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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Benjamin Franklin's 1752 paper on experimenting with electricity from thunderstorms, collected in a Leyden jar, is not to be missed.

http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/47/565.full.p...

After edit:

To answer a question raised by another HN user, the Wikipedia article on the medial s character in older printed English-language books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

is helpful about the history of printing that character.

View on HN

"Make a small cross, of two light strips of cedar; the arms so long, as to reach the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief, when extended: tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross; so you have the body of a kite..."

Love it.

Also, the first paper by Newton, on his new theory about light and colour. He was still just a "Mr."!

http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/69-80/3075....

A Professor before becoming a Dr... Those were the days...

I'm pretty sure Tony Hoare went straight from Elliot Brothers to a Professor of CS post in '68 and then onto a Professorship at Oxford.

There are plenty of professors out there without PhDs, even nowadays.

Not at Cambridge, and not in Physics, but they exist.

In my school at least, they were not called professors if they did not have a PhD, just lecturers.

That first referenced paper is very much in 'don't try this at home' territory.

Pity the Sony Bono copyright law didn't apply or Franklin's decedents would still have the copyright on electricity!

And Trinity College would be collecting a royalty everytime an apple fell off a tree!

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