Ben Franklin invented many things that we still use today: political cartoons, the first volunteer fire brigade, the lightning rod, and more. Unfortunately, the electric slide isn’t one of them.

This painting immortalizes one of Franklin’s most well-known achievements, the 1752 experiment that illuminated (get it?) that lightning is a form of electricity. If you’re wondering why he’s surrounded by putti and going for a Heavenly Bodies Met Gala look, it’s because Benjamin West is elevating Franklin to the realm of otherworldly allegory to communicate Franklin’s celeb status in the colonial world.

In case you don’t come from the city of Philadelphia, where the Eagles are still the Superbowl champs and Ben Franklin is a demigod, you might not realize how important this guy really was. He was a polymath, with achievements reaching so far and wide that you’d be surprised one brain could come up with all of them. He was a scientist and inventor, statesman and politician, and philanthropist and entrepreneur. Basically, he was the Leonardo da Vinci of the colonial United States.

Unlike the all-too-common wrongful attribution of Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, Franklin actually did what he is remembered for. However, we can still bust some myths about his lightning experiment. Despite sensationalized accounts – think George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, no one credits this experiment with discovering electricity. In fact, people were aware of electricity for more than a millennium prior to Ben Franklin messing around with a kite during a lightning storm. Instead, and way more anticlimactically, this experiment proved that lightning is a type of electrical charge. During the experiment, lightning did not strike the kite itself, either. If it did, Franklin would’ve gotten a healthy dose of electricity right through his body. The kite picked up the electrical charges floating around in the air during the lightning storm and gave him a little shock on his finger.

Franklin wasn’t even the first one to conduct the experiment. Members of the Royal Society of London caught word of Franklin’s experiment and laughed it off as crazy and implausible. However, because people were talking about it, a pair of French scientists tried the experiment and succeeded. The endeavor became known as the Philadelphia experiment.

During the eighteenth century, lightning frequently ignited wooden homes and wreaked havoc on the colonists. The kite experiment led to Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod, which prevented potential disasters by controlling the flow of lightning’s dangerous, electrical charges. Thanks, Ben!