Use the arrow keys to move between letters. Press Enter or Space on the first letter of a word, then again on the last letter. Press Escape to cancel.
A few of the words
- PLATE
- Jennings used a glass photographic plate coated with a light-sensitive emulsion — the standard medium for serious photography in 1882, long before flexible film became common.Find this word in the grid to read its note.
- BRANCH
- The photograph's great revelation was the branching, tree-like structure of the bolt — a geometry invisible to the unaided eye in the fraction of a second lightning lasts.Find this word in the grid to read its note.
- ELECTRIC
- Lightning is a massive electrostatic discharge, with a single bolt carrying hundreds of millions of volts — a force Jennings could now show the world in frozen detail.Find this word in the grid to read its note.
- CAPTURE
- Jennings's achievement in Philadelphia on July 9, 1882 proved that the camera could do what no human eye could: capture and hold a single, fleeting bolt of lightning.Find this word in the grid to read its note.
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The First Photograph of Lightning: a free large-print word search
Free large-print word search: on July 9, 1882, a camera in Philadelphia stopped lightning mid-flash — revealing its jagged, branching beauty for the very first time.
About The First Photograph of Lightning
On July 9, 1882, amateur astronomer William Nicholson Jennings pointed his camera at a stormy Philadelphia sky and made history — capturing the first successful photograph of a lightning bolt. Before that night, the branching, jagged structure of a lightning strike existed only as a blur in living memory, gone before the eye could truly study it. Jennings's glass plate held the bolt still at last, turning a wild electric moment into something the world could finally see, measure, and marvel at.
How to play
- 1Find a word.Tap its first letter, then tap along to its last — the trail fills in and finishes itself when it spells a word. Or press the first letter and drag.
- 2Words run in straight lines.Across and down, and on the harder difficulties diagonally and backwards.
- 3It marks itself.Each word you find takes on its own soft colour on the grid and is crossed off the list.
- 4Choose a difficulty.Relaxed, Classic or Challenging set those directions and how much the word list helps — never the grid size. Tap the A buttons at the top to enlarge the letters, or pinch the grid.
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