Franklin (3 page)

Franklin's attitude caused problems with the rulers of Pennsylvania. The sons of
William Penn
ruled Pennsylvania, unlike a royal province, run by a governor whom the king appointed. William Penn obtained the colony as a grant of land from the king, then sold the lands to settlers, retaining millions of acres. Penn's two sons,
Richard
and
Thomas
, could appoint the governor and his council, judges, and other officials.

The Penns despised criticism, and when Franklin began pointing out faults of the government, his friends warned he and his paper never would be successful in Pennsylvania without the support of the Penns.

Franklin listened to this advice and invited these pessimists to dinner. They sat down to a bare table, and the only food served was mush in wooden bowls. Franklin poured water into his bowl and began eating. His guests tried to follow his example, but the stuff tasted so bad they barely could swallow it. Finally, they asked what they were eating. “Sawdust meal and water,” Franklin said. “Now go tell the rest of Philadelphia that a man who can eat that for supper doesn't need to be beholden to anyone.”

Around this time, Franklin decided to marry Deborah Read, whom he had left when he sailed to London. Deborah was already married to the potter, although there were rumors that he had another wife and child in London and that he had been killed in a barroom brawl in the West Indies. Franklin had remained a friend to Deborah in the five years since his return to Philadelphia; he paid her frequent visits and gave her and her mother financial advice. Although he wanted to renew his romance with Deborah, he was not faithful to his feelings for her. He had made a mistake that made it crucial for him to have an understanding wife.

Despite his resolution to lead a moral life, Franklin admitted in his
Autobiography
he found it difficult to control his sexual desires. Before he returned to Deborah, he had had an affair with a woman who, according to one story, peddled oysters from a basket or a pushcart in the streets of the city. From this liaison a son was born. Franklin named the boy William and accepted responsibility. Not wanting his son to be labeled illegitimate, and with marriage to the boy's mother impossible, on September 1, 1730, Franklin accepted Deborah as his wife and brought his son into their household.

There was no public wedding ceremony, since drawing attention to the union would put Deborah at risk. “Our mutual affection was revived, but there were now great objections to our union,” Franklin wrote. Under Pennsylvania law, she could be branded a felon by marrying Benjamin while still legally bound to her first husband. The penalty would have been severe: Thirty-nine lashes at the public whipping post and a life of hard labor in prison. Benjamin and Deborah joined instead into a common-law marriage. There was another benefit to this arrangement: Benjamin would not incur the debts run up by the potter.

Deborah did her best to accept William as her own. She worked hard for Franklin, who recalled “how she assisted me cheerfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing old linen rags for the papermakers, etc., etc.” He recalled that in those days, he had been “clothed from head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife's manufacture.” Deborah was Benjamin's bookkeeper and ran the shop attached to his printing office, where he sold books and stationery.

Franklin was grateful to Deborah and demonstrated it by writing her a love song. One night, at the Junto, he and his friends were discussing the number of love songs written to mistresses, but no one could name one song written in praise of a wife. The next day, Franklin gave this song to one friend and asked him to sing it at the next Junto meeting.

Although they were not poor, the Franklins lived frugally. Benjamin noted that his breakfasts for a long time consisted of only bread and milk, “no tea,” which was served on cheap pottery with a pewter spoon. Deborah thought her husband was worthy of more and surprised him with a gift one morning, which she had scrimped and saved for in secret. “Being called one morning to breakfast, I found it in a china bowl with a spoon of silver. They . . . had cost her the enormous sum of three and twenty shillings, for which she had no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors.”

Two years into his marriage, with his paper thriving, Franklin launched a more successful publication -
Poor
Richard's Almanack.
Every publisher in the colonies tried to produce an almanac; it was an ideal way to use dead time when the presses were idle, and if the book became popular, it could be profitable.

