On Thursday, households across America will gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, with turkey taking pride of place on our Thanksgiving tables. Baste, brine, deep-fry? (But not frozen, please!) The options for cooking a turkey are seemingly endless, but leave it to founding father Benjamin Franklin to invent one more — electrocution.
Franklin recounts the event in another letter to his brother, which you can read on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website. “I have lately made an experiment in electricity,” he says, “that I desire never never to repeat.” In other words, don’t try this at home.