Einstein Did What?!

Silly slip-ups from a few of history's greatest genius minds

- Katie Spalding

Punked by Benjamin Franklin 

To give Franklin his due, he made groundbreaking discoveries in the field of electronics. He invented both battery (the word) and batteries (the thing) and came up with the concept of "positive" and "negative" charges.

But this comes second to Franklin's true electrical vocation: practical jokes.

Picture the scene: It's summer 1749 and you've been invited to a party at your good pal Ben's house. You sit down, pick up your wine glass to take a sip and are hit with an electric shock straight to the mouth.

This was a typical hazard of being friends with Benjamin Franklin. Not only did his guests put up with electrified wine glasses, they were also spooked by dancing spiders made from cork and string, and invited to ... send sparks of electricity between one another through air kisses.

Franklin also invented a party game called Treason, in which players were told to touch a portrait of King George and would receive a shock when they did so. He even adapted the game to work with multiple players at once. "If a Ring of Persons take a Shock among them," he wrote, I assume while giggling like the villain from a 1940s B movie, "the Experiment is called the Conspiracy!"

The father of electricity first encountered its wonders after witnessing an experiment-slash-vaudeville show in 1743, and was electrified by the experience, to say the least.

"I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this," he wrote to fellow electrician Peter Collinson.

Collinson had just sent Franklin an exciting gift: a Leyden jar. Physicists had been able to generate electricity for millennia. But the Leyden jar allowed them to store and use it on demand. It would take nearly 7 trillion jars to store the amount of electricity in a single AA battery today. But for physicists of the time, a whole new world of experiments had opened up.