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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:11
Welcome back to Scoring the Strange. This is Pascual, back to join, at least for the first segment of episode 65, where we will be talking about Ben Franklin and the myths and misunderstandings and some of the more interesting facts about his life. How are you guys doing?

0:00:54
Celestia Ward: Pretty good.

0:00:55
BR: Good.

0:00:56
PR: Good. So, I guess we should just jump right into it and see what we’re skeptical of this week.

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0:01:11
BR: So I have an update. As astute listeners may recall, we did that whole fun, is Elvis in a Home Alone story. Originally, I was contacted by a guy named Dan, and Dan asked me about it, and I looked into it a bit. I didn’t and didn’t claim to do a whole in-depth investigation, but I sort of talked about the reasons why I was skeptical of the matter, and we challenged Kenny Biddle.

CW: That was our first mistake right there.

0:01:41
BR: Right, exactly. So Kenny, because apparently he’s got nothing better to do, jumped on it and did a fantastic job, and we talked about that recently. And as a follow-up, I contacted the guy that originally wrote to me, and I wanted to just, because Kenny and I were talking about it, and I said, well, I’d be curious to know whether he accepts our findings, because a lot of times, as you all know, conspiracy theorists are notorious for like, yeah, but, you know, then they move in the goalposts and, you know, the goalposts are like they’re on the other side of the field and they’re in the next state.

0:02:15
CW: Well, I have hope for this guy. He sounded like he wanted to listen to reason.

0:02:20
BR: Yes. So I replied back to him a couple of days ago and I was just sort of curious to, you know, to see what he was going to say. You know, I still don’t believe it or yes. Thank you so much. Here’s a check for $2,000 or what and sure enough. He wrote back says this is from a guy named Dan Ben. “Thank you and Kenny Biddle for getting to the bottom of this. I am now convinced. By the way, I’m a TV producer developing a series called conspiracy cubicle and this is my pilot conspiracy since I am so passionate about it you providing a conclusion now gives me an ending.” And then he goes on to say that he’d like to credit us and thanks again. So, cool! Score!

0:02:58
CW: Hey, yeah!

PR: Awesome!

CW: Not often you get a skeptical victory like that all’s well that ends well.

0:03:05
BR: Well, and what I point out, I thanked him for getting back to me and I did delicately point out that the fact is that a lot of conspiracy theories are not going to be as concretely and discreetly debunked as this one. I mean this was this is one where he said at the outset if you give me the the actor’s name and a photo comparison I’ll believe you and that’s exactly what we did. So I said well just so you’re aware I mean you know if you start getting into chemtrails 9-11 and stuff we can answer your questions. Whether people accept that or not is a different matter.

0:03:43
CW: Yes. Well, that’s good that that had a solid answer. Speaking of ways that Elvis might manifest himself upon us in this day and age, have you guys heard of the newly discovered time warp just outside Las Vegas?

0:03:58
BR: Is that a new attraction on the strip or what?

0:04:01
PR: Does it involve a character named Frankenfurter?

CW: I wish. Oh, I would love to go see that. But it is becoming a little bit of a tourist attraction in terms of people are excited about it and wanting to go drive over there. And I suppose crypto tourism would be a topic we should discuss in the future. But right now I was hit with a story on KVVU5, which is our local Fox affiliate down here. And even though they’re a Fox channel, they’re supposed to do real news. And they gave a big story to the discovery of this supposed time anomaly. He’s even named it the Vista Vegas Interstate Time and Space or Space Time Anomaly. Paranormal investigator Joshua P. Warren has been measuring the rate of time all over southern Nevada. And he said last week he found that time had slowed down. That’s according to the KVVU right up here. He said he had measured multiple places between Las Vegas and Area 51, but the only place he got a reading was in the desert just north of the city between I-15 and Route 93. Now that’s kind of up on the way towards, sort of towards Utah or Northern Nevada. I’ve actually driven right past there because I had to work a gig in Alamo, Nevada, which is right up that way. And to go back to the article here, the weird thing, the real Holy Grail here was what we picked up with this brand new piece of technology, Warren said. Now, do you guys spot the red flags in there?

BR: Yes, a little bit.

0:05:35
PR: A little bit.

0:05:37
BR: Now, let me just preface this by saying I have encountered Joshua P. Warren, because I like to throw the P in there because he does, several times. If he reads my most recent book, Investigating Ghosts, he will find himself mentioned several times, none of them flatteringly, just FYI, mostly out of concerns for his lack of scientific expertise. And I do recall that in 2015, I was interviewed as the skeptic for a piece on Huffington Post by David Moy. And this guy, Joshua P. Warren, claimed that he had photographic proof of Abraham Lincoln’s spirit in the White House.

0:06:18
CW: Of course he did.

0:06:19
BR: Of course he did. And I, so Moy contacted me, knowing some of what I do, and he asked me to explain it and I did. So I haven’t met Warren personally, but I’m guessing he’s not a real fan of mine.

0:06:32
CW: Well, he’s not a real fan of anybody who’s a naysayer about his work. And I gotta say, I feel like I earned a little skeptic, you know, Girl Scout badge here because this is the first pseudoscientist slash crank slash paranormal investigator who took the time to privately message me. And he linked me to his latest podcast, which he called Dealing with Criticism! And it was a 17-minute diatribe about what a disservice all of us haters are doing when we point out that he’s not using real science and there’s a million ways that this can go wrong.

0:07:14
BR: How dare you, sir?

0:07:17
CW: Yes, he did the same thing to Sharon Hill. He seems to have messaged everybody that commented in a negative way on the KVVU 5 story. I went ahead and wrote KVVU a whole letter and sent it to the reporter as well as her boss talking about why this, you know, they printed this without any sort of back story, without any sort of credible authority that they can ask about space time and physics.

0:07:42
BR:Really? They couldn’t find a single physicist or someone with an actual science degree to comment on this? Really?

0:07:50
CW: But we do have a hero that emerges from this story in the form of a physics student, which I’ll get to soon. Basically, the time anomaly he’s describing is, he says, that time itself was slowing down about 20 milliseconds. And this only happened at one spot on June 18th of 2018, in that spot right off the interstate by Route 93. Now obviously, if you’re doing measurements with a device and you have one instance where something is wonky, well, okay, that’s… he’s literally anomaly hunting. He has found something and called it a time anomaly. And we usually make fun of paranormal investigators for anomaly hunting, but in this case he’s being very open about it. He’s in the desert hunting for anomalies. And I did do a little looking into his background to see, you know, okay, does this guy have a legit science degree? No, he doesn’t. He apparently hosts, and this bugged me, he hosts an AM radio show called Speaking of Strange, and that’s just a little too close to our title.

0:08:55
PR: Yeah, we might need to call a lawyer about that one.

CW: Yeah. So he also sells these things, or he promotes these things on his website called Radionics Boxes, also known as the physical wishing machine. Hand built by a fellow named Dr. Mulder for $195 on up, you can get other little doohickeys added to it. It’s basically a box of knobs and dials and it’s to, quote, help your desires manifest in an almost magical way by tuning your thoughts.

