In February 1739, barred from most pulpits in Bristol, Whitefield went out to Kingswood and preached in the open air to the colliers coming off shift. He wrote afterwards that he could see the white gutters made by the tears running down their black cheeks, and that was the moment the revival found its method. Churches held hundreds; a hillside held thousands, and the people who did not go to church came.
The instrument was his voice. Benjamin Franklin, sceptical about the reported crowd sizes, walked backwards down Market Street in Philadelphia until he could no longer hear clearly, calculated the area of the semicircle, and concluded that thirty thousand could indeed have heard him. Franklin also recorded, ruefully, emptying his pockets into the collection for the Georgia orphanage after resolving on the way in to give nothing.
He had been an actor's understudy in temperament if not in fact, and contemporaries described a delivery that was theatrical in the technical sense: he wept, used his whole body, repeated a sermon until it was polished, and had no scruples about doing so. He crossed the Atlantic seven times and preached in every American colony, and the itinerant tour, in which one man moves through many communities and leaves them connected to each other, is essentially his invention. He died at Newburyport in Massachusetts in 1770, on tour, and is buried under the pulpit there.