cover image Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax

Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax

Tom Tucker. PublicAffairs, $25 (297pp) ISBN 978-1-891620-70-6

According to Tucker, who writes on the history of invention, Benjamin Franklin's""multifaceted genius"" had a hidden side:""He was also a splendid master of the hoax."" And, notes Tucker, Franklin had reason to perpetrate a hoax on the scientific establishment, then embodied in Britain's Royal Society, where the colonial printer was not taken seriously as a scientist. Franklin's legendary electric kite experiment, Tucker asserts, was a myth propagated by Franklin himself that had repercussions even for the Revolution: the British feared that Franklin had created an electric superweapon that, in the words of Franklin's contemporary, Horace Walpole,""would reduce St. Paul's to a handful of ashes."" Tucker bases his hoax theory on a reading of primary sources. A Franklin revival seems to be underway, and readers may want to read this heterodox study along with more general portraits of the man, such as Edmund Morgan's recent Benjamin Franklin and Walter Isaacson's forthcoming biography, due out in July. Illus.