Bolt of Fate
by Tom Tucker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tom TuckerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown)
Published: 2004-03-18
ISBN: 0750936800
Number of pages: 297
Publisher: Sutton Publishing Ltd
Book Reviews of Bolt of Fate
Book Review: Absorbing character study
Summary: 4 Stars
[This review was presented at a meeting of the American Revolution Round Table in New York City, October 2, 2007.]
The title ... might lead you to think we're pondering an academic version of Discovery Channel's Mythbusters, but happily this book is a great deal more, a serious contribution to the history of science and its interplay with society.
One might think, since people have undoubtedly always received shocks when shuffling across carpets, that natural philosophers would have sustained a steady curiosity in the phenomenon through the centuries, and made consistent but plodding progress in examining it. Well, apparently not. Beginning around 1743, and peaking over the next ten years, electricity was suddenly a huge European fad that gripped everyone, from serious scientists to high society to middle-class dilettantes to fair-going country bumpkins. It was suddenly realized that static electricity could be generated at will, by creating friction against a spinning glass jar; and with it, you could not only attract confetti up to your hand, you could make bells ring without touching them, or inflame a glass of brandy. Better yet, you could--in the pure interest of science--ask a willing, electrically-charged young man and a willing but neutral young lady, to touch, and enjoy the mildly prurient result of their shared convulsive shock. In 1746, the invention of the Leyden jar, forerunner of the electrical storage battery, made these parlor tricks into a new mass entertainment, fascinating everyone from village taverns to royal palaces.
One who caught the bug was the successful Philadelphia entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin. In March 1747, Franklin wrote a friend that he was "totally engrossed" in the subject. Tucker, who has written on the history of invention before, goes to some pains to demonstrate that Franklin made genuine scientific contributions to the subject over the next few years. Among other things, in the process of meticulous experimentation on the properties of electricity, it was Franklin who coined positive, negative, plus, minus, and battery as electrical terminology.
Franklin kept current with scientific progress in Europe, and he knew that he'd done original and valuable work. He reported his efforts in the detailed epistolary style of the day to members of the British Royal Society. But not only did the colonial unknown get no thanks and no recognition for his labors, one of the best-known British scientists, the man to whom his letters were entrusted, William Watson, proceeded to plagiarize him.
This is the point at which Tucker's revisionist thesis kicks in. A subsequent missive Franklin wrote in 1750 contained what was known as the "sentry box experiment," in which a long iron rod was to be erected vertically into the sky and bent around into an open-fronted sentry box so that the bottom of the rod, hanging free, would not get wet, and then a person could supposedly conduct electrical experiments with it during a thunderstorm! The author asserts that, though phrased in bland scientific terms, Franklin's "experiment" was intended, and would have been received, as a sarcastic invitation to his nemesis to go commit suicide. Fortunately, no one ever attempted the sentry-box as Franklin originally wrote it. In May of 1752, however, some French experimenters, having read it in translation and taken it seriously, made some common sense revisions. They set up the rod as directed, but left a Leyden jar in the sentry box rather than a person. When lightning struck the rod, the rod charged the Leyden jar just as static electricity would have, demonstrating that lightning was electricity. Twitting the Royal Society, the Frenchmen gave profuse tribute to the unknown American, and Benjamin Franklin became world-famous overnight.
This put him into a serious fix, however. The question now was, what had happened when he did the experiment? Tucker's thesis is that Franklin stepped back, punted, and scored a touchdown: he dreamed up the famous electric kite experiment, intimated--but never precisely declared in so many words--that he'd already done it, and claimed it proved conclusively that the spark you get at the doorknob and lightning are one and the same. Franklin's clincher was an assertion to the Europeans that, by the by, we in Pennsylvania are already using iron rods to protect our buildings ... which was a bold-faced fib, but which catapulted Franklin to even greater fame, and was quickly backed up by instructions casually published in his Almanac for 1753.
Franklin went, according to our author, from being a scientist whose hard work had not been credited to a scientist credited for a proof he hadn't really originated. We might like to believe that Franklin would struggle tenaciously for his due while piously disclaiming the applause for what he wasn't, but ... that wasn't Franklin. (Nor, of course, was it typical of any of his contemporaries, or of too many geniuses before or since.)
Tucker devotes a great deal of primary source research to showing us exactly why the image we all share--of heroic Ben mucking about with a kite and a key in a driving rainstorm--is preposterous and simply never happened. I found it both interesting and convincing. His corollary contention--that the fame Franklin achieved as a result of this never-denied myth enabled him to coax the French into an alliance twenty-five years later, and thus "won" the American Revolution--is considerably more arguable ... but still engaging and provocative speculation.
If you have any special interest in Franklin or in the science of the Age of Reason, I think you'll find Tom Tucker's Bolt of Fate both entertaining and worthwhile.
Summary of Bolt of Fate
Bolt of Fate is a story about invention, fraud, colonialism, electricity, revolution and revenge.Benjamin Franklin is an undisputed hero of the United States, and indeed of Western democracy. The son of a candle-maker, he used his talents and abilities to rise in colonial American society and became a politician, philanthropist, scientist, author, newspaperman, inventor - and a master hoaxer. Bolt of Fate deals with one of the most far-reaching of these hoaxes, one that until now had not even been suspected of being a hoax. It is generally believed that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1752. Electricity from the clouds above travelled down the kite's twine and threw a spark from a key that Franklin had attached to the string. He thereby proved that lightning and electricity were one.What no one has successfully proven until now, and what few have suggested, is that Franklin never flew the kite at all. Told by the Royal Society in London that his communications were not wanted, Franklin then discovered they had stolen his ideas on electricity and passed them off as their own. He vowed to have his revenge and his kite hoax was both his triumph over the silk-coat connoisseurs who then ruled over international science and a crucial tool in the success of the American Revolution and the establishment of the RepublicBiographies & Memoirs Books
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