A Key & A Kite: StarTalk Live! With Benjamin Franklin

How does lightning work? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck break down the legendary science and inventions of Benjamin Franklin, live with chief editor of The Benjamin Franklin Papers, Ellen Cohn and Benjamin Franklin himself!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Live at the Keswick Theatre! Alright!

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I always do this with a co-host. My co-host tonight is going to be and is Chuck Nice. Chuck, where are you, man?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  What's up, buddy?

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Nice!

• 0:35Speaker 01

  What's up, Philly?

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some of you know Chuck is a Philly native?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  That's right. Born and bred Philadelphia. That's why I know we're not actually in Philadelphia.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  But it doesn't really work when you walk out like, "What's up, Glitter?"

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, that wouldn't work. That wouldn't work. So, Chuck?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I think we're in Philadelphia.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Very cool.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk is about science, right?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  I did not know that.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I thought to myself, "Let's talk about, like, a cool, important, interesting scientist who we associate with Philadelphia."

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he from Philadelphia?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  He is from Philly. West Philadelphia, born and raised, from what I hear. And, uh, he's a slapologist.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Uh, we're gonna talk about, perhaps, Philadelphia's most famous scientist, which many other people think of him as just a founding father. Of course, we're talking about Benjamin Franklin! Alright! So, uh, let's get started. So Chuck, what do you know about Benjamin Franklin?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I know he's got a parkway. I know he's got a bridge. I know he got an institute.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I know he's on a hundred dollar bill.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. Oh, man. Uh, yeah.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're looking at this like you've never seen a hundred. Do we not pay you enough?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Let me tell you something. This is, you just, I can't even talk anymore. That's how much I love money and Ben Franklin.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so that's, that's good. So, we know, we associate him, at least in the scientific community, with his discoveries on electricity.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and electricity and lightning, I got a lot to say about lightning. People think they understand lightning, but usually they don't, even if they think so. Because, you know, lightning strikes from the ground up, not from the clouds to the ground. Did you know that?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, tell that to every Greek painting that I've seen.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what else? Ben Franklin was a printer, okay?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he printed, and, and, people don't know this, Chuck, you come from a printer family.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  And every printer in the world loves Ben Franklin. I love Ben Franklin because my father was a printer, and if it weren't for Ben Franklin, I would have starved as a child.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but you, but you worked in the printing factory with him?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  With my dad, yes. And I actually ran something called a raised letter press, which is what he pretty much invented. Yeah.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright. And Ben Franklin was also a successful businessman. He, uh, so, so many things, and I don't have particular expertise on this.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying. So, we gotta, we gotta do this StarTalk style, and we coned the landscape for an expert on Benjamin Franklin. You know where we landed? At the Yale Library, which is undergoing a multi-year project to collect the complete papers.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of Benjamin Franklin. So we got the editor in chief of that project here today. Please give a warm Philly welcome to Ellen Cohn. Ellen, so let me ask you, Ellen, your editor in chief of this project. I mean, we think of him as a founding father and nowhere on the hundred dollar bill. Is there any, is there any indication that he was a scientist? So what percent of his papers and his body of work is reflected, reflects his capacity as a scientist?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Well, you know, here's the amazing thing about him is that his entire life he was interested in science. He was so curious about everything that he saw.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As any good scientist should be. Okay?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Not like you're gonna find too many scientists are like, what's that? Eh.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Like, just to give you an example, how many people of his day or how many of you have ever sat in a darkened room with a fire going in the fireplace? And there's a candle on the table. Now Benjamin Franklin noticed that the smoke from that candle was traveling in a certain direction. And he thought, huh, that's interesting. And he made it his business to try to find out why. I mean, that's the kind of guy he was his entire.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it was a lit candle? Yes, I'm sorry, I did to, like, why would the candle start floating through the air? Okay, so he's saying normally the smoke of a candle would go straight up. He's got a fireplace going and now the smoke is going towards the fire. So he notices this and asks himself what's going on.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a, an observant, curious person.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yes, cuz all I would have thought is, why am I here alone?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  This setting is very, very sexy.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so he didn't, so something I didn't, I never knew. I know a little bit about Ben, but did he, he didn't study science in school?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  So here's the thing. This kid, um, was the fifteenth child.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  In a family of seventeen.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Wow. His poor mother.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  His poor mothers.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mothers?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Well, that is to say he don't.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  First of all, I don't need you bringing that kind of stuff into my school system.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Next thing you be up here talking about your Ben Franklin critical race theory.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think she meant he was raised by two mothers.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm pretty sure that's not the.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, oh my goodness gracious, I walked right into that one.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you did. Well, so, uh, I don't know if you know, I've, um, I have some expertise in the fabric of the space-time continuum. Did you know this?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Also, I have a watch.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  So there.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I was experimenting on this and I was able to open a portal through time.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I got Benjamin Franklin.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And I'm starting to get a little worried, to be honest, right now. Cause what I know is Neil does not smoke marijuana.

