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Franklin and the lightning
In the eighteenth century electricity was a parlour phenomenon — sparks from glass machines, entertaining and useless. Franklin's proposal that lightning was the same thing was first tested in France in May 1752, not by him. The lightning rod is probably the first application of a scientific finding that immediately saved lives at scale, and it gave American science an international standing it had not had. Franklin never patented it, on the grounds that inventions should be shared freely.
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