Benjamin Franklin is mentioned in the "This Week in History" section of this issue. Our "Picture of the Week" is dedicated to this famous American.

The memorial of Benjamin Franklin pictured here is located at The Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The sculpture is 20 feet high and weighs 30 tons.

Franklin is famous for being a scientist, an inventor, a printer a philosopher, a musician, and an economist. Today, he is known as one of America's Founding Fathers.

Benjamin Franklin lived from 1706 to 1970.

One of the things that Franklin is most famous for is his research on electricity. He suspected that lightning was an electrical current in nature, and he was curious to test to see if he was correct. He decided to test his theory by seeing if lightning would pass through metal. Franklin chose to use a metal key attached to a kite to test this theory. By using both the key and a kite, Franklin successfully proved that lightning was actually a stream of electrified air. He proved this theory in June of 1752 on what many of us know as his stormy kite flight. Franklin's discovery that night led him to develop many of the terms still used in science today when discussing electricity-related topics such as: battery, conductor, charge, discharge, uncharged, negative, and electrician.

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