The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-10-08

Roston. Oct. LA committee or prominent citizens recently appointed 70
 prepare for the celebration on January
 of the 2O0th anniversary of the birth
 of Benjamin Franklin is at work upon an ambitious program the detatls oi which will be announced little later.
 Enough has already been elaborated to
 make it certain that the forthcoming affair will be a tiaoughtfest of the kind
 that Boston so dearly loves--one com
 parable, perhaps, to the Emerson cen
 tenary of two years ago, The anniver- sary is also to be commemorated in Nov
 York and particularly in Philadelphia,
 the scene of the major part of Frank
 lin's life work. Yet perhaps nowhere
 will there be a more spontaneous out
 burst of popular sentiment than in the
 town of the philosophers birth.
 Franklin was so many-sided man
 statesman, diplomat, scientific investi-
 gator, educator, journalist, moralist-
 that it would be hard to lay ones hnger
 on just the side of his character which
 is likely to be emphasized in the com
 ing anniversary celebration. Not un-
 likely, however, emphasis will be put
 in Boston upon his scientific achieve
 ments As the first American to attain any reputation abroad in scientific pur- suits. and particularly as the father of modern electricity, Franklin, aside from the fact of his having been born in the Puritan capital, has peculiar claim upon the remembrance of this city. which has been the centre of so many of the important electrical develop ments of the century; where the tele- phone was invented and developed | V here the possibilities of the overhead trolley were first worked out.
 It was so historians recall. during a visit to Boston. made long after he had | a N-A trS n a | that the great commoner acquired that | first interest in electrical subjects which | led to his discovery of the nature of electricity, The civilized world at that time wass just beginning to grope for knowledge of the mysterious force. | Only a short time before had Du Fay | formulat d his theory of the two kinds | of electricity which, from the nature of | the substances from which he produced them, he called vitreous and resinous. but to which Franklin later gave the name of positive Lnd negative; and only a little while before that had Gray, an English pensioner at Charterhouse, | first noticed that different substances have different electrical eonducttvity. | The Leyden jar, an entertaining device 1 of the Dutch experimenters, had been l discovered year or two before and was being displayed throughout Europe l by wandering mountebanks as scien- l tffic curiosity. It happened, therefore, | in 1746. while Franklin was in Boston, | visiting members of his family, that at | the same time a Dr. Spencer Of Scot | land was exhibiting some of the new | electrical apparatus and featuring upon | 1t. The philosopher, at that time In the | prime of his achievements, attended the | lectures, saw immense possibilities in the Lcyden jar and other pieces of me- | chanism. and determined upon his re- turn to Philadelphia to carry on fnves- | tigations of his own.
 | That was the beginning of Franklin great acccomplishment in making obso- lete the idea that electricity is an ob-
 scure fluid. producing curious manifes- tations, and in causing it to be studied | as a force capable of being applied to | everyday problems of living. His sub-
 sequent studies. including the famous
 te-hying epis ode, fairly entitled him to be called the Father of Modern Elec- tricity Unless some one of penetrative and practical mind had made them, the
 telegraph, telephone and trolley car
 and the numerous other utilities de-
 pendent upon electricity could hardly
 have come into being. So that Boston will naturally lay stress upon the mans scientific attainments--perhap the more so because within a stones throw of his birthplace, opposite the Old South Church on Milk Street. are the buildings containing the headquar-
 ters of the Bell Telephone Companies