Monday, June 15, 2009

Go Fly a Kite! ...

... in honor of scribbler, revolutionary, inventor, community organizer, politician and party animal Ben Franklin, who is believed to have flown a kite on this day to test the nature of lightning.

According to historian and biographer Car Van Doren, "The episode of the kite, so firm and fixed in legend, turns out to be dim and mystifying in fact. Franklin himself never wrote the story of the most dramatic of his experiments. All that is known about what he did on that famous day, comes from Joseph Priestley's account, published fifteen years afterwards but read in manuscript by Franklin, who must have given Priestley the precise, familiar details."

But what a great story, what an inspiration ... if you've never volunteered at your local elementary school's science fair, you should ... it's a great place to capture some of the same spirit that prompted Bon Homme Richard to hoist his kite into the stormy Pennsyvania skies.

HERE is a good account of the more elctrifying details of Franklin's life and work, from ushistory.org

And
HERE are instructions on how to make a kite like Franklin's, from pbs.org (the event marked today was NOT his first experiment with a kite)

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