Thanksgiving
November 27-28, 2014
November 27, 2014, the fourth
Thursday of
November, is
Thanksgiving Day in the
United States. Tikalon is on
holiday with the rest of the country, but I've collected some interesting Thanksgiving-related items from previous posts.[1-2]
Turkey is the traditional holiday meal on Thanksgiving Day in the United States, although some people expand their menus, and their waistlines, with an entrée called turducken.
(Source image from Wikimedia Commons)
Turkey is the traditional centerpiece of this holiday dinner, and
Benjamin Franklin is closely associated with turkey for several reasons. Franklin
preferred the turkey to the
bald eagle as the
symbol of the United States. As he wrote in a
letter to his
daughter,
Sarah Bache, on January 26, 1784,
"For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country... The Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America."[3]
Franklin was an early "
Electrician," and he performed some of the first
experiments with
electricity after
retiring from his
printing business in 1745. Franklin believed that
electrocuted turkeys were much more tender than otherwise prepared birds. In the
summer of 1749, Franklin hosted a
barbecue in which an electrocuted turkey was
roasted and served. The
fire was lighted electrically, and Franklin had improvised an
electrically actuated motor to
rotate the turkey on a
spit.[4]
Franklin may have tempered his experiments with turkeys after 1750. On December 23, 1750, Franklin attempted to electrocute a turkey for his
Christmas dinner. He used two large
Leyden jars (a primitive air
dielectric capacitor) which he described as having the
capacitance of forty typical jars. He took a
shock through his
arms that knocked him
unconscious. When he came to his
senses, he felt a "violent, quick shaking of my body, which gradually remitted."[4]
Franklin was numb for a while, and he was sore for a few days thereafter. Franklin communicated this accident to others who were experimenting with electricity to warn them of the
dangers.[4] He went on to conduct experiments that proved that
electric charge was
conserved, and he
invented the
lightning rod after observing that sharp points more easily released and accepted charge. His experiments are summarized in his
paper, "Experiments and Observations on Electricity."[5]
(An engraving of Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, page 159 (Fig. 82) of Natural Philosophy for Common and High Schools (1881) by Le Roy C. Cooley, via Wikimedia Commons.)
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References:
- Thanksgiving, This Blog, November 24-25, 2011.
- Physicists Prefer Turkeys, This Blog, April 30, 2007.
- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Sarah Bache, January 26, 1784, The Library of Congress.
- December 23, 1750: Ben Franklin Attempts to Electrocute a Turkey, APS News vol. 15, no. 11 (December 2006).
- Benjamin Franklin, "Experiments and Observations on Electricity," Minutes of a Meeting of the Royal Society, June 6, 1751 (Via Google Books).
Permanent Link to this article
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