Benjamin Franklin and his Discoveries in Electricity
Benjamin Franklin was a U.S politician who has now become quite famous due to his discoveries in the field of electricity. He proved that lightning was in fact, a form of electricity. He did this by flying a kite which had a metal tip that was connected to a Leyden jar by a thin metal wire, during a thunderstorm. As the thunderstorm passed over him, it was attracted to the metal, and the electricity passed down the wire down to the Leyden jar. When he moved his free hand towards metal piece in his reach he received a shock, showing it was electrical. The only reason that he survived was because he was holding onto a dry silk ribbon, many later scientists died trying to recreate this due to them not being so lucky. It was this experiment that lead him to wonder more about electricity and eventually he came to believe that it was made up of two parts, positive and negative. This was not the only ground breaking observation that he made during his lifetime, he was also the scientist who put forward the theory that electricity flowed in the direction of positive to negative and that the electrons flowed from negative to positive.