Entries tagged with tercentenary

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Tercentenary Minus Zero, Liftoff!

Today is the day! Ben Franklin turns 300. All citizens of the United States, fans of public libraries, wearers of bifocals, users of electricity, volunteer firefighters, and lovers of the Glass Armonica should celebrate.

I persuaded Fermilab's daily newsletter to run a 200-word item and volunteered to write it.

In other news, Stardust made it home Sunday with samples from Comet Wild 2. I plan to give a talk at Confusion next weekend covering Stardust, Genesis, and Deep Impact.

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Ben Franklin: Run-Up to Birthday 300

Here are some cool links concerning Ben Franklin. The birthday falls next Tuesday.

The Franklin Tercentenary homepage is at http://www.benfranklin300.org.

Robert A. Morse has instructions on duplicating Franklin's experiments, and making equipment to do so out of modern materials-- Leyden Jars made from film canisters, aluminum foil, and paper clips, for example. (Thanks to

shimgray for finding this.)

Franklin invented a marvelous musical instrument based on the eerie ringing sound emitted when the rim of a wine glass is rubbed. It's known as the Armonica or "Glass Harmonica".

Franklin studied the broad current of warm water in the North Atlantic and gave the Gulf Stream its name.

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Curious George Goes to the Post Office

Fandom's postman Harry Andruschak points out a list of the stamps that will be issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 2006.

Highlights:

Favorite Children's Book Animals.

Wonders of America: Land of Superlatives. Probably nice, but it will be hard to measure up to the U-Haul "weird science" series of rental-truck graphics.

Distinguished American Diplomats, which led me to learn about Hiram Bingham IV. (I already knew about his dad, Hiram Bingham III, discoverer of the lost city of Macchu-Picchu, autogiro pilot, and governor, for a single day, of Connecticut.)

Ten DC Comics heroes. Half of the pane of 20 will be portraits of the characters; the other half will show individual comic book covers devoted to their exploits. The characters include Aquaman, Batman, The Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Plastic Man, Supergirl, Superman and Wonder Woman.

Four depictions of the accomplishments of Ben "Tercentenary Lad" Franklin.

Holiday Snowflakes, from photomicrographs by physicist Kenneth Libbrecht.

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Franklin: The Quest for Paper Copies

You may recall my entry about Ben Franklin's book Experiments and Observations on Electricity. Just checked the reliable abebooks. The book is remarkably scarce. My choices are:

1. The Octavo Press CD-ROM facsimile, about $25;

2. The Octavo Press fancy super-scholarly ultra-facsimile, on three CD-ROMs, for $225;

3. Original copies, starting around $8000.

You'd think someone would have put an inexpensive edition into print, sometime in the past two and a half centuries. Else maybe the book is not as important as I thought.

Guess I'll hit a library. If I like the book enough, maybe I'll buy the CD-ROM...

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A Shocking Omission

I've just conceived a desire to look at Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, which you'd think would be on the Web someplace, being in the public domain and all. But I can't find a copy.

(Ben's tercentenary is coming up, which reminds me that I've never read his Autobiography, and I really should before 17 January 2006, don't you think? That book, at least, is available from Project Gutenberg.)