0:09:37
BR: I am guessing that most people that buy this wish they hadn’t. That’s my guess.

0:09:41
CW: We don’t, oddly enough we don’t see those testimonies. Knowing all this and then looking at what he has seen here with this device, he is absolutely sure that he has proven. In fact, he even says and I quote him here, the big question at this point is not whether or not we have these anomalies, but what’s causing them. Is this something natural that gives us a window, a gateway into another world or another level of reality? Or is this a byproduct of some kind of weird technology, be it something secret and man-made or something that’s extraterrestrial, Warren said.

0:10:19
BR: Those are the only two explanations I can think of.

PR: Actually, I have some answers for that question actually.

0:10:27
CW: Yeah, he jumped right over that hurdle of whether or not the anomaly exists and goes right to now we get to explain it.

0:10:36
PR: Right. That’s just how science works I guess.

0:10:40
CW: Yes.

0:10:41
PR: So, I mean, the funny thing is this guy, you know, talks about finding a time anomaly on Earth and first off assumes that he just discovered that there is such a thing. The thing is is that science has proven those exist. We have a well it’s actually a pair of detectors they’re 3,000 miles apart they’re called LIGO the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and what they are these two, each one is a detector that’s constructed of two four-kilometer-long vacuum tunnels that shoot lasers in different directions, like north and west, or I think maybe east. Lasers! Yeah, and it’s in an L shape, and so the returning light is measured, and these lasers are shot at the exact same nanosecond, and they’re measured as they return after I think a couple hundred times going out. And over time, if a gravitational wave hits Earth, the returning light on one leg of the detector goes out of sync from the other. And it’s because the nature of gravitational waves is, you know, it’s kind of unidirectional, so whichever direction it comes from will warp the leg that corresponds with it. And what happens is it demonstrates a slight ripple in space-time, essentially, which has been observed five times coming from black holes that have collided, and a sixth time from the collision of two neutron stars. And this is just last year, in 2017. And these two LIGO sites are 3,000 kilometers apart, as I mentioned. One’s in Livingston, Louisiana, the other’s in Hanford, Washington. And the reason they’re so far apart is because they can detect like the most minuscule vibrations from like trucks driving by or even just vibrations from within the facility, like people bumping into stuff. And because they’re so far apart, they’re able to tell if something’s coming from outer space or if it’s just something it’s picking up locally, which I think is kind of the important thing to keep in mind with a guy who’s trying to detect something with a little detector, you know, a handheld detector on a single spot. I mean…

0:12:57
CW: By an interstate.

0:12:58
PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:12:59
BR: Right, I mean, something off the shelf at Best Buy or Radio Shack is probably not going to work.

0:13:03
PR: Well, you know, you need that redundancy to confirm where it’s coming from to begin with. And again, we know this stuff exists, I mean, time warp is a kind of silly word to use for it, but space-time does bend as a result of gravitational waves, so we have measured this before. This is nothing groundbreaking on his part.

CW: Well, yes, speaking of breaking ground, do you want to imagine whether or not Joshua P. Warren dug a 3,000 kilometer tunnel and made a vacuum and used lasers? Or did he measure this time warp another way?

0:13:41
BR: I’m guessing B.

0:13:43
CW: Yes, well I looked it up. He claims he measured it with a device called the DT meter, or differential time meter, which was invented by a Silicon Valley engineer named Ron Heath. Now I looked this up, and I wasn’t the only one. I’m going to give some credit to a physics student, an enterprising physics student named Rob Lee here, who also looked up the device. And right on the website for the device that’s, you know, he’s selling these for $200 and some dollars. And he says right here on the instructions that the purpose of owning this meter is to detect and measure the effects of technology that is able to bend space-time. Examples of this technology would be a UFO that bends space-time or uses gravity as part of its propulsion system. And there’s a typo in it’s. There should not be an apostrophe there and there is. Sorry, copy editor in me, whenever I see typos, I’m like, this was not professionally done. Who’d have thought? So, Rob Lee, like I said, he just calls himself a physics student, and he was one of the folks on Facebook who dug into this. He wrote a great little write-up called The Null Hypothesis, Science of Skepticism is his blog, and he titled this one, Let’s Do the Time Warp Again? Examining the Vegas Interstate Time Anomaly. You can Google that, Rob Lee, L-E-A, and he did a great little write-up here, and he points out that on the website for the DT meter, it points out that there is a noise level, there’s a level of acceptable noise that will happen, and the 20 millisecond difference that was measured was above that. So at least he cleared the noise level that the manufacturer claims is built into the device. However, the manufacturer said for optimum results and to avoid more noise, you should bury the cable and avoid extremely high temperatures.

0:15:50
BR: Where was this?

0:15:51
CW: This was done right outside Las Vegas, which last week, I remember temperatures got up to about 110 out here.

0:15:57
PR: Nice mild climate.

0:15:59
CW: Yes, and in the sun it gets even higher. Now Joshua P. Warren has not been forthcoming about his procedures. Rob Lee said that he did email him asking him or message him and as far as I know he’s not heard back yet. But it does appear that he just was driving all over Vegas and outside of Vegas towards Area 51 just laying this cable down over rocks and around places and if it wasn’t done in a straight way, if it was not done in any way to protect it from temperatures, then it makes total sense, as Mr. Lee pointed out, that you have cable expansion happening. Because this DT meter doesn’t necessarily measure the warpage of space-time, it measures how fast a charge goes through a cable. If you change the dimensions of that cable, you’re changing the reading. He also said that the way it’s devised is it shoots the charge and then averages that over a period of five seconds. So if there’s one little glitch, if you have a slight power loss, if you have something go wrong, it will magnify that because it’ll repeat it until you get five seconds worth and then suddenly it can make very small glitches appear large. So there’s a couple ways this could have gone wrong. I am not an engineer or a physics expert, so I can’t for sure put my finger on it, but if Joshua P. Warren is more forthcoming with his methods and his protocol, if there was a protocol, then I’m pretty sure an engineer could get to the heart of this fairly simply here.

0:17:32
PR: Yeah, that’s a pretty amazing claim based on a piece of technology that, you know, just looking at it, it’s funny because it actually does, in a sense, the way it reads the pulses kind of is similar to how the LIGO works in that it’s sending something out and waiting for it to come back and timing it. And so, in a sense, it is working in that same way except that, you know, so the principles there, except, you know, it’s not in a vacuum, it’s not engineered to the micrometer, that it you know has, I mean it’s just a wire being laid out on the ground.

CW: This reminds me of the same, the very same principle that two tin cans connected with a string work the same way a telephone does.

PR: Exactly.

BR: It’s all the same really, just really hard.

CW: Well this this has taken off in the popular news media. Newsweek wrote about it yesterday and of course commented on their claim too. It quotes, again, it just quotes him as a researcher and it doesn’t have anybody quoted here that could rebut what happened. And it even sort of, in the Newsweek article, which is written by Scottie Andrew on July 1st here, it even added some credibility here. I’ll read the paragraph that bothers me. Though Warren didn’t make his discovery with conventional science, NASA scientists found similar wrinkles in the time-space fabric. The agency’s Gravity Probe B asserted Einstein’s claims that the Earth’s gravity affected space and time travel. Researchers observed gyroscopes and found small changes in the direction they spun as they moved around Earth’s gravitational pull, NBC News reported in 2011. Time warps aren’t just the stuff of science fiction anymore. Dot, dot, dot.

