Having given a talk at Lichfield during their ‘Year of Lunarcy’ – celebrating the 250th anniversary of the organisation of the Lunary Society by Dr William Small – I have created an extended new edition of the Franklin volume. the main additional material relates to Franklin’s stay in Lichfield in July 1772, when he and Erasmus Darwin attempted to isolate what we now know as ‘methane’. Though they were unsuccessful, Franklin’s write-up of his attempt in the first volume of Joseph Priestley’s ‘Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air’ led directly to Volta’s successful isolation of the gas in Italy.