The almanac's success depended on the appeal of the “philomath” - the astrologer who did the writing and predicting. Franklin realized most people read an almanac for amusement and didn't believe anyone could predict the weather and other events accurately a year ahead. So Franklin created a philomath named Richard Saunders, who wrote a comical introduction to the first edition. Poor Richard explained he only had taken to writing because his wife was sick of watching him gaze at the stars and had ordered him to make money or she was going to burn his books and instruments.

A philomath named Titan Leeds wrote an almanac that served as Franklin's competition. Poor Richard explained he would have written almanacs long ago, but he hated to cut into his friend Titan's profits. Now it was all right for him to publish, because Titan was about to die.

Richard explained that according to the stars, Titan would die on October 17, 1733, while Titan's calculations led him to believe he would survive until the twenty-sixth of the same month. Titan Leeds was infuriated and replied, insisting he was very much alive, calling Poor Richard a fraud. The next year, Poor Richard replied that Titan Leeds was certainly dead, because in the almanac that appeared under his name in 1734, “I am treated in a very gross and unhandsome manner. I am called a false predictor, an ignorant, a conceited scribbler, a fool and a lyar.” His friend Titan never would have treated him this way. Titan continued to spew insults, but the popularity of his almanac faded, while Poor Richard's soared.

Franklin became popular because of the proverbs that he sprinkled throughout
Poor Richard's Almanack.
He took them from several books, including the Bible, but he often rewrote them to sharpen their wit.

Franklin made fun of philomaths who pretended they really could predict the future. “I find that this will be a plentiful year of all manner of good things for those who have enough,” he wrote, “but the orange trees in Greenland will go near to fare the worse for the cold . . .”

Franklin was working hard to improve Philadelphia. With the help of the Junto and the
Gazette,
he founded the city's first volunteer fire department and reorganized the city's policemen, who patrolled the streets at night. To help everyone educate themselves, he founded a subscription library, the first in America. He was the guiding spirit behind the Pennsylvania Hospital and the Philadelphia Academy, which became the University of Pennsylvania. He helped organize the colony's first militia, the Philadelphia Associaters, to defend against a French and Spanish invasion. At the same time, he served as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly.

In all his endeavors, Franklin practiced an unusual strategy. When he began soliciting subscriptions for the library, he realized others thought he was doing the job solely for credit. Franklin quickly put himself “as much as I could out of sight” and described the project as “a scheme of a number of friends” who asked him to gather support of “lovers of reading.” The library soon was thriving, and Franklin stayed in the background, never taking credit for anything he achieved.

One situation marred Franklin's happiness. Six years after his marriage, Deborah gave birth to a son, whom Franklin named Francis Folger. At the age of four, the boy died of smallpox. Franklin blamed himself. While an apprentice to his brother, he had joined him in criticizing Cotton Mather's appeal for mass smallpox inoculation. He followed through on this stance by refusing to have Francis inoculated. After Francis' death, to spare other families his immense grief, he penned an editorial supporting smallpox inoculation. It was published in both his
Almanack
and the
Gazette
. For the rest of his life, any mention of Francis brought Franklin to tears.

After this loss, Deborah became more jealous of William. She resented the attention Franklin showered on his only son. Franklin bought William expensive presents, such as a pony, which the boy let wander away. Seven years of common-law marriage had legitimized William, and Franklin meant to give him every advantage.

Benjamin hired a tutor for his son at age eight. Theophilus Grew was a mathematician and astronomer, who collaborated with Franklin on
Poor Richard's Almanack.
William studied for a year at Alexander Annand's classical academy – an elite Philadelphia school – but, like Benjamin, his education was primarily homegrown. The boy immersed himself in books from his father's store, which provided a curriculum in Roman and Catholic Church history, as well as Greek and Latin grammar and literature.

William amused himself by flying kites in the spring, swimming and fishing in summer, and sledding and skating in winter. He joined an amateur theater group that staged plays in a warehouse and bet on horses – activities equally frowned upon in the Quaker city. Often, William gravitated to the docks, where he watched as ships unloaded exotic goods imported from as far away as India. He began to grow restless, thinking of escape and adventure.