0:19:22
BR: Wow.

0:19:23
CW: So, yeah, thanks Newsweek. Thanks for that.

0:19:25
BR: That is a shocking and appalling lack of journalism.

0:19:29
CW: Yes, so they sort of mention NASA in there and basically just kind of imply that, wow, NASA kind of agrees with this guy. This is quite possible, but I went ahead and took the trouble of listening to his 17-minute podcast on dealing with criticism.

0:19:47
BR: Was there a lot of crying, a lot of whining?

0:19:52
PR: Was it just him describing, step one, put fingers in ears, step two, explain la la la la la la la.

0:20:01
CW: Well, as somebody else pointed out, he could have taken that 17 minutes and explained his protocols, explained how others could replicate his results and explain how he got this result and how he was replicating it, but he didn’t do any of that. He first pointed out that, hey, 98% of the feedback I got was positive. So he wanted to point out that he did have cheerleaders.

BR: Just so you understand, most people who don’t know anything about this agree with me.

0:20:44
CW: Yes, because that’s how science is done, by a show of hands. How many people think this is cool? All right, I’m correct. And he said, for those crazy critics, the tiny sliver of messages he got saying, you’re not a scientist, you only have one reading. Well, he doesn’t go on to talk about his scientific expertise or how he got the reading. He just says, well, I’ve been in the media since I was a teenager. And he talks about how much he knows about the media. Okay, all right, well then, that doesn’t make me feel better about your result.” He said, everybody is going to hate on you no matter what. You could say the sky is blue and a million people are going to disagree with you. They are the problem. The people who are naysayers are the problem. Then he goes on to kind of compare himself to Ben Franklin. Who is our topic this week? He kind of asks, okay, what if after Ben Franklin had done his temperature measurements that helped lead to the discovery of the Gulf Stream, what if somebody had just said, fuck you, Ben Franklin, you don’t know how to measure temperature? Well, there’s actually a whole lot of differences in the way that he’s done things with the way that Ben Franklin’s done things. In fact, one of the things I learned about Ben Franklin is he never published his scientific results immediately. He checked and double-checked and wrote them up very carefully before talking about anything because he did not want to get ridiculed. Anyway, Warren goes on to lament, oh, all these poor amateur scientists and explorers that he knows are going to be intimidated and he gives them advice to just not pay attention to it. He says, we are literally talking about fringe elements in the paranormal research area. He’s calling all of regular science fringe instead. So that was fun. And he says that, quote, all science is, is a method, and there may be other methods of exploration that are more effective that we don’t even know about.

0:22:46
BR: Like what? What?

0:22:49
CW: What? So, so screw you science, maybe I know because of intuition or some other thing. I don’t know.

BR: Well, he’s been, he’s been in the media for a long time since he was a kid. Clearly. You’re right. You know, there you go.

0:23:05
CW: I, yes, that’s all you need. And then, and then my favorite quote from the podcast was, look, if I tell you there’s a pink elephant over here and you look and you don’t see a pink elephant, how harmful is that to you, really? Why does it bother you?

0:23:19
PR: Well, if it’s a pink elephant, I don’t know. What are we talking about here? Are we talking about time warps or mythical creatures?

0:23:32
CW: It was like literally a backwards spin on the Carl Sagan example of the dragon in the garage.

0:23:40
BR: Yeah.

0:23:41
CW: I’ve got this thing. I’m going to say this mythical creature is here without any proof and you’re not going to be able to even sense it and you can’t see it, so just keep quiet about it. Let me keep selling my magical wish boxes here. What harm does it do you?

0:23:59
BR: Wow. Yeah, I I guess you know I mean other than people trying to follow up and replicate his his experiments getting heatstroke and just the general dumbing down of science. I guess I guess it’s fine.

0:24:11
PR: And I think that on a last note if you’re thinking about the very spot he found it I wouldn’t worry about looking in the same spot again because as we as we travel 368 kilometers per second away from the center of the universe, that spot probably isn’t there anymore.

0:24:31
CW: Ah, that makes it perfectly unfalsifiable.

0:24:35
PR: Exactly.

0:24:36
BR: Until he does it again.

0:24:37
PR: Right. Well, he’s going to find out that he’s stepping on the other end of the cable next time.

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0:24:45
BR: Alright, well welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 65. This week we have an Independence Day themed show for you all. We’ll be talking about one of our founding fathers and a personal historical favorite of mine, Benjamin Franklin.

0:25:16
CW: Yay, Benjamin Franklin.

0:25:18
BR: Yay!

0:25:19
CW: We’re not going to talk about the impending democratic second Civil War that’s supposed to happen, according to Alex Jones?

0:25:26
BR: No, probably not. I think the less time spent on him, the better.

0:25:29
CW: Well, this will be out on the 5th, so it’ll all be over.

0:25:32
BR: Well, there you go then.

0:25:34
CW: Yeah, Franklin is, talk about a legendary figure in American folklore and American history. There’s so many little mythologies about him and so many misattributed things to him and so many actual wonderful real things he’s responsible for.

0:25:48
BR: Absolutely. And he’s a personal favorite of mine. I’m actually named after him.

0:25:52
CW: I guess he was a favorite of your parents, too, then.

0:25:54
BR: That as well. That as well. I remember asking them why Franklin. And they said that he just was such an amazing man, just a diplomat and inventor and scientist and publisher and printer and polymath renaissance man. A ladies man too.

0:26:15
CW: Well, that as well.

0:26:17
BR: But I do have a favorite Franklin quote, and it is, Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. So it’s a little bit of a Carpe Diem sentiment, but it’s one of my favorites.

0:26:35
CW: True enough. If I was still doing fortune cookies, I would consider using that. Well there was a quote I bought on a t-shirt for my husband that I later found out was not even something he said. But the t-shirt said, Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” And found out that that wasn’t actually said by him. But it’s still a cute shirt. The Franklin Institute, by the way, has a number of true facts and myths about Ben Franklin, if anybody’s curious. And the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is a gorgeous place. I have drawn pictures there for a really swank party a few years back. And it’s got a gorgeous statue of him and all sorts of other Franklin related items.

0:27:18
BR: Cool, cool.

0:27:19
CW: And did you know he’s got a psychological effect named after him?

0:27:23
BR: I did not know that.

0:27:24
CW: Yes, the Ben Franklin effect, according to Wikipedia anyway, it’s named after Ben Franklin, and it’s basically the notion that you are more likely to do a favor for somebody if you’ve already done a small favor for that person. It’s named after his apparent habit of whenever he had somebody in Congress or somebody in the government that he could not quite get along with and they were very intractable, he would kindly ask them if he could borrow a very rare book from their library. And he said they would loan the book to me without question and then ever more after that, they were always much more cooperative with him.

0:28:02
BR: Hmm. Sort of a foot-in-the-door effect or something.