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I brought him through and then I'm trying, I said, why don't I just bring him here? And so then I got in an Uber and he didn't. And so I lost him.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Neil and Ben's not-so-excellent adventure.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that, I would be fun if we had Ben Franklin here. But so, but I don't know where he is. He's wandering the streets of Philadelphia.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, here's what you don't know. I would think that that was like a fantastical story, except that I actually found Ben Franklin. I found him standing on the street just staring at some electrical wires. And then, when I asked him, "What are you doing?", he was like, "I'm not looking at the wires. This is Philly. I'm looking at them shoes." Why would anybody put shoes up on a wire? Was it a typewriter artist who fell?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  And that is all that is left of him?

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What exactly happened here? A typewriter artist, yeah, that, wow. Yeah, I never thought to think that.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if I came from another time, yeah, that's what I would...

• 9:13Speaker 01

  You might think of that.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  But really, it's just some brother walking around without sneakers. Because he ran into the wrong people in Philly. The only city where they don't steal your shoes, they throw them up on the wire so that you can look at them every day. Yeah, man, those were my shoes.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, can we get back to Ben Franklin?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Oh, Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so you, so...

• 9:43Speaker 01

  I'm serious about Ben Franklin.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you bring him here?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Where, I thought by now he was Ben Franklin. Ben. Ben.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  You're very kind.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Benjamin Franklin. It was just an Uber I was getting into. You didn't have to be afraid of it.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  You just wandered off. I, you left me just standing there.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we get Ben a chair, please? Do we have...

• 10:14Speaker 03

  You're too kind. How do you do, Ellen? It's nice to see you.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  How do you do?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Good to see you again, Ben.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Good to see you as well.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  How are you?

• 10:21Speaker 03

  I'm very well, I'm excellent well. You're very kind to ask. Nice to see you all, my friends. Good evening. Thank you, you're very kind. You're too kind.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ben, you were a successful printer. In fact, from what I've read, you were quite wealthy. So is that wealth give you free time to then do cool science things? Because I don't think anyone was paying you to do science.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  That is true. No, that would be the purview of a gentleman. You're absolutely right. I did have some success with my printing, specifically with my almanac. Did very well.

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Poor Richard's almanac?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Poor Richard's almanac.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who... Wait, let me ask now. Who the hell is Poor Richard?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Well, Poor Richard is a character Franklin made up. He, in Philadelphia, I mean, he just had to make a buck. He had to make a living. And he saw that almanacs sold really well. And so he wanted to make one himself. And he, in fact, was such a cutthroat competitor. His almanac was funnier, wittier. It just obliterated the competition because he created this character called Richard Saunders. And Richard Saunders, in the preface to the first almanac, says, "Kind reader, I'm an honest fellow,

• 11:48Speaker 02

  but I got this wife back home who's really hammering on me to make more money. And so to please her, I'm doing this almanac because I know they sell really well. And I never, ever would have done this if it hadn't been for the fact that Titan Leeds, the other almanac maker in town...

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Far more popular than me at the time.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  That Titan Leeds, we know from predictions in the almanac that he's going to die on a certain day.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Wow!

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And he also, because he's a great predictor of things, he also knows he's going to die on a certain day. But we differ about which day it's going to be.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  And so, although I'm a good friend of his, I thought, maybe now's the time for me to get into it. Well...

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Titan Leeds had no intention of dying. And when he read that, he went nuts. And he went hopping around town saying, "I'm not, unlike you. I'm not dead. I'm not dead." And there was such excitement, and Franklin just outmaneuvered him in every way. And before you know it, his leads just folded and his almanacs flew off the shelf. But here's a connection to science. As soon as Franklin's almanacs became really popular, he was able to add more pages to them because everybody, everybody was buying them.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  And what did he do? He starts putting articles in there about science. He took, he took articles that had come over from London and he would reprint them in the almanac because it wasn't enough for him to learn about these amazing things. He wanted to educate everybody about them.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  But, but this is very much true. Taking the, taking this knowledge out of the universities, taking it out of the monasteries and bringing it to the people.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what we're trying to do on StarTalk, actually. Yeah. So what is the Junto Society? Does that have science?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Well, so after, after having published the almanac for a number of years, at the age of 42, I was able to retire and sell my business and I would never have to work again. And this is when I had begun.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At age 42?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  At age 42. And this is when I began the pursuit, seriously, of science. But, but earlier, I had been in London when I was 19 and I had seen other clubs, the TIFF Club, the Tuesday Club. And I had created a club when I was a working man in Philadelphia called The Junto with other like-minded working men. Eventually, we were joined by ship's captains. And together, Junto, of course, being Latin for joined together. Junta Jukan.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I knew that.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Joined together.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  They assist. Join together, they assist. And so, together with the Janto, with this club of like-minded people, we were able to better ourselves, better our community. And eventually, we together founded the first library, a subscription library here in America, which still exists today, and the first science academy, the American Philosophical Society, which still exists in your day.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was recently inducted as a member to the American Philosophical Society. In fact, they are based here in Philadelphia, and that's how I found. They told me about you, yes.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Neil is like the black Ben Franklin.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but...

