Lightning rod of Enlightenment

Philip Dray’s new book, “Stealing God’s Thunder,” is an elegantly written reminder that the United States was born of the Age of Enlightenment, a product of men who lived in the heady years when superstition was put to rout by the light of reason and scientific inquiry. Among the most renowned of Enlightenment thinkers was Benjamin Franklin, whose invention of the lightning rod forms the core of this illuminating study.

This scientific advance would, Dray writes, “be endowed with mythical importance -- a seminal occurrence in the history of science and a radiant symbol of the Enlightenment.” He borrows a quote from historian Andrew Dickson White: “At the moment when [Franklin] drew the electric spark from the cloud, the whole tremendous fabric of theological meteorology reared by the fathers, the popes, the medieval doctors, and the long line of great theologians, Catholic and Protestant, collapsed: the Prince of the Power of the Air [Satan] tumbled from his seat; the great doctrine which had so long afflicted the earth was prostrated forever.”

It was almost that quick and decisive, writes Dray, author of the well-regarded “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.”

Curiosity about lightning and speculation about its nature had been on the rise in those days of burgeoning scientific inquiry, following the pattern set by Isaac Newton. But it took Franklin’s famous experiment with a kite, a cloud and a key on the bank of the Delaware River in Philadelphia to bring down to earth, as it were, the fearsome celestial display. To avert its destructive force, he invented the lightning rod to draw to earth the powerful electrical charges.

The pious, citing 2,000 years of tradition, thought it impious to steal the very displays they believed God used to show his displeasure with mankind. Franklin, ever practical, merely observed that lightning rods were no different than roofs to keep off rain.

The Puritan culture of New England already was breaking down when Franklin was born into it in 1706. Dray shrewdly notes that its dissolution was pushed by one of its defenders, the clergyman Cotton Mather, when he advocated vaccination to shield man from another of God’s scourges: smallpox.

When Franklin went to France to lobby for support for the colonies, and later the young nation, he was lionized as the natural man, brilliant in his simplicity, the embodiment of a person newly freed by the humanistic Enlightenment ideals. In his imperfect French, he took to the role with an enthusiasm that dismayed his fellow delegate John Adams, who really was a New England Puritan of the type Nathaniel Hawthorne would later render so vividly in his fiction.

Throughout his French sojourns, Franklin took note of scientific and technological discoveries. He invented the bifocal spectacle. He was captivated by the newly invented hot-air balloons. On his last sea voyage home, he filled his journal with observations of the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream.

Franklin’s legacy may have been captured best, Dray says, in the Latin phrase by Frenchman Jacques Turgot: “Erepuit caelo fulmen sceptrum que tyrannis” -- “He snatched the lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

That would have been a good motto for the new republic, a commonwealth freshly built upon the virtues of reason and scientific inquiry and with the courage to face the uncharted future without blinking.

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Anthony Day, former editor of The Times editorial pages, is a regular contributor to Book Review.