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Updated: May 9, 2025
The lightning-rod man haunts our county as he does the rest of the civilized portion of the country; and although occasionally he secures a victim, sometimes it happens that he gets worsted in his attempts to beguile his fellow-men. Such was his fate upon a recent occasion in our village.
The great scientific societies of Europe, the Royal Academies in Paris and in Madrid, had already elected him as one of their members. The King of France wrote him a letter, thanking him for his useful discoveries in electricity, and for his invention of the lightning-rod. All this would have made some men very proud. But it was not so with Dr. Franklin.
We had traded the State of Illinois in our patent to a gentleman in the lightning-rod business, and that night while walking up street we noticed a large crowd of men standing on the corner talking. We stepped across the street to see what the excitement was.
The great church itself had strained their financial resources, and one party in the board were of the opinion that they should avoid this unnecessary expense, supporting their economic attitude by the argument that, to put on a lightning-rod, would argue a lack of trust in Providence.
After the experiments of Franklin that did so much to advance the study of electrical phenomena, and to suggest practical applications of electricity, physicists in all countries occupied themselves with investigations along lines marked out by the American philosopher. In 1749 Franklin devised the lightning-rod.
In the midst of the proceedings, at some grotesque utterance of the revivalist, the students in the galleries burst into laughter. The preacher, angrily turning his eyes upon the offenders, saw, first of all, Chotard, and called out to him: "You lightning-rod of hell, you flag-staff of damnation, come down from there!"
I only longed for a dark place where I shouldn't be disturbed and could think of the future that was so near at hand. Oh, mother, mother, think of your son! If you knew you were to see him in a short time, you too would be like a lightning-rod attracting every flash of lightning.
Even before Franklin proved conclusively the nature of lightning, his experiments in drawing off the electric charge with points led to some practical suggestions which resulted in the invention of the lightning-rod. In the letter of July, 1750, which he wrote on the subject, he gave careful instructions as to the way in which these rods might be constructed.
My boy regarded these good men as all personally sacred, and while one of them was in the house he had some relief from the fear in which his days seem mostly to have been passed; as if he were for the time being under the protection of a spiritual lightning-rod. Their religion was not much understood by their neighbors of the Old Church, who thought them a kind of Universalists.
AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of fox-fire, and went to work. We cleared everything out of the way, about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log.
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