Ben Franklin was born in 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. Franklin is most famous for his curiosity and experimentation with electricity and other natural occurrences. In 1743, he observed that storms traveled in an opposite direction than their winds. Traveling on horseback, he would chase these storms and whirlwinds and found that these storms could be plotted. He found that northeast storms actually started in the southeast. He even began printing his weather forecasts in his almanac, making Ben a weatherman!
From observing these storms he became more interested in the effects of lightning. As an inventor Ben was most noted for his famous kite flight experiment. Franklin did not invent electricity, but as a result of his experiments, he did invent the lightning rod which protects buildings, homes and ships from lightning damage from a strike.
Ben suspected that lightning was an
electrical current coming from nature. On a stormy day in June of 1752 he
decided to test his theory using a child's toy kite and a metal key. This
experiment would prove lightning was really a stream of electrified air or
plasma as we call it today. This led him to more experiments and the development
of electrical terms we use today.
Ben Franklin Electrical Terms: