I’ve previously written about attending the lecture that Isaac Asimov gave at the Schwab Auditorium at Penn State, but all I could do was say that it was sometime in April 1970.

Now I’ve come across not only the Centre Daily Times archives, but also the archives of the campus newspaper, The Daily Collegian.

So I can pinpoint the date more accurately to Monday April 20, 1970.

The official title of his lecture was “Of Kites and Chlorine” but he mostly improvised the whole thing, basing it very loosely on the science column he had written entitled “The Fateful Lightning” for the June 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It involved, among other things, Benjamin Franklin’s experiment with the kite and lightning and the development of the lightning rod. (I no longer remember how he worked chlorine into the mix, but it was probably from yet another science column, possibly “The Sin of the Scientist” from the November 1969 issue of that same magazine as it dealt in part with poisonous chlorine gas and the social responsibility of scientists.)

He explained how ever since before the dawn of history people have been turning to experts “for protection against the vagaries of nature.”

As he stated: “The tribal elder, the patriarch, the shaman, the medicine man, the wizard, the magician, the seer, the priest, those who were wise because they were old, or wise because they had entry into secret teachings, or wise simply because they had the capacity to foam at the mouth and go into a trance, were in charge of the rituals, and it was to them that men turned for protection.” Even the “Congress of the United States would feel most uneasy about beginning its deliberations without a chaplain mimicking biblical English in an attempt to rain down good judgment upon them from on high—a device that seems very rarely to have done the Congress much good.”

But as Asimov pointed out science was not an alternative for much of human history. He believed that 1752 was something of a turning point.

It was in 1752, exactly, that that began to change; and it was in connection with lightning that the change began. Of all the fatal manifestations of nature, the most personal one, the one which is most clearly an overwhelming attack of a divine being against an individual man, is the lightning bolt. War, disease and famine are all wholesale forms of destruction. Even if to the true believers these misfortunes are all the punishment of sin, they are at least punishment on a mass scale. Not you alone, but all your friends and neighbors suffer the ravages of a conquering army, the agony of the Black Death, the famishing that follows drought-killed grainfields. Your sin is drowned and therefore diminished in the mighty sin of the village, the region, the nation.

The man who is struck by lightning, however, is a personal sinner, for his neighbors are spared and are not even singed. The victim is selected, singled out. He is even more a visible mark of a god’s displeasure than the man who dies of a sudden apoplectic stroke. In the latter case the cause is invisible and may be anything, but in the former there can be no doubt. The divine displeasure is blazoned forth and there is thus a kind of superlative disgrace to the lightning stroke that goes beyond death and lends an added dimension of shame and horror to the thought of being its victim.

Naturally, lightning is closely connected with the divine in our best-known myths. To the Greeks, it was Zeus who hurled the lightning, and to the Norse, the lightning was Thor’s hammer. If you care to turn to the 18th Psalm (verse 14 in particular), you will find that the biblical God also hurls lightning. Or as Julia Ward Howe says in her “Battle Hymn of the Republic”–“He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword.”

And yet, if the lightning stroke were obviously the wrathful weapon of a supernatural being, there were some difficult-to-explain consequences.

As it happens, high objects are more frequently struck by lightning than low objects are. As it also happens, the highest man-made object in the small European town of early modern times was the steeple of the village church. It followed, embarrassingly enough, that the most frequent target of the lightning bolt, then, was the church itself.

I have read that over a thirty-three-year period in eighteenth-century Germany, no less than four hundred church towers were damaged by lightning. What’s more, since church bells were often rung during thunderstorms in an attempt to avert the wrath of the Lord, the bell ringers were in unusual danger and in that same thirty-three-year period, 120 of them were killed.

Yet none of this seemed to shake the preconceived notion that connected lightning with sin and punishment. —Until science took a hand.

Asimov went on to describe the Leyden Jar, which was a device familiar to scientists in the middle of the 18th century that allowed a large electric charge to be built up and discharged. A Leyden Jar may have seemed like a small scale thunder and lightning storm.

But thinking it and demonstrating it were two different things. The man who demonstrated it was our own Benjamin Franklin—the “Renaissance Man” of the American colonies. In June 1752, Franklin prepared a kite, and to its wooden framework he tied a pointed metal rod. He attached a length of twine to the rod and connected the other end to the cord which held the kite. At the lower end of the cord he attached an electrical conductor in the shape of an iron key.

The idea was that if an electric charge built up in the clouds, it would be conducted down the pointed rod and the rain-wet cord to the iron key. Franklin was no fool; he recognized that it might also be conducted down to himself. He therefore tied a non-conducting silk thread to the kite cord and held that silk thread rather than the kite cord itself. What’s more, he remained under a shed so that he and the silk thread would stay dry. He was thus effectively insulated from the lightning.

The strong wind kept the kite aloft and the storm clouds gathered. Eventually the kite vanished into one of the clouds and Franklin noted that the fibers of the kite cord were standing apart. He was certain that an electric charge was present.

With great courage (and this was the riskiest part of the experiment), Franklin brought his knuckle near the key. A spark leaped across the gap from key to knuckle. Franklin heard the crackle and felt the tingle. It was the same spark, crackle and tingle he had experienced a hundred times with Leyden jars. Franklin then took the next step. He had brought with him an uncharged Leyden jar. He brought it to the key and charged it with electricity from the heavens. When he had done so, he found that electricity behaved exactly as did ordinary earthly electricity produced by ordinary earthly means.

Franklin had demonstrated that lightning was an electrical discharge, different from that of the Leyden jar only in being immensely larger.

