1 Catching Lightning in a Bottle

Chapter 1 Catching Lightning a Bottle On a June day in 1752, a storm approached Philadelphia. The sky grew dark. As thunder rattled the windows, people ran inside. But in a house at the corner of Race and Second streets, two people were getting ready to go outside. One was forty-six-year-old Benjamin Franklin. The other was Ben's twenty-one-year-old son William.

Billy picked up a strange-looking kite. His father had made it for just such a stormy day as this. A metal wire stuck out of the top of the kite. A metal house key was tied to the end of

the kite string. Ben grabbed a jar and put it under his coat. The pair dashed through the rain with the kite and the bottle. They stopped when they came to a field. Billy ran across the field three times trying to fly the kite. Finally, the wind did its work. Up soared the kite, higher and higher. Soon it was just a speck in the clouds. Ben took the kite string from his son. Then they went into a nearby shed and waited.

As Ben held the kite string, they both felt

excited—and scared. With his son's help, Ben was trying to answer an old question. Were lightning and electricity the same thing? Ben suspected that they were. He hoped that flying the kite in the storm would prove it. Ben believed that electricity in thunderclouds could cause lightning. The wire on their kite would draw electricity from a cloud, Benjamin hoped. The electricity

would run down the kite string to the key. There it would make a spark that he would feel. But the experiment was dangerous. What if a giant lightning bolt struck the kite? The current might kill Ben—and perhaps Billy as well. As the lightning flashed nearer, Benjamin touched the key. He felt no electric spark. He tried again. Still he felt nothing. Finally, the storm seemed to be overhead. Ben and Billy held their breath as a black cloud swallowed the kite. Benjamin pressed the key. Nothing. Then suddenly he felt a tingle. He had felt shocks like this before in his lab. A spark from the cloud had electrified the kite. The spark had zoomed down the wet string into the metal key, where Ben could feel it. With Billy's help, he had proved that lightning was electricity!