I am currently reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin, Esmond Wright's "Franklin of Philadelphia" 1986 Harvard U. Press, as part of my on-going study of the 18th century Enlightenment as a rich lesson-plan for extropians and the transhumanist movement. Naturally, Wright recounts Franklin's scientific and engineering work with electricity as a pivotal part of Franklin's life story. Every American elementary school student absorbs the image of Franklin as a dabbler with kites and thunderstorms, but may not learn that in fact Franklin was really a person who "found electricity a curiosity and left it a science," in Carl Van Doren's phrase. His 1751 pamphlet, "Experiments and Observations on Electricity at Philadelphia in America", was the most systematic account of electrical phenomena to date and electrified (ahem) the European intellectual establishment with its systematic debunking of the then-current (ahem) "two-fluid" theory of electricity. Among Franklin's contributions to what we would call physics was the experimentally confirmed development of a theory of positive and negative charge and also of a systematic vocabulary of the phenomenon. He can be credited with either coining or regularizing the use of the terms armature, battery, brush, charge, condense, electrify, Leyden bottle, and nonconductive.

Ever the practical man, Franklin was definitely the developer of the lightning rod as an architectural element, and he worked vigorously for the use of lightning rods to protect buildings and shipping. Lightning being a traditional symbol of divine retribution, the increasing use of the lightning rod during the middle years of the 18th century became a, well, lightning rod of contention and a symbolic rallying point for those who we can today rightly see as the precursors of modern humanistic and scientific materialism. As Wright puts it, lightning rods became a "test of enlightenment among men." Traditional religious thinkers condemned the lightning rod as a "presumption against God", an "intervention in God's purpose". Thus, debates about such things are not new to our time, and the ultimate power of humanistic utility a goal not only of our own age.

An interesting historical aside and irony can be found in the lightning rod debate. Apparently quite a few communities still dominated by religious superstition actually outlawed the use of lightning rods. Saint Omer in France was one of these. When M. De Vissery de Boise-Vale sought to protect his home with a lightning rod in the 1780s, his neighbors tore it down, supported by a local ordinance. A celebrated court case followed in which M. De Vissery de Boise-Vale was supported by the more progressive members of the French scientific community. And who were the lawyers in the case? For the prosecution, none other than Jean-Paul Marat; and for the defense, none other than Maximilien Robespierre. Of course, in these two figures we can later see the bloody dangers of radicalism in any cause: In Marat the tyranny of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, and in Robespierre the dangerous knife-edge of an overconfidence borne of an uncritical belief in one's own rationalism.