The Edison medalist

TWO HUNDRED years ago Benjamin Franklin, by vocation a printer and journalist, and by avocation, a politician, diplomat, philosopher, and scientist, was spending his “avocation time” experimenting with static electricity and the newly invented Leyden jar. He presently came to the conclusion that the discharges from a Leyden jar were similar in general character to those occuring during a thunderstorm. But how to prove this conclusion experimentally? With a little shed in a small field near Philadelphia as a laboratory and with his precious Leyden jar and a kite as experimental equipment, and a thunderstorm as a source of electricity, Franklin in 1752 proved his theory. He thereby demonstrated conclusively that a lightning discharge is neither a display of the power or wrath of deities nor of the arrogance of devils, but rather is a large-scale demonstration of the silk cloth and glass tube experiment. Franklin´s experimental work was of necessity of a qualitative nature. However, he blazed a trail that has been assiduously followed and greatly widened and extended by the man who has been awarded the Edison Medal for 1949, the highest honor bestowed by the Institute for meritorious achievements in “electrical science, electrical engineering, or the electrical arts.”