Rough automatic draft, low quality: expect mistakes and awkward wording. It will be replaced by a better translation. Original →
13
Lightning rod, politics and…
hats
A lover of science from Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Benjamin Franklin, later a diplomat and a member of many academies of sciences, including St. Petersburg, in 1749 wrote down in his work journal the idea of an experiment that was supposed to confirm the electrical nature of thunderstorm phenomena, and in 1750, in a letter to the English scientist Peter Collinson, he proposed a lightning rod - a grounded metal rod that rises above the protected object.
In the spring of 1752, the experiment according to Franklin’s plan was successfully carried out in France - sparks were extracted from a metal pole installed in a booth on an insulator during a thunderstorm. Somewhat later (the same year) in Philadelphia, Franklin himself carried out an experiment with an “electric kite” - he extracted sparks from a string wet from the jedge, onto which a kite with a metal tip was launched and which Franklin, being in a shelter, held by a silk ribbon tied to it. The first lightning rods soon appeared, although their implementation proceeded relatively smoothly. Often by us, not by the sharp ones. A situation arose that filled the struggle between the blunt-ended people and the sharp-pointed ones from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (the first edition of the book was published in 1726). The Royal Society of London (academy of sciences) opposed the mini-improvement proposed by Wilson. Nevertheless, King George III in 1777, during the war with the American colonies who were fighting for independence from England, ordered that pointed lightning rods be replaced with blunt ones so as not to use the enemy’s invention.
(Continued on p. 20)