That time Benjamin Franklin tried (and failed) to electrocute a turkey

"I have lately made an Experiment in Electricity that I desire never to repeat."

Read the whole story

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

The Founding Father once infamously electrocuted himself while trying to kill a turkey with electricity.

Nope. He shocked himself. Electrocution is a portmanteau of "electricity" and "execution," meaning if someone electrocutes themselves they die as a result.

The etymology of a word does not define it - the English language is not 'C'! Dictionary definitions of electrocution give typically 'injure or kill'.

That's just begging the question.

 

[JonathanSmith]

The description of the Ark of the Covenant fits as a Leyden jar like device. Mythbusters episode supports this.

As we are digressing into mythical devices, I always thought that the Ark of the Covenant might be an Orgone generator that actually works. Ha! Some similarities in published designs between the two devices except that as far as I know, no-one has ever sprung for gold sheeting to line the wood when trying to build an Orgone generator.
Or, you know, a container to store and carry some old stone tablets.

However, I can personally attest that the shock from an approximately one gallon Leydon jar fashioned from an old chemical bottle and Al foil is something not to be repeated. Also one gets a nasty burn at the point of entry of the juice which is perhaps a secondary consideration.

I've never understood this with Leyden jars. The area of a gallon jar would be under 1/2 square meter, the wall thickness would be at least a couple millimeters, and the dielectric constant of glass is 5 to 10. The capacitance would only be at most around 0.02 micro Farads. That's... not big. How are these shocking people? How many volts were people able to generate back then to put into them? Van de Graaff generators could make mega Volts, but those were invented in 1929.

People building Tesla Coils are known to use stacks of red solo cups wrapped in tinfoil to make capacitors. It's not that the plastic has a high dielectric constant, or even that the cups are thin (though that does help). It's that the breakdown voltage of these homemade caps is very, very high and the leakage current very, very low. Same with the jars.

 

[Komarov]

Cooking random foods (including using 300x9v battery arc welder to cut a pickle)
Excessive voltage does bad things if you strike an arc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSttQpQjvSE

Now if only the presenter had the first idea about what was actually happening, these videos could be interesting ... "You see the electricity shooting into the water," oh yes indeed you do.

 

[Snark218]

It also bears mention that Ben wanted the turkey to be the national bird. So this is like, say, Teddy Roosevelt attempting to punch a bald eagle to death.

 

[sjl]

And I thought that Benjamin liked turkeys. He wanted them to the be national bird.

No reason for the national bird not to be tasty

Hey, it works for Australia. A well known (if not particularly common nowadays) dish is the Coat of Arms: slices of (cooked) kangaroo meat on the left side of the plate, and slices of (also cooked) emu meat on the right side of the plate. The rest of the meal is put in the middle between the two meats.

I've never actually eaten emu myself, but kangaroo is very tasty indeed. Make sure you don't cook it past rare to medium rare; it dries out very quickly. Well done kangaroo is an affront to humanity. A spicy plum sauce works well to complement the dish.

 

[f00barbob]

My favourite Leyden jar experiment was carried out by a contemporary of Ben Franklin - the french clergyman/physicist Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet.

He gathered 200 monks in a field, arranged in a circle about 1500m in circumference and all holding onto a wire. He then discharged a Leyden jar(s) into the wire with the intention of measuring the speed of electricity by measuring jumping monks.

Unfortunately they all seemed to jump simultaneously, leading Nollet to the conclusion that the transmission of electricity was instantanous.

Physics might be more fun if we had experiments like that nowadays.

In my early morning gym class (the first half of which typicall turned into goof-around time), a friend of mine once brought in 20-something 9 volt batteries connected together in series. After forming a circle of about 10 people, we proved conclusively that we were all easily amused.

 

[Deleted member 388703]

My favourite Leyden jar experiment was carried out by a contemporary of Ben Franklin - the french clergyman/physicist Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet.

He gathered 200 monks in a field, arranged in a circle about 1500m in circumference and all holding onto a wire. He then discharged a Leyden jar(s) into the wire with the intention of measuring the speed of electricity by measuring jumping monks.

Unfortunately they all seemed to jump simultaneously, leading Nollet to the conclusion that the transmission of electricity was instantanous.

Physics might be more fun if we had experiments like that nowadays.

In my early morning gym class (the first half of which typicall turned into goof-around time), a friend of mine once brought in 20-something 9 volt batteries connected together in series. After forming a circle of about 10 people, we proved conclusively that we were all easily amused.

For my frinds at one of our Eagle scout projects, it was the electric horse fence for them.
I was satosfied with shocking myself just once. They'd grab on and watch the pulses make their hands wiggle every second, or make shock chains with each other.

The owner of the horse field commented that it was that "stupid one" horse of hers that seemed to like rubbing up against the fence unlike the others.