Re: One Way Not to Cook a Turkey

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Frank Furter

One Way Not to Cook a Turkey
November 25, 2009 06:43PM

Registered: 15 years ago
Posts: 1,942

(old story, stolen from Improbable Research, timely for season; BTW guess what Franklin proposed as the national bird.)

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200612/history.cfm

Ben Franklin Attempts to Electrocute Turkey

In December 1750, Franklin learned one lesson the hard way, when he shocked himself while trying to electrocute a holiday turkey. Franklin believed electrocuting the turkey made it uncommonly tender.

When he began his electrical experiments in about 1745, Franklin had already retired from his printing business, which was good, because he soon became so absorbed in the experiments he had little time for anything else. “I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time, as this has lately done,” Franklin wrote to his English friend Peter Collinson in a letter thanking him for the gift of a Leyden jar with directions for charging it.

To most of Franklin’s contemporaries, electricity was mainly useful for parlor games. Few people at the time anticipated any practical use for electricity. Franklin was among the first to study the phenomenon scientifically.

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2009 06:50PM by Frank Furter.

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