Ben Franklin’s “The Kite Experiment” first appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, one of the most prominent newspapers of the time. It was published on October 19, 1752, when Franklin was in his forties. The Gazette was established in 1728 by a man named Samuel Keimer, but was purchased by Franklin and his associate, Hugh Meredith, in the following year. Largely considered to be the New York Times of the era, the weekly paper published a wide variety of material including editorials, anecdotes, advice, world (read: western hemisphere) news, classifieds, letters, advertisements, as well as scientific and philosophical information. Additionally it re-published important documents, such as The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The archives of this historical newspaper provide a wealth of information about the lifestyle and daily practices of colonial Americans from a first-hand perspective. It ran until 1800, surviving only ten years after Franklin’s death.
While reading the newspaper, the original publication methods and layout seem at first convoluted and disorganized by modern standards. The Columns are not always labeled or titled. Sometimes they appear with section headers, but there is no color-coding or pagination similar to today's papers. However the format is actually copied from English papers and follows a standard model of the time. Generally, the cost of materials and machinery to publish with forced economic use of limited space, hence most issues were four pages in length, some were six.[1] According to Charles E. Clark and Charles Wetherell, the format of seventeenth and eighteenth century papers was created on 16 November 1667 with the publishing of the first issue of Oxford (later London) Gazette. This set the standard order for newspapers: transcripts of official public announcement, foreign news, local news, and then advertisements.[2] Keimer adopted this form with some modifications. For instance, he filled page one with alphabetical excerpts from Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, a practice that was abandoned with Franklin’s first issue (as the previous 39 had reached the word “Air”). With Franklin at the helm, page one contained “official transcripts, essays, and news, preceded occasionally by letters. Pages two and three were chiefly news pages, and page four was devoted overwhelmingly to advertisements.”[3] The paper had just two columns until Franklin expanded it to three in 1742. This change is seen as a result of modified printing techniques and equipment as well as “a reflexive adaptation to the increasing demand for advertising.”[4] In fact, according to Clark and Wetherell’s article, numbers and space devoted to advertising first surpassed news in the early 1730s, reaching a peak during the 1750s.[5]
The font is also slightly foreign compared to current standards. From what I understand, this is the typical font of business transactions and formal documents. It seems a little foreign to the modern eye, and there are slight differences that you may have noticed earlier this semester when we have read from similar original source material. For example, the lowercase "s" appears in the elongated form (strikingly similar to a lowercase "f") if is the first letter of a word, a middle letter (not last), or twice in a row (as in "glass"); additionally most nouns are capitalized, regardless of their importance or placement in a sentence. Some words may appear with different spellings from what modern readers would consider correct. Actually, you might notice some words spelled differently within the same issue. That is because the Pennsylvania Gazette predates Noah Webster's first efforts to standardize American English in his earliest dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806. Before the 19th century, no such standards existed.
[Did you know? The Pennsylvania Gazette published the first political cartoon, the famous "Join or Die" Snake, on May 9 1754 - just two years after “The Kite Experiment.”]
“The Kite Experiment” begins in the first column on the second of four pages in issue number 1243. It is a medium length article in the news section of the issue. The heading is “PHILADELPHIA, October 19.” The other cities described in the section are London, New York and Boston. Strangely enough, there doesn’t appear to be a title for the article, it simply begins with an enlarged first letter, as most of the other articles do.
While the ads for scientific and philosophical texts suggest a cultured and well-read readership, some of the classifieds remind us of the benighted practice of servitude and slavery. More ads detail ships leaving for ports across the globe – from Antigua, Barbados, South Carolina, London and Rotterdam, to name a few. The wide range of topics supports this publication catering to the masses, the everyday colonial people. This becomes the prime audience for Franklin to promote the emerging wonders of the scientific world. By publishing his findings in the Gazette, he bridges the gap between the intellectual elite who are “doing” science in the old world and the commonplace colonial person, who may be more concerned with basic survival than innovation – or otherwise unaware of their potential successes in the area. Franklin desires to spread the wonderful and life-changing ideas of science to the general public. He wants to bring it down from the academic, studied, and technical heights to the level of the general population. He wanted science to be for everyone, that’s way he mixes this anecdotal article in with the social advice, ads for runaway Irish servants, and other everyday material.
Furthermore, Franklin leaves the article anonymous. In light of the other articles we’ve read by him, this hardly seems unintentional. While his publication “Experiments and Observations on Electricity” in 1751 (the year before “The Kite Experiment”) makes him an authority on the topic, electricity was hardly a well-understood phenomenon at a scientific level at the time. It did however make him an internationally star. Attaching his name to the paper would seem to lend popularity or even credibility to the article—wither would seem to lead to more issues sold; however, Franklin leaves his name off the article. At heart he is a curious and intelligent individual with aspirations to understand and tame nature—and to show the people of colonial America that with simple means they can too. This drive is evidenced by how he sets up the article. He talks about how the experiment has been accomplished in Europe, but that those attempts were flawed, or at least not completed up to Franklin's standard. Franklin then details his own version of the experiment, one that is immediately and easily reproducible for the general public. This not only provides entertainment in literature form, but also allows the readers to recreate their own version with a small about of cheap materials. Moreover it gets to the heart of the Enlightenment, and what the era means specifically for Franklin: the universal spread of knowledge and with it the educating of the everyman. He provides logical advice for the recreation of the experiment, like flying the kite before the storm grows to full strength, and to stand under some cover. Ultimately, it seems that Franklin doesn’t take credit for the experiment because it means more to him this way. In my opinion, he doesn’t take authorship because the effect of the anonymity in conjunction with the experiment’s ease of reproduction creates a potent article, with an impact beyond even the scope of understanding of its readers—the reorganization of intellectual stock among the people.
The Pennsylvania Gazette is regarded as the New York Times of the 18th Century. It had a strong reputation as well as numerous followers, critics and contributors. The Gazette functioned primarily as news source for readers, with segments detailing current events in the other major colonial cities, as well as back in London. Most importantly, it had Benjamin Franklin at the helm, writing and publishing week in and week out. The visionary had the foresight to introduce the sciences to the common people and the means and savvy to accomplish doing so. His publication of “The Kite Experiment” is just one example of the numerous methods he had a bettering his world.
[1] Clark, Charles and Wetherell, Charles. The Measure of Maturity: The Pennsylvania Gazette. The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), p. 285. Online access at
[2] Ibid, 283.
[3] Ibid, 284.
[4] Ibid, 289.
[5] Ibid, 290.