Even after their daughter,
Sarah
, was born in 1743, Deborah still resented William. As he grew older, William noticed this fact. Benjamin tried to soothe these feelings, but he was not always successful. The household had grown, too, to include servants to help with the cooking, housework, and caring for Deborah's mother, who lived with them. There were apprentices to take on other chores and run errands. Deborah devoted most of her time to Sarah. Benjamin was preoccupied with his work. He gave William early drafts of his
Almanack
to proofread, and William also proved useful as a bookkeeper and supervised his father's apprentices.

Benjamin began to consider his future. By 1745, he was successful, with an income of more than £2,000. (An ordinary working man made £15 a year.) He owned and rented out several houses in Philadelphia. But Franklin saw no point in “the pursuit of wealth to no purpose” and he told a story about visiting a wealthy Philadelphia friend, who gave him a tour of his expensive new house. The rooms were huge, and each time Franklin asked why he had given himself so much space, the man replied, “Because I can afford it.” Finally, Franklin said, “Why don't you buy a hat six times too big for your head? You can afford that too.”

That kind of life was not for him. At the age of forty-two, he retired from printing. He hired a new printer, Scotsman David Hall, and offered him a chance to run the business if Hall would agree to pay Franklin half the profits from the
Pennsylvania Gazette
and
Poor Richard's Almanack
and other work done by the print shop for the next twenty years. At the end of that time, Hall would become sole owner of the business. Hall leaped at the chance.

People in Philadelphia speculated about Franklin's next undertaking. Some friends thought he should keep his profitable business that could make him one of the wealthiest men in America. They were amazed the retired Franklin was working harder than ever. But he had a new passion - solving the mysteries of electricity.

Two years earlier, while visiting relatives in Boston, Franklin attended a lecture by Archibald Spencer, a Scottish scientist who performed electrical experiments. Later that year, Spencer sold most of his apparatus to Franklin. Franklin bought more equipment through
Peter Collinson
, a Quaker friend in London who was a member of the prestigious
Royal Society
. Soon he was writing to Collinson, “I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done.”

Scientists knew little about electricity. They produced it by rubbing glass tubes with silk or wool with resin. In 1746, educators at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands discovered how to store electricity in a special bottle – the
Leyden jar
- lined with strips of tin. Most scientists thought there were two kinds of electricity: vitreous (from silk) and resinous (from resin). Franklin, experimenting in his laboratory, concluded electricity was a single “fluid” that sometimes attracted and sometimes repelled. Why?

To answer that question, Franklin gathered three volunteers in his laboratory and had two - A and B - stand on wax squares, which insulated them from the ground. He had A rub a glass tube, thereby transferring some electricity in his body to the tube. He then held the tube out to B, and immediately, an electric spark jumped from the tube to B's hand. A now had less electricity than normal, and B had more than usual. Franklin told B to hold out his hand to volunteer C, who was standing on the ground. Immediately, a spark leaped from B to C. Franklin repeated the experiment, instructing B to ignore C and to hold out his hand to A. A stronger spark jumped from B back to A.

The explanation? B's body, once he received the charge from A, contained more electricity than normal. He was charged positively, Franklin said. A, with less electricity, was charged negatively. To simplify the explanation, Franklin called the positive charge plus and the negative charge minus. This breakthrough in the study of electricity enabled scientists to understand for the first time how current travels from one body to another.

Franklin noticed that a sharp object, such as a knitting needle, drew electricity from a positively charged body more rapidly and from a greater distance than a blunt object.

On November 7, 1749, Franklin moved closer to his great discovery. In a journal of his experiments, he wrote, “Electrical fluid agrees with lightning in these particulars. 1. Giving light. 2. Colour of the light. 3. Crooked direction. 4. Swift motion. 5. Being conducted by metals. 6. Crack or noise in exploding. 7. Subsisting in water or ice. 8. Rending bodies it passes through. 9. Destroying animals. 10. Melting metals. 11. Firing inflammable substances. 12. Sulphureous smell. The electric fluid is attracted by points. We do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since they agree in all particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable they agree likewise in this? Let the experiment be made.”

