Overhead flat lay of lashed kite spars, a ball of twine, an iron key and a Leyden jar on weathered barn boards

The Kite Might Never Have Flown

September 4, 2026

On 19 October 1752 the Pennsylvania Gazette printed instructions for drawing lightning out of a storm cloud with a kite, a key and a length of silk ribbon. It tells the reader what to do. The person who holds the string must stand within a door, and so on. It is addressed to anyone who wants to try.

What it never says, in any form, is that Benjamin Franklin had done it.

The proof was already in

Franklin had proposed the real experiment two years earlier, in a 1750 paper describing an iron rod on a high platform to draw electric fire from a thundercloud. It was translated and published in Paris in February 1752.

On 10 May 1752, at Marly-la-Ville, Thomas-François Dalibard put up a forty-foot iron rod insulated on wine bottles and drew sparks from a passing storm. He reported it to the Académie des Sciences three days later. De Lor repeated it on 18 May. Franklin's proposal had been proven in France, in public, before the kite is supposed to have flown at all.

Read the Gazette piece knowing that and it changes shape. It opens by citing the frequent mention in the European papers of the success of the Philadelphia experiment. Franklin is not announcing a discovery. He is offering a cheaper way to repeat one already confirmed on another continent.

What is actually disputed

The murky part is the kite itself. No contemporaneous account from Franklin says he flew it. The detailed version everyone knows came from Joseph Priestley fifteen years later, and Priestley was not there. Carl Van Doren, whose 1939 Franklin biography won the Pulitzer, called the episode firm and fixed in legend, dim and mystifying in fact. The date is a guess.

Tom Tucker argued in 2003 that the whole thing was a hoax, and that is worth knowing about and worth not overstating. Reviewers in the history of science rejected the case, and the specialists who have spent careers in the papers hold that Franklin flew the kite. The honest summary is not that it was faked. It is that the most reproduced scene in American science rests on one second-hand account written fifteen years late.

The man it killed

On 6 August 1753, Georg Wilhelm Richmann was running a version of the experiment in St Petersburg when a ball of lightning left his apparatus and struck him in the head. He died where he stood. The Royal Society published the account.

Franklin reprinted it in the Pennsylvania Gazette in March 1754, not as a warning against the work but as an engineering argument. Richmann's rod was insulated, deliberately cut off from the ground, because he was measuring the charge rather than disposing of it. Installed to protect the building instead, with a conductor running into the earth, the lightning would have followed the wire and nobody would have been hurt.

That is the entire principle of the lightning rod, argued from a colleague's death four months after it happened.

Robbing the almighty of his thunder

The objection was never that it would fail. It was that it would work.

After the Cape Ann earthquake in 1755, the Boston minister Thomas Prince argued in print that the rods had caused it. Iron points pull electrical substance out of the air and into the ground, Boston had more of them than anywhere in New England, and Boston had been shaken hardest. John Adams, annotating a lecture on the earthquake soon after, recorded that persons of the highest rank called the iron points an impious attempt to rob the almighty of his thunder, to wrest the bolt of vengeance out of his hand.

Franklin never answered in writing. The rebuttal came from John Winthrop at Harvard, who pointed out that discouraging the rods would get people killed.

Rods went up on the Academy of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania State House within months, and fragments of the original conductors sit inside the tower at what is now Independence Hall. Thirty years on Franklin reckoned there were four hundred in the city, and he had patented none of it, on the principle that since we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others we should be glad to serve others freely with our own.

Why he ends up on a shirt

The Benjamin Franklin tee has him in spectacles and a colonial coat, kite string in one hand and something rolled and lit in the other. A joke about the phrase, and a fair portrait of a man whose best ideas arrived from whichever job he was not supposed to be doing.