Ebenezer Kinnersley (89)

Ebenezer Kinnersley (30 November 1711–4 July 1778) was a natural philosopher, scientific lecturer, educator, and preacher, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768. Born in Gloucester, England, he immigrated at a young age to Lower Dublin, near Philadelphia, where his father became the assistant to the minister of a Baptist church. In young adulthood, Kinnersley worked as a shopkeeper and teacher in Philadelphia and occasionally preached himself. After criticizing the emotional preaching style of Great Awakening revivalists like George Whitefield, Kinnersley was chastised by church elders. He published a justification of his Deistic views in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, which prompted further ecclesiastical investigation and an additional rejoinder from Kinnersley that Franklin declined to print. Kinnersley eventually made peace with the church, but these assertions of intellectual independence were likely the reason that no congregation elected him as its pastor following his ordination in 1743. Turning his sights to science, Kinnersley took a leading role in the celebrated electrical experiments conducted by Franklin’s circle and, at the latter’s urging, embarked on widely popular lecture tours of the southern colonies (1749), northern colonies (1751-1752), and the West Indies (1752-1753). Upon his return, Kinnersley became master of the Philadelphia Academy’s English School, as well as a professor at the College of Philadelphia, and continued to experiment with and lecture on electricity. He is best remembered for demonstrating that electricity produces heat and for inventing an electrical air thermometer. Franklin reported on these discoveries at a meeting of the Royal Society, and a paper of Kinnersley’s appeared in the Philosophical Transactions thereafter. Indeed, eminent scientific contemporaries like Joseph Priestley ranked Kinnersley’s findings alongside the better-known Franklin’s. (PI, ANB, DAB)