| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America. By Philip Dray. (New York: Random House, 2005. xviii, 279 pp. $25.95, ISBN 1-4000-6032-X.)
Taking up themes developed by the late I. Bernard Cohen, Philip Dray has fashioned in Stealing God's Thunder an engaging story about Benjamin Franklin's involvement in natural philosophy and its effects on Enlightenment societies.	1
Franklin's interests in the natural world ranged from botany to the shape of the Gulf Stream, but his major contributions were to the nascent science of electricity. When Franklin began his experiments around 1747, investigators were grappling with the inexplicable workings of a new artifact, the Leyden jar, which could store electricity and deliver a nasty shock. Dray recounts how Franklin solved the Leyden jar puzzle with ingenious experiments and his one-fluid theory of electricity. Franklin's findings commanded the attention and respect of European natural philosophers, his renown extending even to the French court.	. . .

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