Nine months later, he summarized his electrical discoveries in a letter to Collinson. He suggested erecting “on top of some high tower or steeple . . . a kind of sentry box,” containing a man and an insulated stand. From the middle of the stand, an iron rod would rise and, bending at right angles, would pass out the door and rise again, twenty or thirty feet to a sharp point. If clouds contained electricity, as Franklin suspected, the pointed rod would draw the “fluid.”

Franklin's letter was published in England as a book entitled,
Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America
. It was translated into French, and soon two French electricians conducted Franklin's experiment, drawing electricity from clouds. British electricians repeated this a few weeks later.

Franklin, meanwhile, tried another, more famous approach. Since no high ground or church steeple existed in or near Philadelphia, Franklin made a kite out of a silk kerchief, attached a pointed wire to the tip, and, accompanied by his son William, went to the commons on the edge of Philadelphia. William got the kite aloft in a thunderstorm, racing back and forth across a cow pasture while his father observed from the safety of a shepherd's shed. For insulation, Franklin tied the kite string to a silk ribbon in his hand. He attached a key to the string just above the ribbon.

At first, the kite dove and looped, and nothing happened. But when rain wet the string, its fibers stood erect, proof that they were positively charged. Franklin touched his knuckle to the key and received a mild shock. He held the tip of a Leyden jar to the key and drew a large supply of electrical “fluid.” He had been right. Clouds were full of electricity, and lightning and electricity were identical.

A few months later, in
Poor Richard's Almanack,
Franklin published the application of his idea. “It has pleased God in his goodness to mankind at length to discover to them the means of securing their habitations and other buildings from mischief by thunder and lightning.” He described how people could erect lightning rods on their roofs and run them down the side of the building to the ground. The same could be done for ships by running a wire from a rod on the mast down a sail to the water. The rod would thus ground the lightning charge, instead of letting it hit the house or ship. Franklin made no attempt to patent his invention. He gave it to the world free, as he did with other inventions, including the Pennsylvania fireplace. Often called the Franklin stove, his was the first fireplace that kept warm air in the room instead of letting it escape up the chimney. Franklin invented the first electrical battery and redesigned Philadelphia's street lights, substituting four flat panes of glass for a globe. Franklin refused to profit from his inventions, because, he said, he had profited from the inventions of others.

Franklin's discoveries, particularly his work with lightning and the lightning rod, made him famous. The king of France sent his personal congratulations. The British Royal Society elected him a member by unanimous vote and bestowed upon him the Copley Medal, its highest award. Harvard and Yale gave him honorary degrees.
Immanuel Kant
, the greatest philosopher of the time, compared him to
Prometheus
, the Greek god who brought fire from heaven and gave it to humankind. In 1750, most believed there was something divine about lightning, associating it with an angry God; the person who tamed it acquired an almost superhuman image.

Franklin didn't act like a superman. Instead, he enjoyed entertaining friends with electrical tricks. He would electrify a many-legged piece of wire and make it walk like a spider. He darkened the room and electrified the gold border of a book. He electrified the gold crown on a painting of England's King
George II
, shocking anyone who touched it. He put a glass of brandy on one side of the Schuylkill River and sent an electric current across the river to set it ablaze. Once, to show electricity's power, he knocked down three strong men with one charge.

During one exhibition, as he was showing visitors how he could kill a turkey via electrocution, Franklin accidentally touched the positive and negative poles. There was a loud crack, and Franklin's body convulsed. He blacked out for several seconds. The hand that received the electric charge was white, and he had a bruise on his breastbone. He later joked, “I was going to kill a turkey, but it seems that I almost killed a goose.”

Stories about Franklin's experiments attracted curiosity seekers. They lurked outside his house, trying to watch the electrician at work. One day, Franklin electrified the rail fence on which they leaned. The gawkers vanished, certain the devil had gotten inside them.