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Well, they have a number of my little improvements and my

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  rattle traps.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'm asking is you create this, you create that. And at no time have we yet even talked about Ben Franklin as a diplomat. And that's how most of anyone thinks about you as a founding father. So, how did you have time for all of this?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Time machine?

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Time is... It requires concentration and a schedule. I have a certain mathematical attitude towards time, just as I have to everything. I... For instance, if one wants to live a good and virtuous life, one must create a moral compass or moral algebra if one is to have enough time to do everything one wishes to accomplish. One must allot the time, and one must devote the time to it. And so, I created a very rigid schedule, which for the most part, until much later in my life, I stuck to and allowed myself to wake at a certain time, to prepare my letters at a certain time,

• 16:40Speaker 03

  to devote a certain amount of time. I also became rather obsessed...

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I believe that the translation of what Ben is trying to say is we did not have the internet.

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or Netflix, right?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Right, or Netflix.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At night.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And we certainly did not chill, ever.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  But nothing is done in a vacuum. We are, I am working alongside, I mean, I'm inspired by so many greater men and working alongside so many other great minds.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Ellen, from your records, when did Ben transition from the bringer of science to people to the doer of science? When was that?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Well, one of the first, one of the first things that he did in in a scientific realm in America, I think, was, uh...

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you don't know, we can find out, because he's sitting right here.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  The transit, the study of the transit, is that what you're thinking?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Well, go ahead.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  No, no, please, please, you've read my letters more recently than I have.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  No, talk about the transit.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Well, the transit of Venus, I actually, Neil, you probably know more about this.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed, the transit of Venus is a very important phenomenon.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  You probably had a chance to study it in your lifetime as well.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, so Venus, twice every couple of hundred years, will move between Earth's vista on the sun and the sun itself. And that, when observed from different parts of the Earth, enable you to triangulate and get a precise distance to Venus. When you do that, it allows you to get the full measurement of the entire solar system, where the distances to all the planets, because previously, you got distances just in units of the Earth-Sun distance, but you didn't know exactly how far that was. So, everything was in unit of Earth-Sun, but the transit of Venus transforms that.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you would have seen the transit of Venus in the 1780s, is that right?

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Well, so in 1761, we have one, and unfortunately, I'm not able to see it, but we begin to see it studied. Also, in 1761, there's war taking place that's going to interfere. But I think it's in 1769 that we are able to participate globally. So, we have Mason and Dixon studying. We have David Rittenhouse creating a telescope and studying it not far from here, in Narrahtin. And I'm, in fact, I'm in a, we build an observatory just behind the Pennsylvania State House, and some years later, the Declaration of Independence will be read out loud from

• 19:21Speaker 03

  that same platform, where we will track and study and time the transit of Venus in order to come up with this final number that will finally give us the, the distance between the sun and the earth.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  And we came up with the number of 90 million miles.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was so wrong. It's 93 million miles.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  We were very wrong.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ben, get back to the drawing board.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Your life has been wasted, sir.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  It is an absolute failure.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we take our first break, let me just bring this to, I think, an interesting close. That transit of Venus was also viewed by Captain Cook.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Captain Cook.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On an expedition from England. And that was best viewed, that was best viewed from the South Pacific. And so, England says, Captain Cook, go to the South Pacific, here are new tools to measure the transit of Venus. Oh, by the way, by the way, could you map every coastline you see? Whatever landmass you hit, just, just, just on the side, go ahead and do that. He measures the transit of Venus brilliantly, comes back to England, presents the maps

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, all of this, and within decades, England takes ownership of those landmasses.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just take a look at all the flags of those countries, okay? Half of them have the Union Jack inserted in it. That's traceable to Captain Cook. Many of them do still.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Have they learned nothing?

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna delve deeper into Professor Franklin's scientific career on StarTalk Live at the Catholic Theater.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, we're back, Kestrel Theater. StarTalk Live.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're outside of Philadelphia and who better to talk about is one of its finest, most significant citizens of the past and I would say even the present day, his spirit energy remains with us in this part of the world and I would say around the world itself. Benjamin Franklin, give up for Benjamin Franklin.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course Ellen Cohn, who is the editor in chief of the Benjamin Franklin Papers Project, which is being conducted out of the Yale Library. Yes.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ben, let's talk about your most famous experiment, which I, as a kid, didn't understand and I still don't. What's up with you and a kite and a key?

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Ah, yes, electricity.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What the hell were you doing? Why, what, who, what, don't you know that's, it's dangerous?

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I do know that it's, I didn't, that's why I did not fly the kite in the, in the storm. My, um...

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, that's the legend.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  I, I had, I stood in a little paddock and my son William flew the... If you're, if you're going to perform...

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Father of the year there, that's it.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  If you're going to perform a dangerous experiment, may I always suggest placing your progeny in, they, they, they can't sue you, mostly because they can't sue you.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what was your, what was your objective there?

