Resumo de Stealing God''s Thunder

Were the endlessly curious Benjamin Franklin to awaken and pop his balding
head into the affairs of America 2005, he would find a discouraging similarity
between the current suppression of stem cell research and the resistance he met
in developing and popularizing the lightning rod. While he suffered no official
wrath for his invention, he did have to endure the vituperations of those who
maintained it was an offense against God to attempt to ward off His destructive
bolts. Whatever the era, it seems that some people just can''t stand the idea of
humanity controlling its own destiny. Although Franklin generally respected and supported
religions, he tended to view God more as a benign onlooker than as a cosmic
meddler.

Philip Dray builds his study around Franklin''s
many experiments with electricity, but he tells a far broader story than that
in Stealing God''s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin''s Lightning Rod and the
invention of America.

Dray''s previous books focused on the 1950s and 1960s, and he won the Robert
F. Kennedy Memorial Book Prize for 2002''s At the Hands of Persons Unknown:
The Lynching of Black America. For this latest book, he turns to an earlier
period in America''s
history with equally impressive results.

A substantial part of his narrative is devoted to the intellectual
excitement of the 18th century. Franklin and his peers in America and Europe shared their questions,
experiments and discoveries via incessant meetings and personal correspondence,
the latter of which they routinely collected and bound into pamphlets to sell
to eager audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
Franklin''s
fertile and open mind, coupled with his genius for making processes
understandable, kept him at the head of the scientific pack.

Dray observes that It was probably a union of . . . two
impulses? interest in investigating that which had not yet been
adequately explained, and the urge to fix what could bear improvement?that drew
his attention initially to the phenomena of thunder and lightning, and led to
his greatest invention. Prosperous though he became, Franklin didn''t look to his scientific
findings and inventions for wealth, electing instead to share what he knew as
well as what he thought.

As a poor and unlettered man who had propelled himself to prosperity and
intellectual eminence, Franklin was the perfect
symbol for America''s
potential. Thus on missions both political and scientific, he was welcomed into
the highest social circles in London (before the
Revolutionary War) and Paris
(during the war). In these ancient societies where birth and rank were still
exalted, he shone from individual worth, a powerful manifestation of the
democratic ideal.

Franklin took his final leave of Paris in 1785 and used the seven-week voyage back to Philadelphia to determine?with amazing accuracy, Dray
says?the location and width of the Gulf Stream.
Observation and reason had proven so effective in unlocking nature''s secrets it
only followed that Franklin and fellow thinkers sought to apply these same
tools to designing more rational societies. Sometimes it worked.

The Franklin Dray conjures up is amiable, inquisitive, open, generous and
serenely above the fray. After all these years, he''s still setting the
standards.

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