0:28:05
CW: Exactly.

0:28:06
BR: Very cool. Well, yeah, there’s lots of stuff about Franklin. We don’t have time to cover all the different aspects of his being a skeptic and a scientist and diplomat and philosopher and all those sorts of things, but we thought we would touch on a couple of things that really jumped out at us that were sort of a good skeptical take. So what’s the first one on your mind?

0:28:28
CW: Well, I thought we would hit the famous kite and lightning experiment first because there’s a lot of misinformation out there about that. A lot of people don’t really understand what happened. I remember hearing from somebody who I think was a history teacher telling me that, oh yeah, he killed his son that way. I said, what? He said, oh yeah, the son got electrocuted and he made the son hold the kite. And there’s like a very slender thread of truth to that.

0:28:53
BR: Is that the William Tell story or what is that?

0:28:57
CW: Well, his son was actually named William. He had an illegitimate son, possibly more, but the one that we know about in history was one he actually took in as an infant and raised in his William Franklin, and the two of them decided one June afternoon to, well, they decided beforehand. Ben Franklin was determined to prove that lightning was in fact electricity. There’s a couple myths about this experiment. Some people think that Ben Franklin discovered electricity, and that’s just not the case. People knew about electricity beforehand. I’ve got a 1957 Ripley’s, believe it or not, Wonder Book of Strange Facts, and it’s got a whole page on Ben Franklin, and it says, he discovered the identity of lightning and electricity. And that’s not exactly the case. He discovered that, well, he wasn’t even really the discoverer of lightning being electricity because the French had beaten him to it already. And there is a recent writer named Tom Tucker, who is a scientific historian, who says that the whole thing is a hoax. He says that the experiment never happened and that Franklin made it up for a political reason.

0:30:10
BR: Oh, them’s fighting words.

0:30:13
CW: Yes, yeah, there’s so much to look into with Ben Franklin here, but as the story goes, on a fine June afternoon as a thunderstorm approached, he and his son William put together a kite made of silk and there was a wire on the very top of it to act as a conductor. Now, they weren’t aiming to get lightning to hit the kite and indeed if that would have happened one or both of them could have died, but he just wanted to collect static electricity from the thunderclouds, which he did successfully, according to him and others of the time and most historians. He had originally planned to conduct the experiment on top of a church spire, but he changed his plans because he realized he could do the same thing just by using a kite. And I don’t know if you knew this, but Ben Franklin was pretty into kites. He’s actually our nation’s first extreme sporter.

BR: Wow. Hardcore, Ben, hardcore.

CW: Have you seen people do this kiting, sort of kite surfing sport, where they, you know, they get on a surfboard and they have this big kite propel them across the water like a little speedboat.

0:31:19
BR: It looks like lots of fun.

0:31:20
CW: Yeah, well, he actually was doing it in the 1700s when he was a kid in Boston. He kited across a pond and he described the experience as most agreeable and foresaw a future where plenty of people would be using kites to propel themselves across water.

0:31:37
BR: Well, keep in mind that for that era, most agreeable is like a thumbs up. It’s like a like, like a love.

0:31:41
CW: I think it means rad.

BR: Yes.

CW: So, so anyway, so they had, they got the Franklin and his adult, you know, illegitimate son, William got this kite up in the air and to make sure that they didn’t get electrocuted from any sort of, although they probably would have been if lightning had struck the kite, as I said. They protected themselves by remaining in a shed. So they were sort of indoors holding onto the string and the kite was up into the clouds. The string itself was hemp, which would conduct electricity, but the very end of the string was made of silk, which would kind of act as a non-conductive material and protect them. So once Franklin saw the strands of hemp string start standing up on their own, much like your hair would if you touched a source of static electricity, well, or if you had hair bin, he noticed that there was some sort of charge accumulating. So he put his hand near the key, which he had put on the hemp part of the string, and sure enough, a little spark of electricity went from the key to his hand. And he was very excited. And he did collect a charge in what they called a Leyden jar, L-E-Y-D-E-N. And that’s just essentially an early capacitor. It’s a jar filled with a bunch of layers of metal foil. So having done that, he did not rush out to publish and tell everybody about it. So he really bided his time and he did not publish until October of that year. So he published the results after carefully writing them up, October 19th, 1752, in his paper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. And a month earlier, he had kind of been scooped by Thomas François Delibard, or Delibar, however you might say that, in northern France. About a year after that, a Baltic physicist named George Wilhelm Richman attempted it, but he was actually killed on the attempt. Some say he was killed by ball lightning, but that’s questionable. Ball lightning itself is sort of a unicorn in weather parlance. We’re not really sure if it’s out there or not. But going back to our historian friend Tom Tucker here, who said that he did not believe it really happened, I’m just kind of making a list here of pros and cons as to whether or not we can believe what Ben Franklin told us about the Kite Experiment.

0:34:15
BR: Okay, so give us why Tucker has reasons to doubt it.

0:34:19
CW: Sure. Well, he said that Franklin was an enthusiastic hoaxer. And that is true. Franklin did write a lot of things as almost satire and sometimes under a pen name. He pretended to be an old widow named Silence Dugood back when he was like a 16-year-old boy. He got all these letters from this old widow published in his brother’s newspaper and Poor Richard’s Almanac. And he took on alternate names and wrote things that were definitely hoaxes and jokes and satire. He also pointed out that this particular trick, if it was a trick, might have been the trick that won the American Revolution, because it was perfectly timed to ingratiate himself with a lot of the French society and scientists, making him this sort of homespun American, you know, country folk scientist, science enthusiast. And so it really sort of had the right effect, it struck the right tone for France to be very enamored with Ben Franklin and be that much more likely to help us in our fight for independence.

0:35:30
BR: It’s a little roundabout, but okay.

0:35:33
CW: Yeah, I wasn’t able to find any specifics as to, you know, an engineer’s perspective as to why this wouldn’t work. But Tom Tucker seems to be zeroing in on motivations and like, oh, he had every reason to hoax this. Well, that’s that’s the reason to call it into question. Now, to fill up the other side of the column here. And by the way, that’s apparently a decision making technique. Ben Franklin himself pioneered the making of two lists to make a decision, the pros and cons. Walter Isaacson, who has written a much more recent biography of Ben Franklin, he says that, well, we do have some legit evidence here in that right after this experiment in June, not in October, not much later, but at the end of June, beginning of July that year, lightning rods went up all over Philadelphia. So it looks like Ben Franklin did what most scientists hope to do. They run an experiment and then they put the results of that experiment into practical use. So he put up lightning rods and certainly has saved a lot of buildings in Philadelphia. And as far as the long stretch of time he took to write up the experiment’s results, apparently he always took a long time. He was always very careful. He wrote slowly and he checked everything because he did not want his scientific findings to be ridiculed when they came out. And although he was certainly a hoaxer and a funny guy when he wrote stuff under another name, there’s no evidence he ever made up anything connected to his scientific achievements. And there were a lot of those. He invented a ton of things from the Franklin Stove to bifocals. And he observed a lot of natural phenomena from the Gulf Stream. He never faked any of that.

