Comment by tokenadult

Benjamin Franklin's 1752 paper on experimenting with electricity from thunderstorms, collected in a Leyden jar, is not to be missed.

http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/47/565.full.p...

After edit:

To answer a question raised by another HN user, the Wikipedia article on the medial s character in older printed English-language books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

is helpful about the history of printing that character.