On October 19, 1752, the Pennsylvania Gazette published a brief description of an experiment recently conducted by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, the article said, had flown a kite in a thunderstorm, causing electricity to be conducted down the line of the kite and electrifying a key tied to it. This demonstrated that lightning, as many had speculated, was a form of electricity.

Franklin's electric kite became the most famous experiment of the eighteenth century, helping to make Franklin famous throughout Europe and America. And yet, some historians argue that it probably never happened.

They point to a curious lack of details about the experiment. It is not known exactly when the experiment occurred. Sometime in June, 1752 was the closest Franklin ever came to an exact date. Nor did Franklin ever write a formal report about it. The only witness to the event was Franklin's son, who never said a word about it. Finally, such an experiment would have been extremely dangerous, possibly fatal, as Franklin knew.

Historian Tom Tucker suggests that Franklin originally proposed the idea for the experiment as a joke. Frustrated because the British Royal Society had been ignoring his letters to them about his earlier electrical research, he might have proposed the deadly experiment as a subtle joke. It was his way of saying, Go fly a kite in a storm! But when his suggestion reached France, where people took it seriously, Franklin decided to play along and claimed he really had conducted the experiment.

Tucker's theory remains controversial. Other historians argue that Franklin would never have risked being exposed as a liar by the scientific community.

In 1812 a Philadelphia man, Charles Redheffer, claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine that required no source of energy to run. He built a working model of the machine and applied for funds from the city government to build a larger version. But when inspectors from the city examined it, they realized that Redheffer had simply hidden the power source. To expose Redheffer, they commissioned a local engineer to build a similar machine, and when they showed this to Redheffer he fled the city. (This replica is still owned by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.)

A year later, Redheffer attempted the same scam in New York City. This time he was exposed by the engineer Robert Fulton who is said to have removed some boards from a wall neighboring the machine, exposing the source of the machine's power: an old bearded man sitting and eating a crust of bread with one hand, while he turned a hand-crank with the other. More→

In February 1876, 'Professor' James C. Wingard of New Orleans announced he had invented a powerful new weapon that would utterly destroy any naval vessel, iron or otherwise, "so as to leave no trace of them in their former shape." Wingard was coy about the exact means by which his weapon operated. He would only say that it projected a "nameless force," which somehow involved the use of electricity, applied without any direct connection between the machine and the object to be destroyed -- and it supposedly worked at a distance of up to five miles, far beyond the range of any other gun or cannon. In other words, this was a nineteenth-century version of a death ray. Wingard claimed that a few ships outfitted with his weapon would be able to dominate all the other navies in the world combined. In fact, he anticipated that his weapon would mean the end of naval warfare altogether, since the first navy to acquire it would become invincible and reign supreme. More→

An article that appeared in the Spring 1996 issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text bore the portentous title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." At first glance the article appeared to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. It was written in the typical style of academic articles, slightly overbearing and verbose, and it came armored with a bristling flank of footnotes (more footnotes than actual text). But on the day that the Spring issue of Social Text appeared in print, the author of the article, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal, published a letter in the academic trade publication Lingua Franca revealing his article was intended as a parody, a fact which the editorial board of Social Text had apparently failed to recognize.

"Any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof," Sokal asserted. He suggested that his article's acceptance by the journal pointed to "an apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certan precincts of the academic humanities." He also fumed over "how readily they [Social Text] accepted my implication that the search for truth in science must be subordinated to a political agenda."

The New York Times ran the story of Sokal's revelation on its front page on May 18, and from there the controversy grew. More→