Kite experiment
Speculations of Jean-Antoine Nollet had led to the issue of the electrical nature of lightning being posed as a prize question at Bordeaux in 1749.[1] The physicist Jacques de Romas also wrote a mémoire with similar ideas that year and later defended them as independent of Franklin's.[2] In 1752, Franklin proposed an experiment with conductive rods to attract lightning to a leyden jar, an early form of capacitor.[3] An attempt to replicate the experiment killed Georg Wilhelm Richmann in Saint Petersburg in August 1753; he was thought to be the victim of ball lightning.[10][11][12] However, Franklin noticed that loose threads of the kite string were repelling one another and deduced that the Leyden jar was being charged.
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