Download PDF by Michael Brian Schiffer: Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical

By Michael Brian Schiffer

so much people know—at least we've got heard—that Benjamin Franklin carried out a few type of electric scan with a kite. What few folks realize—and what this ebook makes powerfully clear—is that Franklin performed an important position in laying the principles of recent electric technology and expertise. This fast moving ebook, wealthy with ancient info and anecdotes, brings to existence Franklin, the big overseas community of scientists and inventors during which he performed a key position, and their awesome innovations. We study what those early electric devices—from lighting fixtures and automobiles to musical and scientific instruments—looked like, how they labored, and what their utilitarian and symbolic meanings have been if you invented and used them. opposed to the attention-grabbing landscape of existence within the eighteenth century, Michael Brian Schiffer tells the tale of the very beginnings of our sleek electric international.

The earliest electric applied sciences have been conceived within the laboratory equipment of physicists; due to their awesome and various results, notwithstanding, those applied sciences speedily made their method into many different groups and actions. Schiffer conducts us from neighborhood to group, displaying how those applied sciences labored as they have been positioned to exploit in public lectures, innovative experiments in chemistry and biology, and clinical treatment. This tale brings to mild the arcane and long-forgotten innovations that made means for lots of sleek technologies—including lightning rods (Franklin's invention), cardiac stimulation, xerography, and the interior combustion engine—and richly conveys the complicated relationships between technology, know-how, and culture.

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Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment by Michael Brian Schiffer


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