By Nick Casey

Years before his famed experiment with a kite, Benjamin Franklin nearly killed himself trying to electrocute a turkey for Thanksgiving. Franklin didn’t always have things right - a point at the center of Philip Dray’s new biography of the Philadelphia electrician, “Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America” (Random House Paperbacks, 2005).

Dray’s portrait of Franklin belies its own title: Franklin’s inventions were never swift acts of paradigmatic theft, but usually succeeded only after a series of false starts and revised experiments.

After the turkey incident, Franklin distanced himself from electrical studies for a brief period, finally publishing “Experiments and Observations in Electricity Made at Philadelphia” in 1751 - and only then reluctantly. Only after further rumination did the idea of a lightning rod materialize. Still, years passed before the New England storm would arrive that carried the inventor’s kite - as well as Franklin himself - into legendary fame.

Several chapters into the book, we witness the scientist secretly launching his kite into a dark Pennsylvania evening, full of foreboding. As thunderheads gathered in the sky, a nervous Franklin watched the string of his kite tighten from the static charges. History or legend, the kite experiment portrays Franklin as half scientist, half myth - caught in that romantic gray area somewhere between inventor and magician.

Of his many titles, profiteer was not one. His inventions numbered in the dozens - including a wood stove, a battery, swim fins and the bifocal lens - yet Franklin did not register a single patent (and, as son of a candlemaker, this was not because of his independent wealth). Rather, Dray draws Franklin as a man who saw the pursuit of intellectual property as a chief distraction from the intellect itself.

A friend of Voltaire, Diderot and the French philosophers, Franklin traveled throughout France as an ambassador-lecturer while demonstrating his lighting rod’s dual abilities of saving lives and advancing natural philosophy. His invention of a glass instrument known as the “armonica” so entranced Mozart with its dulcet sound, the composer scored a quintet for it. Even Franklin tried a hand at chamber music, producing his “String Quartet in F Major” - though as Dray admits, its musicality leaves much to be desired.

Never a fawning biographer, Dray includes examples when Franklin was flat-out wrong.

When the Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather suggested inoculation as a means of preventing small pox, Franklin’s suspicion of the clergy clouded his judgment, leading him to publish anonymous editorials muckraking the new method. When rebel slaves joined the pirates threatening colonial ports, Franklin cast public doubt not on the institution of slavery, but instead on the mental capability of the African-Americans. Its own self-correcting charter riddled Franklin’s era of Enlightenment with flaws. His French colleagues presented the best example when their idealistic revolution disintegrated into a nightmare of guillotines.

Dray ends with a tender point for Franklin’s score, enough to forgive the electrician for any accidental shocks he either gave or received. In the final chapter of “Stealing God’s Thunder,” an elderly, trembling Franklin enters Congress with the country’s first petition to abolish American slavery. Though the measure fails and Franklin dies shortly afterward, we see that when Benjamin Franklin passed away, America lost perhaps its bravest founding father. He was not only willing to battle the electrical storm, he was also the only figure of the country’s founding with the courage to challenge the South.