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Welcome to the 8th Science Ben Franklin wiki!

**Facts About Ben Franklin By:Sylvia Snyderman **
Ben Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his many creations were the lightning rod, Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and the flexible urinary catheter an tube that goes up the patients blatter and allows the patient to have liquids injected in to his bladder or for the patient to pee at his will, pretty cool right? Franklin never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote, "... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously." In 1750 he published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm, which appeared capable of becoming a lightning storm. On May 10, 1752 Thomas-Francois Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot (12 m)-tall iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. On June 15 Franklin may possibly have conducted his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia successfully extracting sparks from a cloud, although there are theories that suggest he never performed the experiment.