Playing with Fire: Histories of the Lightning Rod (review)

Since it was first tried out in 1752, the lightning rod has come to be a highly evocative metaphor for the mediation of potentially disruptive cultural forces. What other artifact of building design can claim to have inspired controversy on grounds of religious impiety, theoretical heterodoxy, meteorological contingency, and plain old technical failure? While the lightning rod has long been deployed for risk amelioration, the thirteen authors in this volume show it has been given a rather more provocative role even within allegedly “Enlightened” civilizations.

This book stems from a conference on “The History and Cultural Meaning of the Lightning Rod” held at the Bakken Museum and hosted by its director David Rhees. The conference celebrated the 250th anniversary of the classic experiment undertaken near Paris with a prototype pointed lightning rod by Thomas-François Dalibard, Benjamin Franklin’s French translator. Playing with Fire does indeed move beyond Franklin-centered narratives that have hitherto typified the historiography of this topic. With coverage of the lightning rod’s deployment across eighteenth-century Europe and Mexico and the nineteenth-century United States, the editors nod to the need for a more inclusive, post-Franklinian global account. To show that the story of the lightning rod is not yet over, even today, the volume concludes with contributions from physicists regarding experiments that bring new credibility to the long-discredited, round-ended forms criticized by Franklinians.

To compensate for the rather localized clustering of (occasionally overlapping) chapters, Peter Heering and Oliver Hochadel supply us with both an excellent introductory chapter and a vigorous epilogue. Their framing of the book is a fine model of how to draw together the surprisingly disparate themes that emerge from writing the multiple histories of such a singular object as the lightning rod. Starting out as an indirect by-product of Franklin’s controversial kite experiments on the bank of the Schuykill River in 1752, we witness the lightning rod become a contested symbol of the Enlightenment.

Written by authors from backgrounds across the history of science and history of technology, the book addresses the lightning conductor as a fascinating (and sometimes troubled) exemplar of “applied science.” How could so many incompatible interpretations of its operation and claimed successes all thrive if lightning rods were in any strict sense an embodiment of Franklinian science? Two chapters that stand out as especially noteworthy are the opening case study by Paola Bertucci and a later chapter by Hochadel. Bertucci describes how the lightning rod brought trouble to meteorological debates in late-eighteenth-century Italy—so much so that its usage drew papal opprobrium. Hochadel discusses a different kind of bad weather, linking the introduction of lightning rods in Germany to the dry fog that covered much of northern Europe in 1783 (which later proved to be ash from an enormous volcanic eruption in Iceland).

The chapters on the commodification of the lightning rod in the nineteenth-century United States are probably of the most direct interest to the readers of this journal. Arwen Mohun’s brief but compelling account of the take-up of this artifact shows how its status shifted through three stages. It began as an elitist symbol on the houses of Franklin’s network of electricians, and then was assembled and installed by some skilled farmers in the 1830s. Later, it was manufactured to be sold by traveling salesmen who were skilled in alarming skeptical farmers about the possible risks of dangers of bolts from above. Elizabeth Cavicchi continues the story by showing how various forms of commercial lightning rods were patented—with minor variations in design to ensure their patentability—and how these devices or variants thereof were crucial to the safe operations of telegraphy.

Although this is not a work that every reader will scour from cover to cover, taken together, its chapters serve as a paradigmatic example of how to use historical research to subvert the alleged “modernity” of a familiar...