Catching the Lightning

Eric Nelson as Young Ben in Franklin’s Fight for Freedom at Birmingham Children’s Theatre in 1975

Blog 56

“Abby: You mean the lightning? Are you really going to catch the lightning?

Ben: Someday... if I keep trying, Abby. Someday I’ll send this kite up and up and up... and I’ll capture it. Then we can start to learn the secrets of electricity!”

Characters in Faye Parker’s Young Ben: Franklin’s Fight for Freedom

Today, in 1752, Ben Franklin carried out his kite experiment during a thunderstorm in which he collected a charge in a Leyden jar to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning. In 1975 as a prelude to the huge celebrations of the American Bicentennial commemorating the Revolution and the colonists’ break with Great Britain, Birmingham Children’s Theatre produced this young people’s play about Ben Franklin.

The story of Franklin’s involvement in America’s fight for freedom certainly started when he was a young boy, and that thrilled me when I was in the fifth grade and began to read juvenile biographies of interesting people. This patriot was born on January 17, 1706, on Milk Street in Boston Massachusetts. One of ten children of Josiah Franklin and his second wife Abiah Folger, Ben’s father wanted him to be trained as a clergyman, but the family could only afford to send him to school for a couple of years.

I yearned to be like Ben who was sent off at age 12 to be an apprentice to his older brother James at a printing shop. That was just a few years older than I was at the time! He loved to read, as I did, and this appreciation for learning was enhanced by his printing trade. When Ben was only 15, James started printing his own newspaper, the first really independent publication for the colonies, the New-England Courant.

Franklin was a printer, a statesman, a patriot, an author, a humorist, a diplomat, a musician, a political cartoonist, a philosopher. And the number and variety of his inventions were phenomenal: bifocals, a stove, lightning rod, a long-arm reaching device, the glass armonica, the odometer, a catheter, swim fins. He was full of life and love and jests, and died at a good age of 84.

Franklin was a favorite character of mine in the musical 1776! and when I worked at the American Village historic learning center. Franklin conducted his kite-flying experiment when he was an adult, but he and Abby speak of as children in the play. “Someday I’ll send this kite up and up and up... and I’ll capture it.” Several times at the Village, we reenacted the kite flying, thankfully without the lightning.

But one Fourth of July at the Village, we experienced a huge summer storm, complete with torrential rain, rolling thunder, and slashes of lightning. We herded all of our thousands of visitors into the buildings to safely wait out the tempest.

Thirty minutes after the last lightning strike, we began to let a few people wander about, but a stray bolt of lightning flashed down from a cloud and struck the sound system and a patron. He was eventually fine, but I was about 20 feet away from him, facing away, when the lightning made contact with the earth. I felt as if I actually caught the lightning. The hair on the back of my head stood out, my spine felt seared in a streak, and I ambled about for a half hour — and later remembered nothing of the stroll.

Since then, I have been very respectful of lightning. Like Franklin, I have started “to learn the secrets of electricity” and one of them is that it can be very dangerous!