writes,[1] "is in all bodies, more or less, as well as electrical fire. Perhaps they may be different modifications of the same element; or they may be different elements. The latter is by some suspected. If they are different things, yet they may and do subsist together in the same body."
Franklin's work did not at first receive from European philosophers the attention which it deserved; although Watson generously endeavoured to make the colonial writer's merits known,[2] and inserted some of Franklin's letters in one of his own papers communicated to the Royal Society. But an account of Franklin's discoveries, which had been printed in England, happened to fall into the hands of the naturalist Buffon, who was so much impressed that he secured the issue of a French translation of the work; and it was this publication which, as we have seen, gave such offence to Nollet. The success of a plan proposed by Franklin for drawing lightning from the clouds soon engaged public attention everywhere; and in a short time the triumph of the one-fluid theory of electricity, as the hypothesis of Watson and Franklin is generally called, was complete. Nollet, who was obdurate, "lived to see himself the last of his sect, except Monsieur B— of Paris, his élève and immediate disciple."[3]
The theory of effluvia was finally overthrown, and replaced by that of action at a distance, by the labours of one of Franklin's continental followers, Francis Ulrich Theodore Aepinus[4] (b. 1724, d. 1802). The doctrine that glass is impermeable to electricity, which had formed the basis of Franklin's theory of the Leyden phial, was generalized by Aepinus[5] and his co-worker Johann Karl Wilcke (b. 1732, d. 1796) into the law that all non-conductors are impermeable to the
- ↑ Letter y.
- ↑ Phil. Trans. xlvii, p. 202. Watson agreed with Nollet in rejecting Franklin's theory of the impermeability of glass.
- ↑ Franklin's Autobiography.
- ↑ This philosopher's surname had been hellenized from its original form Hoeck to αἰπεινός by one of his ancestors, a distinguished theologian.
- ↑ F. V. T. Aepinus Tentamen Theoriae Electricitatis et Magnetismi: St. Petersburg, 1759.
