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THE KITE C 1755   One doctor of lightning, floating on his back down a river held his kite high, a sail in the sky of silk (B Franklin once let a kite tow him across a sizeable lake) Sail of wind and rain in diamond-shape at the end of which a child was, too, a kind of lightning sitting on the sill of a window or standing just inside a door will emit a luminous liquid, slightly viscous, which flashed an instant above the gathered crowd honing down into a long string that held a single hand well in place forcing the connected person to quickly learn the rigour that rules over such childish things once mixed with copper, oiled paper, and an impending storm     BENJAMIN FRANKLIN   used books, people, wires, and wax – it was really quite simple –   Franklin wandering lost between it all could nonetheless feel the tiniest sparkling parts alive inside the glass,   and of something given off deep within that somehow let Isaac Newton live Yet Franklin never quite met him and was left to make a meticulous record of the weather, the water, and the stars in the skies ajar from the deck of the ship heading home again, c 1725 It was he who first asserted that all electricity is a single thing and who solved the mystery of the Leyden jar   So, back to the books, the corks, and the wax, while the fresh water from a tea kettle came as a shock or maybe as a memory – a librarian in Latin opening the windows during thunderstorms so that all could read by the lightning     THE ELECTRIC FORTUNE-TELLER   made and marketed by Georg Heinrich Seiferheld, 1757-1818, was just one among a series of ghostly devices made of lights, buttons, boxes, and small Leyden jars all hidden in a miniature temple made of shook-foil shaken and in the hand, a book on which was written in sparks: “This darkness is permissible” So, off went