Introduction

For a long time, humans have justified the lightning as god’s penalty. Then came the time they wanted to protect themselves from that natural phenomenon.

Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706 in Boston and died in 1790, in Philadelphia. He was a pioneer in the research about the lightning so there weren’t any precedent studies about the similarities between lightning and electricity. He had to lead a typically scientific step to advance the concern. As expected, his first question about the lightning was “What is lightning?” .He had in fact an intuition. Indeed He is the one who discovered the electric nature of the lightning. During the Age of Enlightenment, a century full of discoveries, Franklin’s lightning rod was one of the main inventions and never stopped evolving from 1752 to now.

What we are talking about is the initiative that took an inventor, at the risk of his life, to give out a shield to the humankind. We’ll study the lightning then, its similarities with electricity and Franklin’s legacy in the modern lightning rod.