Good, than mine? Compel them, then, by Law, either to Marriage, or to pay double the Fine of Fornication every Year. What must poor young Women do, whom Custom have forbid to solicit the Men, and who cannot force themselves upon Husbands, when the Laws take no Care to provide them any; and yet severely punish them if they do their Duty without them; the Duty of the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, Encrease and Multiply. A Duty, from the steady Performance of which, nothing has been able to deter me; but for its Sake, I have hazarded the Loss of the Publick Esteem, and have frequently endured Publick Disgrace and Punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble Opinion, instead of a Whipping, to have a Statue erected to my Memory.

For all his practical inventions, Franklin was no mere utilitarian. His electrical experiments, begun around 1734, engrossed his time, issued in his Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), and earned him the Copley medal of the Royal Society. It was Franklin who used for the first time, in an electrical sense, such terms as “plus,” “minus,” “positive,” “negative,” and “battery.” The exact circumstances of his famous kite experiment are unclear; he may not have flown the kite himself. But he became the first person to propose that the identity of lightning and electricity could be proved experimentally, something the English scientist Joseph Priestley called the greatest scientific discovery since the time of Newton. That Franklin came to be viewed internationally as a sort of demigod who had invaded the supernatural realm and by harnessing lightning had exercised a huge liberating control over nature, was in one sense ironic. For his ingenious use of a kite fashioned from two light strips of wood and a handkerchief suggests that his love of economy applied even in his theoretical investigations. He practiced science as well as wrote in the plain style, and often achieved elegant solutions by homely means.


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