• 23:32Speaker 03

  So, um, so we're working with the American Philosophical Society. We're doing experiments. I have retired and I am corresponding with a friend in England at the Royal Society, Peter Collinson, and he sends me a wonderful new invention from the University of Leyden, Leyden, known as Leyden jar. Normally, these sort of inventions, these innovations, would have been named after the creator, but in this case, the creator was a professor Musselbach. I don't think anyone's going out and buying a Musselbach jar, so we called it a Leyden jar. And he, so Peter sends me one of these, and he says, "Perhaps you'd like to consider understanding how it works, learn how it functions." And we begin by, would you like to describe?

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so the Leyden jar, as I remember from my physics training, it's a jar that's sort of electrically insulated from what's around it, but there are metal sheets inside of it that-

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Aluminium.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That if they become charged, they just sort of resist each other, and you see them just sort of separated, sitting there, perfectly happy, separated, kind of opposite what gravity would otherwise have them do. So in a way, it has trapped electricity in this volume.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  That's right, and what I'm going to do is take a dozen of them, eighteen, and put them in a box and wire them all together and create, instead of just producing electricity, electrical fluid, by rubbing a piece of wool on a glass tube-

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't do that.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  I'm going to create an electrostatic generator, an enormous machine, and now I'm going to have rows, so imagine, if you will, rows and rows of these jars, all sticking up, just imagine, and now I can store quantities of the electrical fluid in it, and it is rows and rows of these jars sticking out of a box, as if, to me, it appears like a row of fowling pieces, or cannons, sticking out of the top of a ballast straight. And do you know what we call that?

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A battery.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  A cannon sticking out of a ballast tree?

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A battery.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  A battery.

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  And that is what we're going to do. We're going to try and invent and name the battery.

• 25:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  And we're going to, once again, fail, but...

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotta start somewhere, Ben.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  But it's going to inspire me to perform, I don't know, Alan, 130 separate experiments. And eventually, it will lead us to the understanding that the electric... Well, it will lead us to many understandings. It will lead us to... Most importantly, it will give us a vocabulary, a language, a nomenclature for studying this new fluid.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  So, so... Is that why you needed the kite and the key?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Well, so ultimately, the kite and the key is going to prove the final experiment, which is that one form of this electrical fluid is the discharge of lightning. And we're going to take some electrical, um, uh...

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fluids from the sky.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  From the sky, not from a lightning bolt, that would be in lunacy. And we're going to put it into one of these capacitors. We're going to take it back to our laboratory. We're going to perform a series of experiments with it. Just how quickly can it burn a piece of paper? How quickly can it... And then we'll take another battery filled with electrical fluid created from a generator, and it will perform exactly the same way. Therefore, we will prove that these two seemingly different substances are in fact the exact same thing.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  And at any time in this experiment, does it get you back to the future?

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Apparently so.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  I would have said no.

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just to put us on the same page, every time it rains anywhere in the world, there are electrons that used to be up in the sky, in the clouds, that have arrived on Earth. And electricity doesn't like being imbalanced that way. Alright, these are from ions that come out of the rain-swelled skies. And so, the electrons collect. Now, if you happen to be under a thunderstorm, there'll be a lot of those electrons collecting locally. The electrons want to get back to the cloud, but they're really lazy, okay?

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the last thing it wants to do is move through air, because air is actually an electrical insulator, alright? It hates moving through the air. So, when you build up enough charge, the charges look around and say, "Wait a minute, I see a human being. Let me go up into the human being. Now I have five and a half less feet I have to move through the air. Oh, wait a minute, there's a tree. Let's go higher up, okay? There's less air that I have to move to. Wait a minute, there's a church steeple. Let's go up to the tip of the church steeple,

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and we will discharge there." And so, lightning, there's what's called a leader stroke, that is exploring what path between the sky and the ground requires the least stress on the movement of these electrons. It finds the path, it's called a leader stroke. And the moment that leader stroke completes, the electrons surge back to the cloud, and that is the lightning bolt that we all see, that most people think comes from the cloud to the ground. But it's the electrons that had accumulated going from the ground back up to the clouds. Now-

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you died because of a bunch of lazy electrons? Yes. Right, so if you're the tallest one in an area, you are susceptible, okay? Anytime lightning hits a baseball game, who does it hit? The pitcher! The pitcher. The pitcher is just a little bit closer on the pitcher's mound. And they step on it and they do it. And that leader stroke, the moment it comes out, you actually will feel the static electricity. So if you feel your hair rising up because you start accumulating these extra charges, if you start feeling the hair rise up on your skin,

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  drop to the ground immediately. Because what's happening is the electrons are gathering and they're ready to make that jump, they're ready to jump. But if you drop low in that instant, then you will confound this exercise.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Oh my God, where do we go?

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then...

• 30:27Speaker 01

  You know, I'm just sitting here trying to be a lazy electron. I don't understand. What just happened?

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just a little bit of elec... And by the way, when they launch rockets, you ever notice there's the launch pad in the middle? And there are four towers. Multiple towers, there's a water tower as well, for other reasons. But there are four towers that compete with the rocket to attract lightning. So if lightning cut is... If the electrons are ready to come up and go back to a cloud, the rocket is not their first choice because we've supplied them with a way to go back. And this reminds me of one of Professor Franklin's most brilliant inventions, the lightning rod. Dude!

