Benjamin Franklin on Electricity

jtbell

After posting just now in another forum about how our assignment of positive and negative charge goes back to Benjamin Franklin, I looked to see if his "Experiments and Observations on Electricity" (published in London in 1751) was available anywhere. About 25 years ago, I had a lot of fun reading an annotated reprint of it that I found in a library, and even quoted bits of it in some of my classes.

Amazingly, it appears to be out of print in paper form. I did find the following:

An online copy of the original edition, at the Rare Book Room.

A CD-ROM of the original edition, by Octavo Editions, also available from amazon.com.

A French translation on Project Gutenberg.