No lesser man than the great philosopher Immanual Kant called Benjamin Franklin the “modern Prometheus,” after the Greek god who brought man fire (after making man out of clay.) Franklin did contribute a lot to the advancement of electrical science – his was the first hypothesis of positive and negative charges and the suggestion the lightning is essentially electrical in nature. His was also the design for an early vehicle for lightning experimentation, a kite. All this was laid out in a series of letters he wrote to Peter Collinson, President of the Royal Society of England.

On this day, March 28, 1747 Franklin composed the first of his five famous letters to Collinson. That one served as a general introduction — Franklin thanked Collison for his “kind present of an electric tube, with directions for using it,” and told him the specifics of his discovery would follow.

“For my own part,” Franklin wrote, “I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done.” Yet somehow Franklin still found the time to create a number of other inventions, including bifocals and the Franklin stove, and to publish his observations of the Aurora Borealis. There was no end to Franklin’s intellectual appetite or his energy.