LONG ANSWER Benjamin Franklin looked up at the skies over Philadelphia on a June afternoon in 1752 as a storm approached and thought to himself: perfect kite-flying weather. e revered polymath and soon-to-be Founding Father of the United States had devised an experiment to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning, which amounted to flying a silk kite with a wire on top and a house key tied to it with hemp string in the hope of conducting electricity. is didn’t mean Franklin actually had to be struck by lightning (he would have likely died) – instead, the kite picked up the charge in the atmosphere. When he and his son William noticed the loose threads of the string standing upright, Franklin collected the “electric fire” in a Leyden jar, a special container able to store a charge.
