Ben Franklin's Lightning Experiments Digitized

[app103]

Benjamin Franklin's 1752 paper, describing his lightning experiments with a kite, is now online (in .pdf format) for a limited time.

Included in this document is Ben Franklin's recipe for cooking a tender turkey. 

http://www.journals....ume=47&spage=202

^{Note: When reading this document it will be necessary to replace many f-like characters, in your mind, with 's'. (I am sure glad we don't spell like that any more)}

[Deozaan]

To me that raises the following question:

Why are some of the S letters written like an F but not all of them? There are places that it has both right next to each other. Such as the word "less" written as "lefs." Makes no "fense" to me.

[Edvard]

There were certain rules, obviously and if I remember correctly, it's always the first 's' gets it. I remember a friend of mine and I used to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and his favorite tobacco brand came in a marshmallow-green tin and was called "Three Castles" except the first 's' looked like an 'f' so we pronounced it (on purpose) "three caftuls"
 Ahh... memories

[housetier]

if I remember correctly there are three places where "S" can be in a word:

• at the beginning of a word
• somewhere in the middle of a word
• at the end of a word

And for some reason the typesetters of that time chose to make each of those cases look differently.

[Edvard]

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

[Eóin]

Very interesting.