Benjamin Franklin believed that a turkey killed with electricity would be more tender than one killed in the traditional way.
In the middle 1700s, people knew of electricity, and experimented with electricity, but didn’t yet know much about it. Franklin’s plan was to zap a turkey using a Leyden Jar.
The Leyden Jar was invented in Germany in 1746. It consisted of a glass jar with metal foil lining the inside and metal foil wrapped around the outside. It also had a metal rod through its cork so that the bottom of the rod extended down into the jar and the top stuck out through the cork. If water was put in the jar, covering the bottom part of the rod, the device could store static electricity.
When the protruding rod and the outside foil were connected, a spark would be produced, just as rubbing your stocking feet on a carpet and touching someone produces a spark. Except a Leyden jar’s spark was bigger.
Franklin took the Leyden Jar to the next level.
Instead of small containers, he used two six-gallon jars and connected them together. With this, he could kill chickens. However, turkeys, which were larger, would only be stunned by the device, and would recover in about 15 minutes.
Franklin figured that if two jars would stun a turkey, five jars would surely kill it. And it did, zapping the life out of a 10-pounder.
Because of a mishap with the two-jar setup, Franklin used excessive caution with the five-jar rig. Here in Franklin’s own words is what happened with the two-jar.
“I have lately made an experiment in electricity that I desire never to repeat. Two nights ago being about to kill a turkey by the shock from two large glass jars containing as much electrical fire as forty common phials, I inadvertently took the whole through my own arms and body, by receiving the fire from the united top wires with one hand, while the other held a chain connected with the outsides of both jars.
“The company present (whose talking to me and to one another, I suppose, occasioned my inattention to what I was about) say that the flash was very great and the crack as loud as a pistol.”
Franklin was senseless for a minute or so before recovering his wits enough to know what had happened.
He wrote: “. . . that part of my hand and fingers which held the chain was left white as though the blood had been driven out, and remained so eight or 10 minutes after, feeling like dead flesh. I had a numbness in my arms and the back of my neck, which continued till the next morning but wore off. Nothing remains now of this shock but a soreness in my breast bone, which feels as if it had been bruised.”
If Franklin had made that mistake with the five-jar setup, turkeys throughout the world would have rejoiced and America would have been short one founding father.
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