How did Benjamin Franklin discover lightning?

Answer 1

Lightening was discovered long befor Ben came along. He was just the first to understand it's nature.

Answer 2

Lightning was discovered thousand of years ago by a hunter who got struck by lightning.
Benjamin Franklin on the other hand made an experiment with lightning and what flowed thru a wire hung on a kite when lightning struck it,He called it electricity(some kind of energy that flowed inside the wire)
Ben Franklin had discovered that electricity could flow and its power could be used.
Ben Franklin that made the greatest discovery of modern time.

Answer 3

Lightning was discovered very early, Benjamin franklin only proved i is an electric dicharge coming down on earth. He set up a kite with a metal wire in it. When lightning struck it, he proved it was an electric discharge when it lit a bulb connected to the wire of the kite.

Answer 4

He didn't discover lightning.

He is described as proving that lightning was composed of electricity and some take this to mean he discovered electricity. He didn't really do this either, what he did was correctly describe electricity as a *force* and also showed that various sources, lightning, Leyden jars and static for example, were all composed of the same *force*.

Answer 5

To prove that lightening (which had been around since the earliest formations of Earth's atmosphere!!) was connected to magnetism and static (natural) electricity, he tied a metal key to a kite string, which became magnetized after the kite was directly struck and the charge passed down the wet kite string.

Answer 6

Ben Franklin's Lightning Rod What would you think if you saw a man chasing a thunder and lightning storm on horseback? You would probably wonder what on Earth he was trying to do. Well, if you lived in the 1700s and knew Benjamin Franklin, this is just what you might see during a terrible storm. Ben was fascinated by storms; he loved to study them. If he were alive today, we could probably add "storm-chaser" to his long list of titles. It was in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1746 that Franklin first stumbled upon other scientists' electrical experiments. He quickly turned his home into a little laboratory, using machines made out of items he found around the house. During one experiment, Ben accidentally shocked himself. In one of his letters, he described the shock as "...a universal blow throughout my whole body from head to foot, which seemed within as well as without; after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick shaking of my body..." (He also had a feeling of numbness in his arms and the back of his neck that gradually wore off.) Franklin spent the summer of 1747 conducting a series of groundbreaking experiments with electricity. He wrote down all of his results and ideas for future experiments in letters to Peter Collinson, a fellow scientist and friend in London who was interested in publishing his work. By July, Ben used the terms positive and negative (plus and minus) to describe electricity, instead of the previously used words "vitreous" and "resinous." Franklin described the concept of an electrical battery in a letter to Collinson in the spring of 1749, but he wasn't sure how it could be useful. Later the same year, he explained what he believed were similarities between electricity and lightning, such as the color of the light, its crooked direction, crackling noise, and other things. There were other scientists who believed that lightning was electricity, but Franklin was determined to find a method of proving it. By 1750, in addition to wanting to prove that lightning was electricity, Franklin began to think about protecting people, buildings, and other structures from lightning. This grew into his idea for the lightning rod. Franklin described an iron rod about 8 or 10 feet long that was sharpened to a point at the end. He wrote, "the electrical fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike..." Two years later, Franklin decided to try his own lightning experiment. Surprisingly, he never wrote letters about the legendary kite experiment; someone else wrote the only account 15 years after it took place. In June of 1752, Franklin was in Philadelphia, waiting for the steeple on top of Christ Church to be completed for his experiment (the steeple would act as the "lightning rod"). He grew impatient, and decided that a kite would be able to get close to the storm clouds just as well. Ben needed to figure out what he would use to attract an electrical charge; he decided on a metal key, and attached it to the kite. Then he tied the kite string to an insulating silk ribbon for the knuckles of his hand. Even though this was a very dangerous experiment, (you can see what our lightning rod at the top of the page looks like after getting struck), some people believe that Ben wasn't injured because he didn't conduct his test during the worst part of the storm. At the first sign of the key receiving an electrical charge from the air, Franklin knew that lightning was a form of electricity. His 21-year-old son William was the only witness to the event.

Answer 7

SEEING THE SKY HE DISCOVERED lightning

Answer 8

He didnt

Answer 9

He looked up into the sky and THERE IT WAS!
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