Credit: The White House Historical Association After the brief article by Franklin, the only detailed contemporary reference appeared in 1767 in History and Present Status of Electricity, the work of the English chemist Joseph Priestley, who allegedly gathered the data from Franklin himself. The truth is that in that article Franklin did not attribute to himself the execution of the experiment, which together with the scant details has led some scholars to argue that neither the kite nor its flight ever existed. In fact, the idea is widespread that Franklin discovered electricity thanks to a lightning bolt that struck his kite, proof that the development of history has created an amalgam of realities, myths and unknowns. But despite the countless activities of Benjamin Franklin (17 January 1706 – 17 April 1790), the kite experiment has endured throughout the world as his best-known feat, considered as the birth of electrical science. That publisher was also a politician, inventor, scientist and one of the founding fathers of the United States. On that day, the owner of the publication put his name to an article, not to editorialise on some political issue, but with another more unusual purpose: to report the success of an experiment that had used everyday implements, such as a kite and a key, to demonstrate “the Sameness of the Electric Matter with that of Lightning.” Every edition of a newspaper hits the streets with the intention of going down in history, and the Pennsylvania Gazette achieved that goal on 19 October 1752.
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