A great symbolic moment for the Enlightenment, and for its project of freeing humanity from needless terrors, occurred in 1752 in Philadelphia. During a thunderstorm, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite with a pointed wire at the end and succeeded in drawing electric sparks from a cloud. He thus proved that lightning was an electrical phenomenon and made possible the invention of the lightning-rod, which, mounted on a high building, diverted the lightning and drew it harmlessly to the ground by means of a wire. Humanity no longer needed to fear fire from heaven. In 1690 the conservative-minded diplomat Sir William Temple could still call thunder and lightning ‘that great Artillery of God Almighty’. Now, instead of signs of divine anger, they were natural phenomena that could be mastered. When another Hamburg church spire was struck by lightning in 1767, a local scientist, J. A. H. Reimarus, who had studied in London and Edinburgh, explained its natural causes in a paper read to the Hamburg Patriotic Society, and advocated lightning-rods as protection. Kant, whose early publications were on natural science, called Franklin ‘the Prometheus of modern times’, recalling the mythical giant who defied the Greek gods by stealing fire from heaven and giving it to the human race.
Gradually a change of outlook was occurring. Extraordinary events need not be signs from God; they might just be natural phenomena, which could be understood and brought under some measure of human control.
David Udell comments on David Udell’s Shortform