Two hundred years of American Physics

Pure SCIENCE DID NOT FLOURISH in America during the first centuries of European colonization, yet one of America’s greatest physicists—Benjamin Franklin, who also was the first to receive world attention—made his significant contributions to science around 1750 (figure 1: detail from a painting by Robert Feke). Among his achievements were a revolutionary theory of positive and negative electricity and a demonstration that thunderclouds could induce electricity in grounded rods. First tried in France, the lightning experiment (figure 2) attracted universal acclaim, which helped Franklin greatly in his later diplomatic efforts.

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