Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin

Blog overview

Since ancient times, thunder and lightning were seen as a wrathful Deity’s instruments of punishment. But when Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in 1752, the way we view God and nature changed forever. Our scientific, religious, and artistic conceptions were transformed. With thunderstorms no longer a spectacle to be feared, Western poets, painters, and composers started to treat it as a subject in its own right. Never before was the beauty of lightning so extensively represented as during the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era. Interestingly, Franklin visited the Dutch Republic twice, promoting his new device. Did he succeed?

Thunderstorms in Art and Literature

By Jan Wim Buisman

November 7, 2024

Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod had far-reaching consequences, not only in religious but also in aesthetic terms. Men’s newly gained mastery of celestial fire made it possible to revel and enjoy the incalculable and majestic forces of nature. As lightning was no longer seen as a sign of divine wrath, artists started to …...

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Demons and Thunder

By Jan Wim Buisman

October 31, 2024

Enlightened Protestants and Catholics both wanted to liberate simple folk from ignorance, fear, and superstition by good instruction. In enlightened eyes, fear of thunderstorms was not only evidence of a wrong understanding of God, but also the chief cause of the origin and spread of all kinds of superstitious ideas and practices. A particular source …...

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Religious Reactions to Thunderstorms

By Jan Wim Buisman

October 24, 2024

That God addresses people directly in thunder and lightning was a generally accepted idea in the religious mentality of the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century West. That notion of the immediate and clearly audible presence of the Almighty could have extreme consequences. In certain circles it came to be regarded as disrespectful to eat, work, or …...

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A New Invention: Franklin and the Netherlands

By Jan Wim Buisman

October 17, 2024

Benjamin Franklin visited the Dutch Republic on two occasions. When he and his son William travelled in the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic in August and September 1761, they made certain to visit the great scholar Petrus van Musschenbroek in Leiden. This professor, whose consequential invention of the Leyden jar in 1746 was mentioned …...

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Lightning, Volcanism, and Earthquakes

By Jan Wim Buisman

October 10, 2024

This year, Iceland once again proved itself to be a volcanic island: on February 8, 2024 several volcanoes started to produce huge eruptions. Perhaps the most famous outburst was that of June 8, 1783, when the Laki volcanic fissure erupted. It was the start of an eight-month-long series of violent explosions which threw up such …...

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