History for the day: 1752: Franklin flies kite

History.com has this for 10 June:

On 10 June 1752, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm and collected a charge in a Leyden jar when the kite was struck by lightning, enabling him to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning. Franklin became interested in electricity in the mid-1740s, a time when much was still unknown on the topic, and spent almost a decade conducting electrical experiments. He coined a number of terms used today, including battery, conductor, and electrician. He also invented the lightning rod, used to protect buildings and ships.
Franklin was born on 17 January 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts, to a candle and soap maker named Josiah Franklin, who fathered seventeen children, and his wife Abiah Folger. Franklin’s formal education ended at age ten, when he went to work as an apprentice to his brother James, a printer. In 1723, following a dispute with his brother, Franklin left Boston and ended up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he found work as a printer. Following a brief stint as a printer in London, England, Franklin returned to Philadelphia and became a successful businessman. His publishing ventures included the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack, a collection of homespun proverbs advocating hard work and honesty in order to get ahead. The Almanack, which Franklin first published in 1733 under the pen name Richard Saunders, included such wisdom as: “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Whether or not Franklin followed this advice in his own life, he came to represent the classic American overachiever. In addition to his accomplishments in business and science, he is noted for his numerous civic contributions; among other things, he developed a library, an insurance company, a city hospital, and an academy in Philadelphia that would later become the University of Pennsylvania.
Most significantly, Franklin was one of the founding fathers of the United States, and had a career as a statesman that spanned four decades. He served as a legislator in Pennsylvania, as well as a diplomat in England and France. He is the only politician to have signed all four documents fundamental to the creation of the US: the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Treaty of Alliance with France in 1778, the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which established peace with Great Britain, and the Constitution in 1787.
Franklin died, aged 84 on 17 April 1790, in Philadelphia, and remains one of the leading figures in American history.

Rico says that, as Sheldon so patiently explained on a recent Big Bang Theory, Franklin did not discover electricity, he merely discovered that lightning was electricity...