0:37:22
BR: Sure, and I think it’s a fair distinction to point out. Certainly a person can have different areas of their life where if you’re doing something that requires scientific credibility, yeah, you’re doing something that’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek, anonymous letter to the editor, you know, making a satirical point, I don’t think they’re really comparable.

0:37:46
CW: Yeah, I don’t think that latter activity is really crossing the line on ethics there. And another thing that Isaacson brought up is that if he was faking it to ingratiate himself with the French, he could have just claimed that he did it a month or two prior and gotten credit for discovering it himself. But he did not do that. He claimed credit. He claimed he did the experiment after the Frenchman. And the real clincher for me though was that he did this experiment with his son William. And later on in life, the two of them had a real parting of ways. William became a very outspoken loyalist. He supported the Crown and did not join the fight for independence. And he and his father were not on good terms. They were not allies from that point on. And so had William wanted to discredit Ben Franklin’s most famous experiment, the thing that really propelled his celebrity from that time, he could have easily just come clean about it. But he never did.

0:38:49
BR: Certainly would have had all the reason to.

CW: Yeah, so my vote is that yes, he did send up a kite into a thunderstorm to try and collect not lightning, because that would have killed him, but static electricity, proving that lightning was in fact an electrical phenomenon and leading to the invention of lightning rods.

0:39:11
BR: Sounds right to me.

CW: So Ben, what are you going to be looking into for us?

0:39:14
BR: Again, there’s lots and lots of stuff that one could go through when reading accounts of Franklin and his various biographies and what, including his autobiography. One of Franklin’s main contributions to science and skepticism that I can think of is his investigation into mesmerism and the theory of animal magnetism. was Franz Anton Mesmer, 1734 to 1815, and he had this notion that there was this universal fluid that could cure ills and cause diseases, and it was believed to be the sort of, it’s almost like the ether that came up later, and this notion there was this fluid that was just underneath the skin that was emitted by the celestial bodies, and that…

0:40:00
CW: Did this have anything to do with subluxations because it’s sounding an awful lot like something else?

0:40:07
BR: Right, yeah, along those lines, definitely. And the idea was that this fluid, which by the way couldn’t be detected, and that’s just in case someone’s listening, that’s a big red flag. If science can’t detect what you’re looking at, there may be a problem with your hypothesis. But in this particular case, he believed that this fluid, this magnetism, could be manipulated using actual magnets. And then he later said, well, actually, we don’t need magnets. We can just generalize this. And so, because magnets, of course, work by using ferrous material, iron.

0:40:43
CW: Was he able to turn anything into a magnet if he had enough money? Did it work with money?

0:40:48
BR: Sort of, yeah. Sort of almost the secret, you know, the power of positive thinking, which is not too far off in this case. So he was eventually, he claimed, able to magnetize pretty much anything. Water, paper, wood, leather, trees, things that aren’t actually magnetic. And he actually concluded that he himself was magnetic and that he was helping to sort of manipulate the energies. And so in many ways it’s not unlike modern notions of balancing energies and vibrations and things that you might hear at a new age shop or an alternative medicine place.

0:41:31
CW: Yeah, this saddens me to realize he could probably be making a lot of money right now doing Reiki and chiropractic.

0:41:38
BR: Yes, that is quite likely and he would have fit in right at home here. And actually, Mesmer arrived in Paris around the same time as Franklin and he was trying to get some scientific acceptance for his theories. He cultivated the following, including the Queen, but scientists, however, were less than impressed.

CW: Ah.

BR: Yes, it’s the common refrain, like, well, scientists aren’t taking me seriously.

CW: They don’t believe in this weird ether that you can’t see or touch or smell or hear.

0:42:14
BR: Yeah, it was like, why are they being mean to me? And for the most part, the scientific community regarded him as a charlatan, perhaps a self-deluded charlatan, but a charlatan nonetheless.

0:42:25
CW: So let me guess, the French aristocracy did not think that the scientific community was being mean enough to Mesmer, so they called Ben Franklin.

0:42:36
BR: Yes, that’s along those lines. So what happened was that in March 1784, King Louis appointed a commission to investigate these animal magnetism claims, because again, it was subject of some debate at the time. And so he, uh, there were a variety of, of people who were commissioned, including Joseph Ignace Guillotine, the inventor of the Guillotine, uh, Benjamin Franklin, and also the famed chemist Antoine Lavoisier.

CW: Oh, that’s quite a party.

BR: Yeah. Yeah. It’s some, some, some heavyweights here. And so King Louis is like, okay, well, is this real? Is this not real? What’s what’s going on? So I’m going to read a quote from a book titled Benjamin Franklin by Carl Van Doren. It’s one of the earlier biographies of him. In fact, actually, Van Doren is the uncle of Charles Van Doren, who is maybe best known, at least these days, for his role in the 1950s quiz show scandals. There was the film, I think it was Robert Redford film, Quiz Show. And there was one particular contestant who was winning and winning. That was his nephew that was doing that. So anyway, just a little aside there. So here’s what Van Doren says about Franklin. Again, this is page 714 of his book on Franklin. Franklin on 19 March was skeptical about animal magnetism but willing to think that the quote, delusion may however in some cases be of use while it lasts. There are in every great rich city a number of persons who are never in health because they are fond of medicines and always taking them, whereby they derange the natural functions and hurt their constitutions. If these people can be persuaded to forbear their drugs in expectation of being cured by only the physician’s finger or an iron rod pointing at them, they may possibly find good effects, though they mistake the cause. So here we see Franklin basically zeroing in on the placebo effect.

0:44:33
CW: Yeah.

0:44:34
BR: It’s like, okay, well, there could be something here, but let’s take a look at this. And actually, oddly enough, Mesmer and Franklin had a brief run-in before, because one of Franklin’s many inventions was the glass armonica. Not the harmonica, but the armonica. Do you know what that is?

0:44:55
CW: Some sort of instrument? Is it small? Can you put it in your mouth?

BR: It’s bigger than a bread box, depending on how big your bread is. But it’s sort of a tabletop thing. It consists of spinning pieces of glass, and you play it by wetting your fingers with water and touching the spinning pieces of glass and emitting sort of different tones. It almost sounds a little bit like a theremin, if you’re familiar with that.

0:45:23
CW: Well, like the way you can play a wine glass with your palm or hand.

0:45:26
BR: Yes, yes.

0:45:26
CW: I like to do that. Those are fun.

0:45:28
BR: They are fun, and in fact, a friend of mine is one of the very few glass harmonica players in the world. She lives in my hometown of Corrales, and I’ve heard her perform this. It’s really pretty cool.

0:45:39
CW: You know an interesting assortment of people, Ben.

0:45:41
BR: I do. I do, including you. And interesting, so Mesmer had staged some seances and he’d used Franklin’s glass armonica contraption to provide sort of spooky background music to these seances. So, a little bit of a mixture there. So anyway, so Kingly appoints the commission and Franklin goes over there and says, okay, let’s try and figure this out. So Mesmer decided he wanted no part of this. Now, you might think, well, hold on here, right? We have a King’s commission to validate, or not, Mesmerism.

