When Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, he had to be persuasive enough to get people to believe that electricity wasn't just a parlor trick you do with a

When Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, he had to be persuasive enough to get people to believe that electricity wasn't just a parlor trick you do with a glass rod and a silk scarf. It's also how clouds create lightning, and the fundamental forces are the same. You have to remember in the 18th century, lightning killed a lot of people. The fact that lightning rods did, in fact, do what Franklin said they would do was persuasive evidence. I'm not an expert on the history of Ben Franklin, so I don't know if he ever had to explain that lightning doesn't exist to provide divine retribution. But he did have to get each local church to allow a lightning rod on the steeple with a proper connection to grounding, so I'm sure there were some interesting conversations.