• 31:17Speaker 03

  So...

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did good there.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Thank you. And in fact, I... Ellen would know better than I. There is a French natural philosopher who is able to attract charges during a bright sunshine. We see, at the time that I'm in France, the Italian Signore Volta expanding on these ideas.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so the Italians, the electricity is... has an imprint of all the people who were fundamental to its progress. So Alexandre Volta is a... The Volt is named after him. Not the Chevy car. I'm talking about... The volts of your battery. There's ampere. Amps come from, I think emperor is French, uh, ampere? And so, all of these names and terms come, there's even a, uh, there's a faraday, there's a, um, uh, but all these words we have for electricity, like you were saying, professor.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Doctor.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say that?

• 32:16Speaker 03

  I was never a professor.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  You can just call me Ben.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ben.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Just Ben.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As we were saying, Ben, that, I can't call you Ben, that's too...

• 32:25Speaker 03

  That, behind my back, the other, um, members of the Constitutional Convention called me Dr. Fatsides.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Ah, that's what I'mma call you then. It wasn't even the worst insult among us, if you, I prefer Ben.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Today, we don't body shame people that way.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  So, yes, Ben will...

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so with, um, lightning rod, you now give the electrons a place to depart Earth so that they don't randomly find some other thing like a church steeple and destroy the church people.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  And in Boston, they kept tearing down the lightning rods for fear that I was, they believed, from the pulpit, suggesting that I was somehow, um, creating an accumulation of electrical fire.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, I, I, I left something out, excuse me. So...

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Please.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The lightning rod is so brilliant, it was, it may have been more brilliant than Ben knew, because, watch what happens. So, you have the lightning rod, which is just a piece of metal sticking up, and it's the highest point of your structure, alright? So the electrons gather. If you make the lightning rod a point...

• 33:36Speaker 03

  This is important.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then, the electrons, on going to that point, ready to go to the cloud, they'll leak off! And they'll just sort of drizzle off into the sky. So, lightning rods not only reduce the chance you'll get struck by lightning, if you're struck by lightning, it saves you from destruction.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  But this was a very important argument at the time, people, the debate over a dull-topped lightning rod versus a point, a very sharp point, was something we took very seriously.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the electrons crowding there, they spill out. It's very crowded, and, and you can spill electrons back, and basically...

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Never have the lightning strike that would have otherwise taken place. It's just brilliant. Now, let me, let me ask you, Ellen. I'd heard this, and I just, I just want verification. I want to see if you have it. Before the lightning rod, by the way, this is the 1760s, 70s. What's the tallest structure in any city in colonial America? Church, okay? So what structure is most likely to be hit by lightning first? Church. So if there's a church here and a church there and a church there, and that church gets hit by lightning, I got a story in my church, right? They say-

• 34:59Speaker 01

  That was the false church, people.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep, that was the false god.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Clearly, God didn't like your church.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't like your church. Good way for me to get more churchgoers into my church by holding that argument. But then Ben comes along and saves all the churches. I heard that there was criticisms. I don't know if it was heresy of Ben thwarting the will of God.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Right. Which is why, which is why we had to help it along with something called Jesus arson.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jesus arson? What's-

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Cause Ben put up these lightning rods. These churches aren't burning down. And God told me to just burn your church down.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so, so- That's not, was not my intention.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So, so Ben, so for me, the idea that you would be accused of heresy for thwarting the will of God, I'm thinking to myself, how powerful is the god you're worshiping? If Mr. Fatso can prevent them from destroying your church? This is my thought. So do, is there any correspondence related to this?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Oh, he, he got immense criticism from people all over America and Europe too.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Most people believed that lightning was God-

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, divine.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Was divine.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just, not just in modern religion, but you go back to ancient religion. Zeus, eh, you know, they, and, and, um, did Thor wield the lightning bolt or just a hammer?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  No, Thor called on lightning. He called down lightning with his hammer.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With his hammer, okay.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I got that from Marvel.

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Now, you know what else? Inside churches throughout Europe,

• 36:58Speaker 02

  there weren't just people inside there. You know what else they used to store in churches?

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, the parts of dead saints?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Gunpowder.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Oh, that's smart.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Hey, you know that place that just keeps catching fire for some reason more than any other place? You know what we said? Let's put some gunpowder there.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Well, just only, what, 20 years before I was born, 20 years or so, 30 years, was the Great Fire of London, 1666, not too long, so...

• 37:27Speaker 01

  And what do they keep in their churches? Dynamite?

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel much later.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  I don't spend that much time in churches.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Clearly, I did not know that.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's where he made his money to leave the trust that would give the Nobel Prizes. Yeah, dynamite, TNT.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  That's somewhat disturbing, to be honest.

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  That the man who created the stuff that blows things up also made the Peace Prize.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  You have to give a prize for peace?

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, unfortunately, yeah, we need that. Otherwise, there may be even less incentive than there otherwise would be to create peace in the world. But, Ben, I want to, before we take a break, I want to get to your other experiments. But tell me what other critiques that were handed down?