CW: Yeah, didn’t he make a big ruckus about not being accepted by scientists?

0:46:26
BR: Yes, yes. Well, he basically goes, well, I don’t want to have anything to do with this. And so he refused to participate in the experiments, but he did have his assistant, Charles Deslin, participate. And this was kind of a clever thing on his part, because basically he had his assistant participate, but he also said, well, he doesn’t entirely understand my brilliance. So he has a working knowledge, but there may be some nuances that he’s missing. This of course set up a no-lose situation for Mesmer because if the experiment showed that in fact there was nothing to Mesmerism, then well, my assistant doesn’t quite understand it, that’s why it went wrong.

0:47:11
CW: That’s actually brilliant. If it did perchance work, he could claim full credit and if it didn’t, well, my understudy doesn’t really know that much about it. Sorry guys.

0:47:23
BR: Yes, that’s basically what he was trying to set up. So anyway, if you’d like to read more about these experiments, it’s actually pretty interesting. There are several good books that I can recommend. There’s the Walter Isaacson book that you mentioned earlier and there’s also the H. W. Brand’s book, The First American, The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, which I will quote from here shortly. And so they set up these experiments and they used various tests, including of different classes. So they had seven people of working classes and then four people of a higher social class, just in case that had some relevance to the proceedings.

0:48:02
CW: Well, hey, that already puts them ahead of the game as far as the marshmallow test goes.

0:48:06
BR: It does. It does. Good call back there. So, I’ll read a little short passage here from the first American, and this is sort of describing some of the tests that were done. Franklin had a kidney stone at the time, so this is why he was unable to travel to Paris for it. So it says, Franklin’s kidney stone prevented his leaving Passy. This is where he was living. So Deslin and the commission came to him. The mesmeric cure was applied to several patients with maladies ranging from asthma to tumors. The results were ambiguous at best. In one of the more dramatic moments of the experiment, Deslin purportedly magnetized an apricot tree in Franklin’s garden.

0:48:51
CW: An apricot tree?

0:48:53
BR: An apricot tree! This is cutting-edge science of 1784. This is what Mesmer is selling.

0:49:00
CW: Now I’ve got that preschool song in my head. Thanks.

0:49:03
BR: Yes, you’re welcome. A blindfolded 12-year-old boy was then led to four un-magnetized trees, which of course presumes that one of them was magnetized, which of course it wasn’t, which he embraced one after another to determine the magnetism they contained or not. The first tree he sweated, at the first tree he sweated and coughed. At the second he said he felt dizzy and his head hurt. At the third his head hurt even more and he reported feeling the magnetism growing, although he was in fact moving farther away from the test tree. At the fourth tree he fainted, which terminated the experiment.” So there you go, folks. This is what they’re trying to do. So as you can imagine, as you can sort of get the gist here, the commission made of scientists and eminent scholars was not impressed. So the commission released their findings saying that basically there was nothing to mesmerism and that it was all a product of the mind and the product of expectations and suggestibility and so on. Thomas Jefferson concluded that mesmerism was, quote, a compound of fraud and folly, which is quite insightful, and that’s about right. But Franklin wrote that, quote, some think it will put an end to mesmerism, but there’s a wonderful deal of credulity in the world, and deceptions as absurd have supported themselves for ages.

0:50:26
CW: Well, he was right about that.

0:50:28
BR: Yeah. He was right about that. So, again, this is classic skepticism. I mean, they did a series of pretty well-designed scientific experiments using blinding and other techniques that pretty much show that there was nothing to mesmerism. And Franklin recognized that just because you debunk it doesn’t mean it goes away. This is one of the classic elements of skepticism, right? It’s known as the rubber duck syndrome. So as soon as you debunk something, just wait a little while and it will pop back up again.

0:51:02
CW: Is that where Randi got that term? Was he quoting unsinkable rubber ducky from Ben Franklin? Except it would have to have been a wooden duck or something, I guess they didn’t have rubber back then.

BR: You would think, you would think. But all in all, I mean, the investigation into mesmerism was well done on all accounts. And it actually did some damage to Mesmer. He sort of faded away and his star didn’t quite shine so brightly afterwards. Although, again, to this day there are nearly identical treatments with even less evidence that are promoted widely.

0:51:39
CW: Well, that certainly is enlightening. And, yeah, I’m not going to look at apricot trees the same way.

0:51:45
BR: And so that’s a couple. So we’ve talked about his kite experiment, which almost certainly was legitimate, and we’ve talked about his investigations into animal magnetism, for which there was little or no evidence. So what’s next on your plate?

0:52:02
CW: Well, I looked into a sort of a domestic mystery with Ben Franklin, having to do with his son, his wife, and whether or not she was one of the first anti-vaxxers. And they disagreed on the benefits of, well, I shouldn’t say vaccination, because back then it was called inoculation, and it didn’t involve a vaccine. It involved smallpox and getting a little bit of pus from a smallpox sore or a pock and putting it under the skin of a healthy person so that they would develop a less severe version and just a few pox and then be immune to the disease for the rest of their life. Now, this had started happening in the time of Ben Franklin when he was actually fairly There was an outbreak in Boston in 1721 and in 1730. And Ben Franklin actually covered the whole smallpox outbreak, but not so much from the point of view of the terrible misery and suffering it caused. But he focused on the miracle of inoculation and the vast promise it held to safeguard people against this horrendous disease that was very likely to kill you, especially children. Children who got this disease were very likely to die, and those that survived ended up mentally handicapped, blind, terribly disfigured, just all sorts of horrendous things happened because of this disease.

0:53:30
BR: If you’ve seen photographs or read descriptions of smallpox, it’s a pretty horrific disease. It’s not really talked about much these days, thankfully, but we’re not talking a bad cold or a flu. This was a really, really terrifying, horrific, disfiguring disease.

0:53:47
CW: Yeah, yeah. And thankfully, it’s mostly in the past now, thanks to the benefits of inoculation and then vaccination and application of science.

0:53:57
BR: Science!

0:53:58
CW: Well, before I get into whether or not the two of them disagreed about the benefits of inoculation, Ben Franklin and his common-law wife, Debra, actually kind of had a peculiar start to their relationship and marriage. It’s kind of complicated.

0:54:15
BR: So, just to be clear, so if they were on Facebook today, under relationship, it would say it’s complicated?

