Benjamin Franklin’s Leyden-jar battery at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia
4 December 2020
Very often, so-called “coinages” by famous people are not actually the first use of the word. Famous people often get credit for coinages because either their writing survives when that of less famous people disappears into the mists of time or because people read the works of famous people, while those of the less famous languish unopened on library shelves. (The latter is becoming less common in this age of digitization and full-text search.) This is further compounded by the fact that it is rare for the actual first use of a word to be recorded at all. It happens with some regularity with scientific and technical terms, but not for most words. But sometimes a famous person does actually coin a word.
Such is the case with the electrical sense of the word battery, which was coined by Benjamin Franklin. And in this case, it is a technical term, and Franklin was well-known for his experiments in electricity. He was a serious and well-respected scientist. (During his lifetime, Franklin was perhaps the most famous North American, surpassing even George Washington in global celebrity.) So, it does not seem odd that he would coin such a term.
Franklin used the term electrical battery twice in a letter describing his electrical experiments to Peter Collinson, one of the founders of the Royal Society and a patron of the American Philosophical Society, which had been founded by Franklin. The exact date of the letter is somewhat uncertain, as the published version contains two dates. The first, at the head of the letter is 1748. Then at the end, Franklin signs it with the date 29 April 1749. It’s possible he started the letter in one year and finished it in the next—it is a long letter, and the gap between New Year’s Day and 29 April is not that extreme when one considers under the calendar of that time the new year started on 25 March; so Franklin may have penned the letter over the course of a little more than a month. Or perhaps, like many of us do today at the start of a new year, he simply wrote the wrong year before correcting it later. Another possibility is that one of the dates could be a later editorial intervention. (I haven’t examined the actual manuscript or facsimile thereof, only the published version.)
Franklin describes and names his battery thusly:
Upon this we made what we called an electrical-battery, consisting of eleven panes of large sash-glass, arm'd with thin leaden plates, pasted on each side, placed vertically, and supported at two inches distance on silk cords, with thick hooks of leaden wire, one from each side, standing upright, distant from each other, and convenient communications of wire and chain, from the giving fide of one pane, to the receiving side of the other.
Then at the close of the letter, Franklin outlines some impractical, but entertaining, uses of electricity:
Chagrined a little that we have been hitherto able to produce nothing in this way of use to mankind; and the hot weather coming on, when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, it is proposed to put an end to them for this season, somewhat humorously, in a party of pleasure, on the banks of Skuylkil. Spirits, at the same time, are to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river, without any other conductor than the water; an experiment which we some time since performed, to the amazement of many. A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle: when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France, and Germany, are to be drank in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery.
Franklin probably used battery because the array of Leyden jars that formed his device resembled, after a fashion, an artillery battery.
Sources:
Franklin, Benjamin. “Letter IV: To Peter Collinson.” Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America. London: David Henry, 1769, 28, 37–38. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. battery, n.
Photo credit: Adam Cooperstein, 2013, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.