This meant that the rules that applied to the Leyden jar discharge would also apply to the lightning discharge. Franklin had noted, for instance, that an electrical discharge took place more readily and quietly through a fine point than through a blunt projection. If a needle were attached to a Leyden jar, the charge leaked quietly through the needle point so readily that the jar could never be made to spark and crackle.

Well, then—If a sharp metal rod were placed at the top of some structure and if that were properly grounded, any electric charge accumulating on the structure during a thunderstorm would be quietly discharged and the chances of its building up to the catastrophic loosing of a lightning bolt were greatly diminished.

Franklin advanced the notion of this “lightning rod” in the 1753 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac. The notion was so simple, the principle so clear, the investment in time and material so minute, the nature of the possible relief so great that lightning rods began to rise over buildings in Philadelphia by the hundreds almost at once, then in NewYork and Boston, and soon even in Europe.

And it worked! Where the lightning rods rose, the lightning stroke ceased. For the first time in the history of mankind, one of the scourges of the Universe had been beaten, not by magic and spells and prayer, not by an attempt to subvert the laws of nature—but by science, by an understanding of the laws of nature and by intelligent cooperation with them.

What’s more, the lightning rod was a device that was important to every man. It was not a scholar’s toy; it was a lifesaver for every mechanic’s house and for every farmer’s barn. It was not a distant theory; it was a down-to-earth fact. Most of all, it was the product not of an ingenious tinkerer, but of a logical working out of scientific observations. It was clearly a product of science.

Naturally the forces of superstition did not give in without a struggle. For one thing, they made the instant point that since the lightning bolt was God’s vengeance, it was the height of impiety to try to ward it off.

This, however, was easy to counter. If the lightning were God’s artillery and if it could be countered by a piece of iron, then God’s powers were puny indeed and no minister dared imply that they were. Furthermore, the rain was also sent by God and if it was improper to use lightning rods, it was also improper to use umbrellas or, indeed, to use overcoats to ward off God’s wintry winds.

The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was a temporary source of exultation for the ministers in the churches of Boston. There were not wanting those who pointed out that in his just wrath against the citizens of Boston, God had, with a mighty hand, destroyed the city of Lisbon. This merely succeeded, however, in giving the parishioners a poor notion of the accuracy of the divine aim.

The chief resistance, however, was negative. There was an embarrassed reluctance about putting up lightning rods on churches. It seemed to betray a lack of confidence in God, or worse still, a fullness of confidence in science that would seem to countenance atheism.

But the results of refusing to put up lightning rods proved insupportable. The church steeples remained the highest objects in town and they continued to be hit. It became all too noticeable to all men that the town church, unprotected by lightning rods, was hit while the town brothel, if protected by lightning rods, was not.

One by one, and most reluctantly, the lightning rods went up even over the churches. It became quite noticeable then that a particular church whose steeple had been damaged over and over would stop having any of this kind of trouble once the lightning rod went up.

According to one story I’ve read, the crowning incident took place in the Italian city of Brescia. The church of San Nazaro in that city was unprotected by lightning rods but so confident was the population in its sanctity that they stored a hundred tons of gunpowder in its vaults, considering those vaults to be the safest possible place for it.

But then, in 1767, the church was struck by lightning and the gunpowder went up in a gigantic explosion that destroyed one-sixth of the city and killed three thousand people. That was too much. The lightning rod had won and superstition surrendered. Every lightning rod on a church was evidence of the victory and of the surrender and no one could be so blind as not to see that evidence. It was plain to anyone who would devote any thought to the problem that the proper road to God was not through the self-will of man-made magical formulas, but through the humble exploration of the laws governing the Universe.

Although the victory over lightning was a minor one in a way, for the number killed by lightning in the course of a year is minute compared to the number killed by famine, war or disease, it was crucial. From that moment on, the forces of superstition could fight only rearguard actions and never won a major battle.

Here’s one example. In the 1840s the first really effective anesthetics were introduced and the possibility arose that pain might be abolished as a necessary accompaniment of surgery and that hospitals might cease to be the most exquisitely organized torture chambers in the history ofman. In particular, anesthesia might be used to ease the pains of childbirth.

In 1847 a Scottish physician, James Young Simpson, began to use anesthesia for women in labor, and at once the holy men mounted their rostrums and began their denunciations. From pulpit after pulpit there thundered forth a reminder of the curse visited upon Eve by God after she had eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Male ministers, personally safe from the pain and deadly danger of childbearing, intoned: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…” (Genesis 3:16)

The usual story is that those apostles of mothers’ anguish, these men who worshiped a God whom they viewed as willing to see hundreds of millions of agonized childbirths in each generation, when the means were at hand to ease the pain, were defeated by Simpson himself through a counter quotation from the Bible.

The first “childbirth” recorded in the Bible was that of Eve herself, for she was born of Adam’s rib. And how did that childbirth come about? It is written in Genesis 2:21, “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.”

In short, said Simpson, God had used anesthesia.

Actually, I am not impressed with the counter-quotation. Eve was formed while Adam was still in the Garden and before he had eaten of the fruit and, therefore, before sin had entered the world. It was only after the fruit had been eaten that sin and pain entered the world. Simpson’s argument was, therefore, worthless.

It was just as well it was, too, for to defeat superstition by superstition is useless. What really defeated the forces of mythology in this case was a revolt by women. They insisted on anesthesia and refused to go along with a curse that applied to them but not to the divines who revered it. Queen Victoria herself accepted anesthesia at her next accouchement and that settled that.