EPIPHANY? by Jane Kelley

Where do you get your ideas? That's the question I always get when I do workshops. That's also the question I ask myself when I get stuck for one. 

The myth, of course, is that ideas come like this.

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky -- by Benjamin West

 

Ideas come from some place above. You can call it a muse, or divine inspiration. I remember being taught that Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by flying a kite in a thunder storm. I'm sure those weren't the facts I was presented with. But that's what stuck in my head. 

 

Look at Benjamin West's painting of Franklin out in a thunder storm with his kite! If that isn't an epiphany, then what is? He's like Prometheus stealing energy from the gods. He's surrounded by cherubs, for Pete's sake. He's doing something glorious! Because, as we all know, electric current traveled down his kite string so he could tame it for the benefit of all humankind. 

At least, that's the myth. The truth is a much more complicated, as truth usually is. This moment in the storm was not a stroke of genius. This was a scientific experiment. Franklin knew that another scientist, Jean-Antoine Nollet, had wondered if lightning was connected to electricity in 1749. Others were studying tribolic electric effect -- where charges can pass from one object to another. Franklin had tried to make that transfer from the top of a tall building. All of which was very interesting to scientists, but I know you're wondering -- what about that kite?

 

Franklin and his son attached two strings to the kite. One was wet to conduct the electricity to a Leyden jar -- a contraption made of several nesting jars used to store electricity. The other string was kept dry so that Franklin could safely hang on to the kite without getting killed like Georg Wilhelm Richmann, another scientist who was also working with electricity.

In fact, on that fateful day, no lightning bolt struck the kite. The wet string did conduct an electrical charge. Franklin observed the tiny filaments of the string stand up -- like static -- as the power was conducted down the string to the Leyden jar. After energy was in that jar, Franklin used it later to, as he described, charge phials,  kindle spirits, and perform all other electrical experiments that people did with "excited" globes and tubes.

In other words, the kite experiment worked. Just not in the way that Benjamin West depicted in his painting.

 

And so it must be for us humble creators. We should not wait for lightning to strike us. If it did, it probably would kill us, like poor Georg Wilhelm Richmann, who never was glorified in a painting for his work with electricity.

 

Instead we should construct a place to keep our ideas safe until we are ready to use them. 

 

 

If you don't like these Leyden jars, maybe a notebook will suffice. 

 

 

JANE KELLEY -- has never been struck by lightning, but she has flown kites and is the author of many middle grade novels.