His son William was his eager laboratory assistant. William studied Franklin's theories and daily journals and contributed his own impressions, formed by participating in his father's experiments. He read up on similar trials taking place in Europe. As with the kite experiment, William thrilled at being the risk-taker. He scaled roofs to install Franklin's lightning rods and collect in glass bottles electricity from passing thunderstorms. Once on a trip through Maryland, the father and son saw the formation of a small tornado in the distance. Franklin began to track it, hoping to gain some understanding of its cause, but was ready to abandon the study when the swirling debris made it too dangerous to pursue. William, though, chased the whirlwind, prodding his horse until he was nearly swept up in it himself. Then he turned back and reported what he saw to Franklin.

One summer, while Franklin was away in Boston, a violent thunderstorm wreaked havoc on their Philadelphia neighborhood. The worst of the damage was to a three-story home, which had been struck directly by a massive bolt of lightning. In the light of the next morning, William investigated. He discovered bricks shattered “as if done by a blow of a hammer . . . from underneath.” Holes were bored into the woodwork, the splinters driven upward. Door hinges and glass panels had melted. Window frames were shattered from the bottom up. On the roof, the shingles were singed. William hurriedly scribbled down notes and sketched his findings. He wrote to his father with excitement. His theory: The lightning had passed upward. Franklin sent a scientist named
Ebenezer Kinnersley
to study William's notes. Ultimately, Kinnersley, not William, took credit for the discovery.

Franklin spent four years studying electricity, transforming it from a curiosity into a branch of science. If he had been able to continue, he might have made even more remarkable discoveries.

But political difficulties in Pennsylvania arose, and Franklin believed solving political and moral problems was more important than science; the welfare of Pennsylvania - a colony of more than 300,000 - was a mightier responsibility. Franklin thought citizens in a free society shared responsibility for its safety and health. He was grateful to Pennsylvania for giving him a chance to overcome poverty and attain wealth and fame, and he wanted to give others the same opportunity. So when citizens elected him to the Assembly as a representative from Philadelphia, he abandoned his laboratory and worked on the challenges facing Pennsylvania.

The Penns were a problem. They owned millions of acres, but refused to pay taxes on them. Each governor sent from England had instructions to veto any bill passed by the Assembly taxing the proprietors' estates.

The Penns' refusal to share the expenses of dealing with Native Americans angered legislators. Each year, Pennsylvania and other colonies gave tribes gifts to buy their loyalty and maintain peace. The French, in possession of Canada, began vying for the natives' support with more expensive presents. This was unfortunate for the colonies because the French, united in a single colony with the wealth of the French king supporting them, outbid individual colonies. One of Franklin's first duties as assemblyman was to negotiate new treaties with Pennsylvania's tribes. When he and fellow commissioners learned the tribes considered their offerings inadequate, they gave their own money to buy more goods “at the Philadelphia price” on the frontier.

Franklin worried that France's plans to move down the Ohio River and claim the colonies between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean threatened the colonies. It was time for the colonies to unite. He noted the strength of the Iroquois, a confederation of six tribes. Why didn't the English follow their example? “It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous. . . .”

Franklin began thinking of the thirteen colonies as a nation that must be formed.

Before he began to study electricity, Franklin had tried to unite Americans with a common interest in science by founding the American Philosophical Society. Its purpose was to pool scientific knowledge and apply it to American life. The response was disappointing, partly because the mail service took up to six weeks to deliver a letter from Boston to Philadelphia, and letters frequently were lost by post riders and postmasters. It was difficult to unite people without reliable communications, and Franklin began considering ways to improve the postal service.

He took the job of postmaster in Philadelphia, partly to ensure his newspaper, with the largest circulation of any on the continent, regularly was mailed to subscribers. In 1751, when America's deputy postmaster general died, Franklin applied for the job, and upon his appointment, he went to work to transform the American postal system. For four years, he worked without compensation. Only if the system showed a profit would he get paid; for decades it had been operating at a loss.

Franklin preferred to learn from experience, and within a few months after his appointment, he began a ten-week journey east, traveling across New Jersey through New York into Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.