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Well, um, one of the ways that Franklin countered this argument was to say, uh, you know, God sends rain, and that doesn't keep us from putting roofs over our head.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brilliant. Ben, that was good. Ben, that was good.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  In the middle of the summertime, the sun is really strong. That doesn't prevent us from carrying parasols. So why should it be that if the deity gives us the knowledge...

• 38:52Speaker 02

  To understand these phenomenon, then why shouldn't we take advantage of that knowledge to protect ourselves?

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A couple of other physics moments here. So, so you're... What's this oil and water thing you did?

• 39:12Speaker 03

  Ellen.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  So, even from the earliest age, Franklin, being the observant kid he was and young man, as he was crossing the ocean back and forth, he noticed that when the cooks dumped the cooking oil overboard, the waves smoothed out. Why is that? Why is that? He kept on thinking about it. And much later, when he was living in England, he thought... He was talking to people about this phenomenon, and he said, "I want to do an experiment." He took a little bit of oil, and he carried it to a pond that he knew about. He put the oil on the surface of the pond on a windy day

• 39:58Speaker 02

  to see what would happen. And to his amazement, because no one ever expected this, the oil smoothed out the water. It became smooth as glass. But it didn't stop there. That smooth area kept going and going and going until, to everybody's amazement, half an acre of water was absolutely flat.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Covered by a tiny bit of oil introduced to it.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  A teaspoonful of oil.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  He would have loved Exxon. Well, but you know, in our time, there was practical applications for this. Oyster divers would put a little bit of oil, and it would allow them to see their catch.

• 40:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because otherwise the turbulent water disrupts the optics of what's below. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to find out what Ben was doing in France during the Revolutionary War, when StarTalk Live from the Kestwick Theatre continues.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Live, Kestwick Theater!

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got Chuck Nice, my co-host. I've got Ellen Cohn, editor-in-chief of the Benjamin Franklin Papers Project, up at Yale in New Haven. And we've got none other than Ben Franklin himself. Thank you, Ben, for coming out for this. So, we know that the American colonies were very friendly with France, through Jefferson and through the diplomacy of Ben Franklin. And, of course, while we're fighting England, the French are always looking for a good fight against England, anyway. So, they were sympathizers to our cause. And very shortly after our revolution, they had theirs, right?

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'm gonna ask you, what brought Ben to France? And what was he doing there while in residence?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Well, actually, it was not at all a given that France was gonna help the American colonies. Not at all.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  We are not sure if we want to help you, colonists.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  You do not have the hard French soap. You smell like peasants.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, does every French person you imitate smoke a cigarette?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  This is what we do. We were bombed with cigarettes in our hands.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Continue. Never mind, Chuck on the corner there. Okay, go.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  So, when the patriots gathered and wrote the Declaration of Independence and pledged that they would risk their lives on this cause, the question was, how are we gonna win this war? I mean, it's one thing to declare a war. It's another thing to fight a war when you don't have guns, you don't have ammunition, you don't have any place to go and buy tools. The colonies relied on England for everything. And now, all of a sudden, not only did they declare their independence, they're cut off from their supplier.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  So, they sent Benjamin Franklin to France to try to persuade the King of France...

• 43:33Speaker 02

  To support a revolution against another king. Now, that was not gonna play necessarily. Cause kings kinda like-

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Yo, kings roll with kings. Real recognize real.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  So, why did they choose Franklin to do this mission? That was, in fact, not at all a sure thing. The reason was that by the time 1776 rolled around, he was already by far the most famous man in America. Why? Because of his lightning experiments.

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His science.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  His science.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  And it wasn't just that the lightning rod was saved millions of lives. And it wasn't just that he invented the battery. Most people considered the most significant thing about his experiments to be that he proved that something that was invisible in the atmosphere was actually electricity.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  No one had any concept of that before he came along and proved it with the kite and the key.

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So his legacy preceded him in Europe?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yes. He was immediately made a member of the Royal Society, which was the greatest scientific organization in England. And he was made, and this was astonishing, because the French don't do this very often. They made him a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  So he was, when he arrived, now Congress sent him over to France in top secret. He was on a ship that if it had been captured, he would have been hanged. So no one had any idea that he was actually on that ship. And when he said, "Foot on French soil, the French win." Nuts. Because they already knew who he was and they loved him. So it was his scientific reputation.

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did not know that.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  So are you telling me that if we sent Neil deGrasse Tyson on a secret mission to talk to Vladimir Putin?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  That there could be a possibility.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  That we might be able to get something done.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, this is very encouraging. I did, this is beautiful and brilliant and I, I'm deeply moved by this fact. That science in the day would be elevated to become something even greater than diplomacy itself. Because it sailed above popularity contests or anything else, the seizing of power. It recognized brilliance and that gives us deep hope, I think.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and let me tell you something else that's totally inspiring. You mentioned before about Captain Cook.

• 46:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Well, after that voyage, they sent him back. You remember this?

• 46:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he had multiple voyages, yeah, yeah. Until, he didn't. But I was in Hawaii once and I was watching Don Ho, okay? That's how old I am. I was watching Don Ho and someone asked him at the end, what happened to Captain Cook? And Don Ho said, "I don't know."