0:54:24
CW: Yes, it would definitely say that. Yes. The two of them met when they were teenagers. I think she was 15 and he was 17, just working for his brother’s paper. And they kind of hit it off. They sparks flew. They kind of liked each other. But Franklin got an offer from Pennsylvania’s governor, William Keith, and he took off to London to get a printing press, but discovered that he had been lied to. There was no money waiting and he couldn’t buy his printing press and he didn’t even have money to come back home. So things fizzled with the girl he had left back home and she ended up married to somebody else, a potter named John Rogers. Now, this John Rogers guy was a pretty bad dude. It turned out he had another wife back in England. A woman could self-divorce out there, but, you know, she was essentially sullied. She did not have a dowry anymore. This John Rogers guy had taken off by that point. And there were rumors that he had died in the West Indies, but proving that would be a whole other matter. And so she was kind of in limbo, certainly not a good wife prospect for anybody. Meanwhile, in that time, Ben Franklin, his star had started to rise and he seemed like a good catch. But then he had a bastard son, which suddenly tarnished him. So he took in this infant child. We don’t know who the mother was. Historians don’t say who she was. But with this small child, he suddenly needed a wife, but was no longer a good prospect for any reputable gentlewoman with a good dowry. However, there was Deborah. So the two of them kind of found themselves thrown together and it was a good match for many complicated reasons. And she moved in and started raising the baby. And that’s all she wrote in terms of their in terms of their engagement and living arrangement. So after a time, she bore him a son. So he had not only this first son, but a quote-unquote legitimate son that they named Francis Folger Franklin. Now, he was apparently a joy to behold, a very lovely little kid. And sadly, right after his fourth birthday, he died of smallpox. And Franklin was apparently, he was very enamored with him, and he had written so many positive stories about inoculation, urging people to get inoculated, that when the, by now it was the second outbreak in Philadelphia of smallpox in 1736, he reported that out of the 288 people who had died, only one of those people had been among the inoculated. And there had been like 50 people that had volunteered to be inoculated, and only one of them passed away as opposed to a great many more who were not inoculated.

BR: That’s pretty good odds.

CW: Yeah, but there’s now – see, Walter Isaacson, again, who I mentioned had written that biography that I pulled from before, he found a whole bunch of hints in various things that Ben Franklin had written indicating that he and Deborah became estranged after the death of Frankie, as they called him. And Franklin, he sort of hinted that his wife had a bit of a temper and she could be very disagreeable about things. And he based a lot of his writing, a lot of his satirical writing about wives in general. While he did sing her praises as a homemaker, he never really complimented her mothering skills and he even sort of denigrated them. He did base some satirical things about her that were not so much in a flattering light. They were married for 44 years and out of the last 17 of those years, until she died of a stroke, he only spent two of those at home. And he kept saying he’d come home, but he just never did. Now, certainly they were different people, but again, Isaacson found all these little hints that, I mean, he at one point wrote that one of the major impediments to getting a child inoculated was if the parents disagreed about it. Now, Franklin did state that he did make a statement after his son died. It was the only thing he really said after the 1736 outbreak. He said, quote, in as much as some people are deterred from having that operation performed on their children, I do hereby sincerely declare that he was not inoculated, but received the distemper in the common way of induction. Now, so he was trying to assure people that his child had not died as a result of inoculation. He had not caught the disease for which he was inoculated because he was not inoculated. He continued, he had, quote, intended to have my child inoculated as soon as he should have recovered significant strength from a flux with which he had long been afflicted.” So many historians just kind of took that at face value and said, well, the kid was too sick. He was only four years old and perhaps he had been a sickly child and he just was never strong enough to get the inoculation. And again, Isaacson went through and found indications that Ben Franklin had talked about his wife producing very sturdy, strong offspring. That was one of the few things he said that was good about her mothering skills. And so there’s many little sort of notations in some of his writings that indicated that they just did not have Frankie inoculated because she was too scared of the procedure and was worried, you know, she might lose this one son that did tie her marriage together because really she was she was worried about losing Ben Franklin. And just worried about, as a mother, just worried about losing her child, which is really what drives a lot of the fears of people today who don’t understand much about vaccination use and are just terrified of the chemicals and what could happen. So it was just really interesting to me to see such a modern drama play out with one of our founding fathers.

1:00:48
BR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it’s a it’s It’s enlightening to sort of understand the dynamics of what was going on and hearing him you know, explicitly going out of his way to make sure that people realize that no, this is not a this is not a result of any inoculation at all. It’s the opposite.

CW: Yeah And he did say that that was one of his biggest regrets in his life that he had not inoculated him which which again Isaacson pointed out well, he wouldn’t have expressed it as a regret unless it was a choice and unless unless he had perhaps backed down in a disagreement with him in it with between himself And his wife over whether or not to inoculate him interesting.

BR: Well good for Ben.

1:01:30
CW: Well, not so good for his son. What else did you look into Ben for our last sort of skeptical angle on Benjamin Franklin?

1:01:41
BR: Well, Ben Franklin, as it turns out, played a small but significant role in a famous cryptid, a cryptozoological monster of the being the Jersey Devil.

1:01:55
We are hitting all the bases here. We got vaccinations, we got debunking bad bogus treatments, and now we got cryptozoology. That’s fantastic.

1:02:06
BR: Something along those lines. I’m primarily using for a source a recent book titled The Secret History of the Jersey Devil by Brian Riegel and Frank J. Esposito, which I read, it’s a fascinating book if anyone’s interested in monsters and folklore and legends and it’s all fascinating. But one thing that jumped out at me was the small but significant role that Franklin played. The Jersey Devil story is kind of complex and it’s too complicated to sort of summarize concisely here, but part of it is tied in with stories about a family called Leeds. L-E-E-D-S.

1:02:43
CW: Yeah, I remember when you helped me do some… We worked on some creature cards and one of the things in the little blurb about the Jersey Devil is its mother was supposedly a witch named Mary Leeds, right?

1:02:56
BR: Yes, that’s right. That’s absolutely right. And so, just sort of as a bit of background, so you know, Franklin had an apprentice to his older brother James in Boston’s first newspaper, the New England Current, in the 1720s. He later left and then sort of returned and he eventually published the Pennsylvania Gazette. So for much of his early life, he was a newspaper man and he was working as an apprentice and elsewhere. But as was common at the time, he began to branch out into almanacs. This is, of course, as he mentioned earlier, Poor Richard’s Almanac. Poor Richard being one of the pseudonyms along with Silence, Do Good and others that Franklin used. And you know, you know, poor Richard’s last name, right?

1:03:42
CW: I did look into that and it delighted me.

1:03:45
BR: Richard Saunders.

1:03:46
CW: I know, that makes me wonder if Richard Saunders is really Richard Saunders. Richard, are you really Richard? Or are you doing your podcast, The Skeptic Zone under a pseudonym?

1:03:56
BR: It’s a beautiful little term there, but yes. So, you know, poor Richard’s almanac is named after poor Richard Saunders and is one of Franklin’s alter egos. As we mentioned before, at various times throughout his life, Franklin would write under pseudonyms, including Silence Do Good and Richard Saunders, and it was often done as a sort of tongue in cheek or satirical. It wasn’t really meant to grievously mislead anyone. It was often sort of a tongue-in-cheek satirical political purpose. And in fact, he was found in the long tradition of those sorts of literary hoaxes. When Franklin began getting successful with Poor Richard’s Almanac, it annoyed a man named Titan Leeds, going back to the Leeds family. And Titan Leeds was his chief rival, and he published an almanac titled The Leeds Almanac.

1:04:50
CW: Oh, almanac business is going to get dirty, huh?

