Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General

Among the many phenomena which engaged the scientific imagination of Benjamin Franklin (1773) is the fact that a drop of oil, if placed on water, spreads out to form a film too thin even to produce prismatic colors but capable still of smoothing the waves. The author, formerly a professor of phy