Word: lightninged
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1 million Number of gallons of Jim Beam bourbon that burned when a Kentucky warehouse was struck by lightning
After the crappiest selection in decades at the Cannes Film Festival, I found a terrific season of London shows. One was actually about London: the musical "Our House." I hadn't hoped for much. Since it's a trunk show of songs from the 80s ska group Madness, and since...
Franklin wasn't the first to propose a kinship between harmless sparks and a lightning bolt. But he was the first to suggest an experiment to prove it. The Royal Society of London published his proposal, yet it was the French who actually put it to the test. The experiment...
When the secret finally got out, it had sweeping repercussions. As Harvard historian of science I. Bernard Cohen (who died June 20) has pointed out, Franklin's experiment showed that electricity was not just an amusing "bizarrery" but a force of nature, like gravity. It also illustrated an Enlightenment ideal...
What Franklin modestly described as his "electrical amusements" made him the world's most famous scientist. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him the "new Prometheus." Most important, Franklin's fame helped open French hearts--and purse strings--when years later he came calling at Louis XVI's court on...