I'm heading into the storm

Benjamin Franklin's mind was great and versatile. He invented bifocals, the newspaper interview genre, the rotating skewer, the labor theory of value, and much more. He was the first to come up with the idea that you could save on lighting by changing the clocks twice a year. That the aggressor state must be punished by the world community. That it is useful to wash every day. Franklin opened America's first university and first library. He came up with a universal writing system for Indian languages ​​and worked to improve the English alphabet. Wrote the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. But his main area of ​​scientific interest was electricity. Franklin was the first to prove that lightning is an electric discharge, and introduced such terms as “battery”, “conductor”, “charging”, electric “plus and minus”. In 1751 he published a pamphlet entitled Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America. This was the first time that the New World was ahead of Europe scientifically - after all, even the creator of the Leyden jar (the first electrical capacitor), Pieter van Muschenbrouck, in an article on electricity written for the famous French Encyclopedia, bashfully admitted that traditional methods of preventing lightning, such as striking Bells or cannon fire may be effective.

Franklin had neither tall buildings nor long iron rods at hand, so the first lightning rod in history was a kite with a tiny metal fragment embedded in it. This is how the first lightning was caught. The scientist refused to patent his invention, wanting it to begin serving people as soon as possible. The first real lightning rod was built in France, in Marly-la-ville, in May 1752 by Francois Dalibert, and only then the Capitol of the North American Colonies in Philadelphia acquired it.

The fame of the overseas inventor spread across Europe like a thundercloud; he was elected to all academies, including the Russian one. But the British government did not like Franklin for his outright separatism. When in 1776 the English War Department asked the Royal Society how best to protect His Majesty's arsenals from lightning strikes, scientists responded that there was no better way than Franklin's lightning rod. But then King George III himself intervened, hinting to the Chairman of the Society, Sir John Pringle, that such an answer sounded unpatriotic. “The laws of nature are not subject to royal whim,” the scientist responded and resigned.

However, the dissatisfaction of the upper crust over Franklin's invention is nothing compared to the explosion of indignation that it caused among the masses. The very idea that a person could so easily and simply tame the main weapon of God’s wrath seemed blasphemous. Rationalists objected: lightning, for that matter, does not run from heaven to earth, but vice versa, but this was too contrary to everyday perception. In different places, people broke lightning rods for pious reasons. A curious incident occurred in 1780 in the French city of Saint-Omer. When the townspeople demanded that the iron mast erected by Mr. Visry de Bois-Valley be demolished, and he refused, the matter came to court. The whole of France watched the hearings in the Artois district court. The twenty-two-year-old lawyer, who defended the lightning rod from the attacks of obscurantists, based his defense on the fact that both the human mind and his ability to conquer the forces of nature are of divine origin. Everything that helps save a life is for the good, the young lawyer argued. He won the case and gained great fame. The lawyer's name was Maximilian Robespierre.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the portrait of the inventor of the lightning rod is the most desirable reproduction in the world