By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham
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| October 30, 2011 | 7
By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham
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7 Comments
Add CommentSo we are going to have bionic body parts operated by electrical signals from the brain all because Ben Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm and did not get turned into barbecued chicken? It causes us to wonder if the idiotic things we do will have any long term consequences.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo HubertB, Of course there will be long term consequences, brings to mind the incredible "half-life" of spent fuel rods from our nuclear generated electricity. Left up to future scientists to surely find viable ways to dispose of it.
Some others who tried tha same experiment were barbequed. Franklin was lucky.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrankfurters too, they can fly away on a kite.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about that ink spot in the hands of an adult 8th grader. Disneyland/world
IBM's trash pile gave us Microsoft and Apple.
These Franklinstein stories make me feel much better about my own idiocy. I must have inspired half the planet by now.
TY authors - nice presentation.
Franklin didn't hold the kite string. Someone else got the kite flying and then anchored the end to a post.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to see some documentation of the leaps of logic the picture makes. Since Mary Shelley chose the name of the castle where a famous alchemist lived shortly after boating near it, I wonder if the trip through Germany had as much influence on her as the electrical stimulation of muscle did. Actually we know she was near the castle but I've never seen anything that indicates that she had exposure to electrical muscle stimulation or even heard about it at all. Maybe neither thing had anything to do with her book.
One need not look very far:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth" - Mary Shelley, from the preface to the novel.
This story may be the origin of modern environmentalism. The moral? Science is bad. Humans should not intervene into nature. They ought to emulate the lower species that don't do that. In fact, now that you mention it, humans are bad. The fewer of them that we have, the better.
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