[Lee Stewart]

Ben Franklin didn't discover electricity

Ben Franklin's famed experiment involving a key tied to a kite wasn't quite the revolutionary scientific venture you might think it was. He certainly didn't "discover" electricity; scientists already were well aware of its existence in 1752, the year of Franklin's experiment. What Franklin sought to discover was whether lightning was a form of electricity, and he was the first to propose that hypothesis. But, complicating matters, it may not even have been Franklin himself who sent the famous kite into the air. In 1752, Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette about the success of the experiment and described how it worked—but he never actually said that he performed it himself. It wasn't until 15 years later that scientist Joseph Priestly wrote an account attributing the experiment to Franklin.