This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMail.

I think the coolest thing about Ben Franklin isn't that he invented bifocals or

flutha kite or chart of the jet stream or love the ladies or invented the urine catheter

or invented a musical instrument that sounded like this.

Or that he started the first volunteer fire crew or that he's in the chess hall of fame or that

he designed that kick ass join or die poster with a snake cut up into parts representing each

colony where they tried to change the alphabet so words could be spelled like this sounded.

No. The coolest thing about Ben Franklin is that when he went to Europe during the Revolutionary

War to get support from the French he was so famous and his electricity experiments were so

groundbreaking that there were people in Britain who were terrified of him. People who thought that

if he could fly a kite and trap lightning in a jar then he was probably actually in France

sharing with the king's other mortal enemy some sort of secret weapon some sort of electrical

death ray because here was a guy who had harnessed the power of nature. St. Thomas Aquinas had written

that lightning was God's wrath but if you were struck by lightning it was because you had ticked

God off and here was this chubby American guy who A. could bottle lightning and B. had invented

the lightning rod which is like a shield for God's wrath it's like saying God I know I might have

done some bad stuff and you might want to smite me but sorry I just put a metal pole on my roof

and now your little lightning bolts can't get me so suck it but of course Franklin hadn't

invented a lightning bolt gun that he was just waiting to unleash in the red codes and a lot of

the Franklin fear was just the kind of superstition stuff for the 18th century equivalent of tabloids

or a Glenn Beck but the British government didn't take any chances in fact after someone had put a

faulty lightning rod on one of its government buildings and that building was struck by lightning

...