden jar would have been quite easy with a kite on a wire. Lightning arresting systems have a ground rod which goes deep for two reasons. The first is better conductivity but more important, lightning typically travels along the surface of the ground during a strike. These radial currents can be lethal some distance from the strike. A deep rod, leads the current below and reduces radial currents. (related to the skin effect).
The Mythbusters proved VERY conclusively that if the kite had been hit with lightning, Franklin would have died.
Thanks for the clarification! I always wondered exactly what and why happened.
I believe it, lightning is no joke
I really love the level of detail that you give to these historical accounts, you're also brilliant at debunking many of the common misconceptions that surround the history of electrical science! I'm an electrician in my day job and it is amazing to know all about the incredible discoveries and leaps of imagination that led to our current day world of electrical wonders!
In Britain, this is still a Sentry Box. A Guard House is a building at the entrance to a Regimental Barracks with an Officer and several men who may search and detain anyone entering or leaving the Barracks.
I had also heard that Franklin's 1752 kite experiment used a Leyden Jar as part of the testing apparatus. It was attached to the key by wires, enabling Franklin to store static electricity.
interesting electricry has been around way long than we know. all old building harvested atmospheric electric via aether and mercury
Awesome story.
Franklin built and installed a lightning detector in his house that would ring a bell when even far distant strikes occurred. Genius.
His wife hated it, as you might expect.
I just re-watched, in order to fact-check the Khan Academy's Ben Franklin avatar.
"As the kite soared into the stormy sky, the key drew an electrical charge from the atmosphere. When I touched the key, I received a mild electric shock, proving that lightning was indeed a form of electricity. This experiment was a significant step towards understanding electricity and its relationship with lightning."
Hmmm... close.
Oh yeah, everybody go get The Lightning Tamers! Great book!!
You are such a great person for doing this!!!!!!!!!
Ben Franklin was, um, quite the character.
I seriously doubt that Franklin ever really fly a kite in a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are known for turbulence and downbursts, wind conditions that are not very conducive to flying kites. When I was a kid we lived in a part of the south that seldom had enough wind to fly a kite except before storms. Every time we tried to get a kite up in the air before storm it would dance and bob and after a few seconds dive for the ground no matter how hard we tried. As an adult I've noticed BBQ smoke does the same thing when cooking before a storm. I think the whole kite thing is fiction.
I cry whenever I think about Richmann (7:57). (I'm sobbing right now. I don't know why these things affect me so strongly.) Like some early experimenters with ionizing radiation, he touched the dragon and was killed.
Like the story about lighting that starts with “Billions of years ago, in a galaxy far far away a cosmic ray of unknown origins started its journey to earth”
Hi Kathy, great video. I'm a bit confused about the positive negative thing. If Franklin thought glass was negatively charged by rubbing because it lost electrical fire, which he thought of as positive, this firstly suggests he had some evidence for thinking the glass was losing something in being rubbed. Or was this just a 1 in 2 chance of guessing right? Even so, if it turns out that he did guess right, i.e. glass loses something, we now know that this is electrons, but who decided that electrons should be negative, and how did that come about?
I think it was more like broom sweep up dirt so the broom must be sweeping up the electrical charge and so he decided that the glass was losing electric charge in the room was gaining electric charge was he didn’t noted as positive. However it turns out in this example the glass is gaining electrons and the broom is losing electrons. Since Franklin said that the broom got positive charge it ended up that the electrons were negative and by the time we figured out that electrons were the ones that were moving it was too late to call them positive.
You could say the Key to Ben Franklin’s success was when he divided to Go Fly A Kite!
Up to the highest heights
*decided
Nice...
One small objection- you know that Franklin’s experiments were celebrated first in England. His “book” was actually a collected series of letters to Peter Collinson in 1747 and widely read among scientists in England.
Awesome.
pankaj kumarji thanks, this is one of my favorite stories
why a kink in the guard’s house’ rod?
Kathy, have you noticed that in the illustration the kite should be turned in the opposite direction? The artist was not a physisist.
Nor a kite flyer!
Electricity was known long before Old Ben. In fact just 100 years after Columbus discovered the Caribbean, Queen Elizabeth was enjoying scientific demonstrations of static electricity.
awesome
Simon Strandgaard glad you liked it (it is pretty crazy with the French rivalry stuff)
Why was the kink in the pole important for the sentry box experiment?
Mac Mac, it's not clear from the drawing where the spark was produced however the kink could be essentially a capacitor plate with respect to the ground storing charge. Note right angles tend to be places where lightning branches off of grounding wires during a strike ifaik due to charge concentration. Kinda why lightning rods have a point and van de graff generators have a dome at their tops. Even on circuit boards sharp 90deg angled traces can cause issues.
Hello Madam....!
How are you...?
I have not understood properly why there was metal key in kite string....?
The metal in the kite went on a wire from the end of the kite to the key. The rest of the kite was silk string that was kept dry. Therefore, the electrons could flow into the key (metal is conductive) but not through the string and into the ground.
@@Kathy_Loves_Physics
Madam, Thanks for Your Reply.
And Sorry for replying you Late "Thanks".
My Mind got Caught in 5000 years old 'Mahabharat' Stories.
I wondered what made Julius Robert Oppenheimer think that he is not the 1st one to create that Weapon.
Did the frenchman discovery electricity
No, I would say that either the Greek philosopher Thales "discovered" electricity as he was the first to write about static electricity or the English doctor who decided that electricity was different than magnetism. See my video #1.
"Abbe" isn't a kind of nickname and it doesn't mean friar. The French word abbé designs a secular cleric, a priest who doesn't belong to a religious order. That's why he is called Abbé and isn't called like the Frère Jacques of the song; frère means brother, and that is the origin of the word friar, from the Latin frater.
Catholic religious men come in two tastes: priests and friars. Priests are "secular," they live more or less like regular people, manage the parishes, obey to the local bishop, who obeys to the Pope. They got the sacrament of ordainment.
Friars live in a community with follows a determinate set of rules. There are many kinds, from congregations of teachers, nurses, missionaries, and the contemplative ones who live in monasteries dedicated to pray; those are usually called monks. They do what their rule of life orders them to do, they obey their superior, who obeys to the superior of the whole group, who obeys to the Pope. They can be priests too and get the sacrament of the ordainment, but they can be just regular guys and formally promise to follow that way of life: those are the religious vows.
Two different ways of life, two different ladders of hierarchy.
So, was Bufon a bufoon?
Maybe.
@7:20 What I don't understand is: WHY DON'T WE GENERATE ELECTRICITY IN THIS MANNER? The static electric charge drawn from the sky, could be used to charge a capacitor on a large scale. The discharge from this large scale capacitor could then be converted to AC and power a home, or even a city! You could use a specialized reservoir, with many pools to act the same as Franklins "Battery" of Lyden jars! I am sure there are reasons why not... I just have never heard them!!! IMHO
Ultra high voltage DC electricity is very hard to manage and control. It tends to make, ahem, very large arc flashes.
Look up the ION POWER GROUP, that uses the work of Oleg Jefiminko to convert static into usable DC and AC power by using graphing wires to collect the static charges in the air.
Jesus Christ Almighty God bless you all 😊
love your videos
can not stand your theme music!
I mute it every time