Why won't jQuery's load event fire on dynamically inserted script elements?

Question

I'm dynamically inserting a script element using jQuery. The script loads as expected, but the load event does not fire.

jQuery('<script/>').attr({
    type : 'text/javascript',
    src : 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js'
}).appendTo('body').load(function(){
    /* This alert does not fire: */
    alert('I just loaded!');
});

If I use regular JavaScript to insert the element, the load event does fire and can be caught with jQuery.

var e = document.createElement('script'); 
e.type = 'text/javascript';
e.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
document.body.appendChild(e);

jQuery(e).load(function(){
    /* This alert does fire: */
    alert('I just loaded!');
});

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Use the jQuery.getScript()^[docs] method instead.

$.getScript('http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js',function(){
    alert('I just loaded!');
});

Or, on current versions of jQuery, using the promise pattern as below

$.getScript('http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js')
  .done(function(){
    alert('I just loaded!');
  })
  .fail(function(){
    console.log('script could not load');
  })
;

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EDIT: Removed the code comment that was copied from the question, as it added confusion to the answer. Thanks to @Jeff for pointing it out.