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "We haven't seen him in a while."

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rumors are that he was eaten by locals.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  He was, he was.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  I dined with Captain Cook once, but I assure you, he left the table.

• 47:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good, okay.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  So here's the thing, during the war, during the American Revolution, Captain Cook, well, actually, they didn't know it in London, but he had already been in, put in the pot. But the rest of his boats, the rest of his ships.

• 47:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody had Captain Cook for dinner, yes.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  But his ships.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, that was low-hanging fruit. I had to say, somebody had Captain Cook for dinner. And they enjoyed it, yeah. We heard it the first time. Yeah, okay. Sorry, Ellen, will shut up, please, continue.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Well, so word reached Europe that Captain Cook's ships were on their way back from this voyage of exploration and discovering. And Franklin was our ambassador in France. He couldn't communicate with Congress. There was no way to do that. A letter might take six weeks to go and six weeks to come back. He had to act on his own. So when he found out that Cook's ships were traveling north, he issued on his own initiative an order to every single American captain sailing on the ocean, "Leave those ships alone."

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Not only leave them alone, but if you meet with Captain Cook's ships, now keep in mind, these are British ships, and by rights, any American would have been authorized to seize them. Franklin said, "Leave them alone. In fact, give them any assistance that they might require because they are on a mission, a scientific mission, and science should be in a plane above politics."

• 49:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Wow.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Amazing. So just to finish the story about Captain Cook, when word reached the Royal Society in England that Franklin had done this, still in the middle of the war. I mean, the war was like at its height. The Royal Society voted to give him a gold medal. And the British Admiral, the head of the British Admiralty, wrote him a letter and sent it to him. And you can just imagine what this meant to him.

• 49:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, if the world recognizes your work, that goes beyond just whatever satisfaction you'd get recognizing yourself. So, congratulations.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  I'm far too humble to...

• 50:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. But wait, but that wasn't, it didn't stop there. Europe turned dark in 1783.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Oh, this is interesting, Ellen.

• 50:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For mysterious reasons.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  This is while I'm in France in 1783. This is the same time that we are writing the Treaty of Paris. The war will be coming to an end soon.

• 50:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, tell me what happened then?

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Well, it was this amazing, terrifying thing that happened. Um, in the summer of 1783, hadn't yet signed the treaty. The sky, all over Europe, turned dark. The sun was just this dim little, uh, disk in the sky. When the sun set, it was blood red. People were terrified.

• 50:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got all biblical, probably, right?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That summer was super, super, super hot. There were thunderstorms. People were dying. Livestock was dying. Nobody knew what in God's name was going on. And that continued for months, uh, into the next winter, which, correspondingly, was the coldest winter on record. And so, at a certain point, I mean, scientists all over Europe were writing to each other, trying to figure out what caused this? What's going on here? Um, and Franklin, very tentatively, wrote a letter,

• 51:36Speaker 02

  a little essay, which he called meteorological conjectures. Because he wasn't sure. But he analyzed the situation and he said...

• 51:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sign of a good scientist is if you don't really know for sure, you don't say that you know for sure.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  And the really good ones never say they're sure, because then they can never be wrong.

• 51:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  So what he said was, he thought that it was possible that the particulate in the air was actually ash and gases from a volcano in Iceland. That he had read a story telling him that this huge explosion had happened, eruption. Um, and it turned out he was absolutely right.

• 52:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that happened just a few years ago even.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Ten years ago?

• 52:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, around there, yeah. A volcano and ice was erupted.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  The same volcano.

• 52:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The same, they had to stop all air traffic.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The airplanes, we invented how to fly, just so you know. Okay, so because jet engines take in air, and if the air is filled with dust from a volcano, that is bad. But if you look at prevailing wind patterns in the rotating earth, generally they move west to east. That happens in the United States, it happens over Europe, and I-

• 53:03Speaker 03

  I wonder how we determined that that was happening in the United States?

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Remember how he said he's so humble?

• 53:13Speaker 03

  I'm sorry.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  I proved that weather appearing to come to Philadelphia from the northeast was in fact coming from the southwest, hence the nor'easter, a term that I... Sorry, please continue.

• 53:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I wouldn't even call that a good guess. I mean, he had to really think through what that is and what it meant, and arrive at that conclusion. Let me keep going because we're running out of time. Uh, Ben, what could you tell me about Mesmer?

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Friedrich Mesmer?

• 53:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  So Mesmer had been going- Anton, thank you. Anton Mesmer.

• 53:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Friedrich was pretty good too, though.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Anton Mesmer, Anton Friedrich, Friedrich von Steuben. So Anton Mesmer is going around Europe, the continent, claiming a new form of medical treatment, which will eventually become known as animal magnetism. This quality that rests within us. And he can treat it, and he has various techniques. And eventually, this animal magnetism can be affected, he claims, by a musical instrument that I had invented, known as the glass harmonica.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  And eventually, he finds his way to France. While I'm there as our minister to France. And I will let Ellen take over from this point and let you know what happens when Mesmer, Antoine Mesmer, and his animal magnetism begins to practice.

