The storm clouds rolled over Philadelphia like a bruise spreading across the sky, and Benjamin Franklin held the string that connected him to either immortality or instant death.

The Kite That Caught Lightning: Benjamin Franklin's Mortal Gamble

How a Philadelphia polymath risked electrocution to steal fire from the sky

Benjamin Franklin flew a kite into a thunderstorm and survived by sheer luck to prove lightning was electricity.

The storm clouds rolled over Philadelphia like a bruise spreading across the sky. Benjamin Franklin, fifty-six years old, stood in a field on the outskirts of the city with his twenty-one-year-old son William, clutching a silk kite with a pointed wire at its tip. It was June 27, 1752, and the two men were about to conduct one of the most dangerous experiments in scientific history.

Franklin had been obsessed with electricity for years. In his print shop, he had shocked dinner guests, killed turkeys with electrical current, and nearly electrocuted himself so severely that he described the sensation as being struck by 'a universal Blow throughout my whole Body.' But those were parlor tricks compared to what he now attempted: proving that lightning itself was electrical fire.

The kite rose into the darkening atmosphere. A hemp string connected it to a silk ribbon Franklin held—the silk providing crucial insulation between himself and death. At the junction of hemp and silk hung a brass key. Rain began to fall, soaking the hemp, making it conductive. Franklin watched as loose threads on the string began to stand erect, bristling like the hackles of a frightened cat.

He extended his…

💡 The scientist who replicated Franklin's experiment in Russia, Georg Wilhelm Richmann, was killed instantly when ball lightning struck his forehead—making him the first person to die conducting electrical research.