1:04:53
BR: It’s a rough and tumble business. Those almanac feuds of the 1700s, man, they were nasty. So let me quote briefly from the Regal and Esposito book here on page 53, and this is talking about the almanac feud, and you’ll see where this is going in a minute. Writing as Richard Saunders, Franklin followed the standard formula of agricultural and astrological material, including the inspirational quotes. As a competitor in the lucrative market, he decided to go after his successful rival in print by creating an almanac feud. Rather than sound the more serious tone of the Leeds Almanac, Franklin went for a folksier, almost comical and satirical approach. In the 1733 edition of Paul Richard’s Almanac, Franklin, writing as Saunders, used astrological techniques to predict Titan Leeds’ death on October 17th of that year. He referred to Leeds in his typical jaunty manner as, quote, my good friend and fellow student of astrology. He explains that he, Titan Leeds, died by calculation made at his request on October 17th, 1733. By his own calculation he will survive to the 26th of the same month. The small difference between us we have disputed whenever we have met over these nine years, but at length he is inclinable to agree with my judgment.” So he’s basically doing a version of the onion, sort of saying, well, you know, we had this running bet and he thinks he’s going to die at this point, but who knows, right? Okay. And Franklin’s following in the tradition, as I mentioned, of author Jonathan Swift had done something similar years earlier. So there’s a sort of tradition here. And while Franklin sort of approached the whole thing in a humorous vein, Leeds did not. Leeds was pissed about this. I’ll quote from the Secret History of the Jersey Devil on page 54. When he was attacked in print, Daniel Leeds would go on the offensive, gleefully trading shot for shot with his enemies. Titan tried to do the same, Daniel Leeds being his father. He retaliated in the Leeds Almanac by saying that Franklin, quote, has manifest himself a fool and a liar for his actions. Franklin replied with mock outrage, saying Leeds was, quote, too well bred to use any man so indecently and so scurrilously. And so this must not be the real Titan Leeds, but a manifestation of the spirit world.” So Franklin, as Saunders, was complaining, that he was being abused by the ghost of Titan Leeds, basically. No human would stoop to such a level. So this is clearly a ghost attacking me.

1:07:35
CW: Ah, well, wow. One should never engage in a battle of wits with Ben Franklin. That’s just a losing proposition.

BR:  It is a losing proposition all around.

CW: And to do it publicly. That’s like these almanacs sound like the Twitter of yesteryear.

1:07:49
BR: Well, and so is so as They talked about in the book. I mean there were a couple purposes behind this one of them was that Franklin did not believe in astrology and leads did and he promoted that in his almanac. And so Franklin saw it as sort of a fun way to poke fun at astrology by saying, well, his own astrologers say he’s going to die, and well, surely he can’t be wrong, right? It puts him in this delicious, delicious sort of ironic point of view.

1:08:20
CW: Knocking down astrologers, too. It can’t get more skeptical than Ben Franklin at this point. It can’t.

1:08:22
BR: It really can’t. So what happened was that in the process, Franklin had sort of accidentally or in jest essentially cast his rival almanac publisher as a ghost and suggested that the Leeds family was in league with the devil. And he didn’t mean this literally. It wasn’t so much that he was actually accusing people of Satanism, as happened, of course, in the 80s and 90s in America. It was more sort of, that was what rivals did. They sort of called each other, well, Satan’s clearly in your house, sir. You would have these sort of offhand remarks that were, again, sort of helped set the kernel of notion or belief that there was in fact some sort of association between the Leeds family and the sinister forces and Satan.

1:09:25
CW: Leading some to imagine that one of the Leeds women had copulated with the devil and produced the Jersey Devil.

1:09:33
BR: Yes, exactly. So, again, I want to be very clear. I mean, Franklin was not trying, he didn’t intentionally create the Jersey Devil legend and he certainly, he would have no inkling that it would evolve as it later did. It was just a happy byproduct. It was just a happy byproduct. And so, but again, now, you know, it’s interesting how Regal and Esposito sort of trace the Franklin feud with Leeds and how it eventually sort of sowed the seeds for what would later become elements of the Jersey Devil.

1:10:06
CW: Well, that sounds like some good folklore cryptozoological digging there. I’m glad you have all these sources we can dig through.

1:10:13
BR: Yeah, it’s an interesting story and I’ll give you another quick tidbit was that in their book, they talk about how the popular image of the Jersey Devil, it’s this sort of weird, chimerical hybrid. It has cloven hoofs and antlers and it looks like a moose and it looks like a devil and it’s got a pointed tail and it has all these really weird elements of different creatures that are sort of jammed together.

CW: Yeah, it definitely was designed by committee.

BR: Yeah, so someone didn’t think that one all the way through. And in their book, they point out that in 1725, before the Almanac feud with Benjamin Franklin, Titan Leeds changed the masthead of his almanac. Previously, it had just basically been a text version. But later in 1728, Titan replaced it with the Leeds family crest, which features a trio of figures with wings, clawed feet, and a pointy tail representing valor.

CW: Oh, that sounds familiar.

1:11:13
BR: Yeah, and they say, quote, these single-headed eagles appear often in English heraldry, hovering over the top of the shield is a cockatrice, a kind of monster rooster well-known in myth.

CW: A cockatrice.

1:11:27
BR: A cockatrice, yes. I used to battle them in my D&D days.

1:11:32
CW: I’m going to start using that in more frequent conversations. Cockatrice.

1:11:37
BR: I believe, if I’m not mistaken, at least in the D&D world, they can turn you to stone, like Medusa. But it’s a-

1:11:44
CW: Now, are they, are cockatrices, do they come from eggs laid by roosters? I think I may have read about them when I was a kid.

1:11:52
BR: I, it’s been too long since, since, I don’t know off the top of my head.

1:11:57
CW: I expect you to know these things, Benjamin.

1:11:59
BR: I’m sure you do. But anyway, so again, we sort of see a little, again, nobody intentionally created the Jersey Devil myth. It was like many legends, it was sort of a combination of hints and rumor and speculation and gossip and factoid sort of wrapped up in speculation. Those are my favorite kind of stories. Well, there you go. So it is a historical curiosity that Franklin played a small but significant role in the evolution of the Jersey Devil story.

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1:12:35
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1:13:10
CW: Alright, well thank you for joining us on this post-independence day tour of some of Benjamin Franklin’s skeptical accomplishments back in the day. And what have we got on the schedule for next week, Ben? I think we’re looking into a psychic detective of some sort?

1:13:31
BR: Yes, next week we’ll be talking about a case I investigated about maybe six, seven years ago, longer, about what was claimed, at least by some people, to be the best case for psychic detectives. And it involved a serial killer in New Jersey and a psychic who claimed that she helped capture him. I looked into the case. I spent about 18 months looking into it. It was a challenge that occurred on a podcast. And it was a really interesting case, and I’ll go into depth in it. So it’ll be fun.

1:14:07
CW: All right, we look forward to peeling back the layers on that with you. And we’ll hopefully have Pascual with us soon. He was able to join us for the opening segment, but he had, like I said, he’s got stuff going on right now, but he’ll be back shortly.

1:14:22
BR: Very cool.

1:14:24
CW: Take care.

1:14:25
BR: Bye-bye.

1:14:26
Squaring the Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC. Copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitared and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celestia Warren. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero and Kronos Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero and of course our listeners and patrons.

1:14:50
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Transcribed with Cockatoo