• 54:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the same Mesmer as that gave us the... Mesmerize.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Well, this mesmerizing is part of this.

• 55:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know you can't resist me.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  This is the same, the music is very...

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Well, the music is incidental, in fact.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Please.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  I mean, he used music, but then he didn't use music. Here's the thing about Mesmer. The reason he came to France is because he was kicked out of Vienna. This is a guy, this was a doctor, who gathered people around, turned off the lights, put his patients right in front of them, stroked their thighs, I'm not kidding you. And then he would look deep into their eyes, mesmerism. And then he would tell them that whatever was ailing them, he could cure.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Sounds like a human resources problem.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  And people believed him.

• 56:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They believed it because they wanted it to be true.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  And so he gets run out of Vienna. He comes to Paris, sets up clinics. All these French people come, pay tons of money. They're all having symptoms and twitching and God knows what. And the government's getting really worried about this guy. So they, the king of France, appoints a commission of the greatest scientists from the Academy of Sciences and the greatest doctors from the Academy of Medicine. And they say, "You've got to investigate this guy." Now, what's fast, this is one of the most important incidents

• 56:50Speaker 02

  in the history of medicine of the 18th century. Because, just think about it. Nobody could see this magnetic fluid. And they put Benjamin Franklin on the commission. You can understand why. He was the guy who had identified this invisible force in the sky.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Now, there's a doctor claiming there's some invisible force that he can manipulate. And only he knows the secret, he's not telling. So how do you, like, get at this? How do you figure out whether it's true or not? And one of the most brilliant things about this commission was, they conferred, they tried to think, "How do we devise experiments to get at this?" And they came up with this idea.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Animal magnetism can exist without being useful.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  But it cannot be useful if it doesn't exist. So the science contingent said, "Before we do anything else, we have to see if we can prove whether this invisible force exists." And they did, over the course of four months, a series of controlled experiments that are mind-blowing. And they wrote up a big report that reads like a detective novel. It's so well-written, and you're just on the edge of your chair. The one experiment that was the one that clinched it, that animal magnetism didn't exist.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  They had a doctor who practiced magnetism, and he went and he magnetized a tree in Franklin's yard. And they said to the guy, "Now, you can bring with you a patient. You choose the patient. And we're going to test you in blindfodum and see if he can feel anything from the magnetized tree." This was a little boy, 12-years-old, and I don't think they were counting on the fact that the kid would be blindfolded and that when the doctor magnetized the tree, the kid was like inside the house. So there could be no communication.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Well, the kid, with his blindfold,

• 59:34Speaker 02

  went to the wrong tree and started shaking and having convulsions and God knows what. Anyway, it was obvious that this was a bunch of hooey.

• 59:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The word is bullshit. Yes, sorry, excuse me for that thing.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  But here's the next part of the story that is mind-blowing. After they proved that it didn't exist, it was Franklin who had, for almost all of his life, been thinking about how the mind can affect sensations in the body.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  And so they devised a series of amazing tests that we would call double-blind experiments, where they had patients think that they were being magnetized when they weren't. They had patients sitting there not knowing anything was going on with the doctor, like, shooting death rays at them. They did all kinds of variations and the conclusion was, this thing worked if the patient believed that it would work. And this was the moment in the history of science when, what they called imagination. They said, "Animal magnetism doesn't exist,

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  but it seems to be true that our own minds are able to cause all kinds of physical sensations in our body." And this led to what we call the placebo effect, all kinds of things like that.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Well, they did the wrong experiments. If they wanted to know if animal magnetism really existed, all they had to do was put Chuck Nice in a cocktail party.

• 1:01:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how that works.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  But this is a very important notion, because I have tried in everything I have endeavored to serve the benefit of mankind. And here we have an unscrupulous doctor practicing what is clearly an unscrupulous...

• 1:01:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you wouldn't have known that until you could demonstrate it and have everyone else convinced of it.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  But what if it serves some purpose? What if it is useful for some? What if they believed themselves to be here?

• 1:01:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mind that, but just don't call it science. So I'm going to summarize, if I may, that the life of Ben Franklin was not so much enumerated experiments. His entire life was an experiment. And I'm reminded, with the starkness of the detail here, just in blunt detail, that an experiment is the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe. What is unknown and unknown for you. So...

• 1:02:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Experiments are something to be cherished, something to be cultivated, something that we should continue our entire lives lest we ossify in whatever was the last course we took in school. And then you think that's the understanding of reality. But reality is continually being explored by the likes of Benjamin Franklin in modern times, and we hope continuing into the future. And the more people who think that way and participate in that exercise will transform civilization as we know it. Because we need it, because we need to become better shepherds of our own future that right now is driving off a cliff.

• 1:03:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So,

• 1:03:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  thank you all for coming. This has been StarTalk Live at the Kestwick Theater. Thank you, Ellen Coe.

• 1:03:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck Nice.

• 1:03:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mitchell Kramer as Benjamin Franklin, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:03:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of you, drive safely, stay safe, wear masks, do things smart. I want you to live as long as human physiology will allow. As always, keep looking up.