Of all this great man's scientific excellencies, the most remarkable is
the smallness, the simplicity, the apparent inadequacy of the means
which he employed in his experimental researches. His discoveries were
all made with hardly any apparatus at all; and if, at any time, he had
been led to employ instruments of a somewhat less ordinary description,
he never rested satisfied until he had, as it were, afterwards
translated the process, resolving the problem with such simple
machinery, that you might say he had done it wholly unaided by
apparatus. The experiments by which the identity of lightning and
electricity was demonstrated, were made with a sheet of brown paper, a
bit of twine or silk thread, and an iron key!--_Lord Brougham._
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