Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, in the colony of Massachusetts Bay ^[1]. His father, Josiah Franklin, was an English-born maker of candles and soap; his mother, Abiah Folger, came from Nantucket. Benjamin was the fifteenth of Josiah's seventeen children, and money in the crowded household was always tight ^[2].

His formal schooling lasted roughly two years. Josiah briefly intended the boy for the clergy and sent him to Boston Latin School, but the cost proved too high, and by age ten Benjamin was working in his father's shop ^[1]. He hated the trade. Because he loved books, at twelve he was apprenticed instead to his older brother James, a printer, where he learned typesetting and press work ^[2].

The apprenticeship gave him his first taste of writing. When James founded the New-England Courant in 1721, sixteen-year-old Benjamin slipped essays under the print shop door at night, signed with the pseudonym Silence Dogood, posing as a sharp-tongued widow. Fourteen of the letters ran before James discovered the author ^[3]. Relations between the brothers soured, and in 1723 Benjamin broke his indenture and fled, first to New York and then to Philadelphia, arriving at seventeen with little more than the coins in his pocket ^[1].

Philadelphia became the stage for one of the great self-made careers in American history. After a stint in London (1724-1726), where an empty promise of patronage from Pennsylvania governor William Keith left him stranded, Franklin returned and worked his way up through the city's small printing trade ^[2]. By 1728 he had opened his own shop, and in 1729 he bought the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he turned into one of the most widely read newspapers in the colonies ^[3].

His most profitable creation appeared in 1732: Poor Richard's Almanack, published under the persona of Richard Saunders. The almanac mixed weather tables and calendars with proverbs about thrift and diligence, many of which ("early to bed and early to rise") entered common speech. It sold roughly ten thousand copies a year at its peak, a remarkable figure for the colonial market ^[3].

Franklin also organized his adopted city with unusual energy. In 1727 he founded the Junto, a mutual improvement club of tradesmen, which spun off the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, the first subscription library in America ^[4]. He helped launch the Union Fire Company in 1736, the American Philosophical Society in 1743, and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania in 1751 ^[4]. Printing contracts, a partnership network stretching from New England to the Caribbean, and his appointment as postmaster of Philadelphia made him wealthy enough to retire from active business in 1748, at forty-two ^[2].

Retirement freed Franklin for science, and his electrical work made him famous on two continents. Working with borrowed apparatus in the late 1740s, he proposed that electricity was a single fluid with positive and negative charges, terminology still in use, and argued that lightning was an electrical discharge ^[5]. The celebrated kite experiment of June 1752, in which he drew charge from a storm cloud into a Leyden jar, supported the theory; French experimenters had already confirmed his proposal at Marly weeks earlier ^[5]. The practical result was the lightning rod, which he refused to patent. His book Experiments and Observations on Electricity earned him the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753 ^[5].

Any list of Benjamin Franklin achievements runs long. He invented the Franklin stove, bifocal spectacles, and a flexible urinary catheter, charted the Gulf Stream with his cousin Timothy Folger, and studied everything from ocean temperatures to the common cold ^[4]. As deputy postmaster general for the colonies from 1753, he reorganized mail routes and made the postal service turn a profit for the first time ^[2].

His political achievements were greater still. Franklin proposed an early plan of colonial union at Albany in 1754, spent most of 1757 to 1775 in London as an agent for several colonies, and returned home in time to serve in the Second Continental Congress. He sat on the committee of five that drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and edited Jefferson's text ^[6]. Sent to France that same year, he negotiated the 1778 Treaty of Alliance that brought French money, ships, and soldiers into the war, then co-signed the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended it ^[6]. He is the only founder whose signature appears on all four of the era's key documents: the Declaration, the alliance with France, the peace treaty, and the Constitution ^[1].

In 1730 Franklin entered a common-law marriage with Deborah Read, a Philadelphia woman he had courted before his London trip; her first husband had absconded, making a formal ceremony legally risky ^[2]. The couple had two children: Francis, who died of smallpox at four in 1736, a loss Franklin mourned all his life, and Sarah, called Sally, who cared for him in old age. Franklin also raised an illegitimate son, William Franklin, born around 1730 to an unidentified mother ^[1].

The family paid a price for Franklin's long absences. Deborah, who feared ocean travel, never joined him in England and died in 1774 after roughly a decade apart from her husband ^[2]. William, whom Franklin had helped install as royal governor of New Jersey, remained loyal to the Crown during the Revolution. Father and son never truly reconciled, and Franklin's will pointedly left William almost nothing ^[6].

Franklin's private character mixed discipline with sociability. As a young man he drew up a famous scheme of thirteen virtues, tracking his lapses in a notebook, an exercise he described with wry honesty in his autobiography ^[3]. He owned enslaved people for part of his life, a fact he later confronted: in his final years he served as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and in 1790 signed its petition asking Congress to end slavery ^[7].

Franklin came home from France in 1785 to a hero's welcome and was almost immediately elected president of Pennsylvania's Supreme Executive Council, the state's chief office, which he held for three years ^[1]. Age and gout limited him, yet in the summer of 1787, at eighty-one, he attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as its oldest delegate. He spoke rarely, but his support for the Connecticut Compromise on representation and his closing plea for unanimity helped carry the document to signature ^[6].

His last public campaign was against slavery. The 1790 abolition petition he signed provoked furious debate in the First Congress, and Franklin's final published essay was a satire mocking the pro-slavery arguments of a Georgia congressman ^[7].

Benjamin Franklin died at his Philadelphia home on April 17, 1790, at eighty-four, after a pleurisy attack. An estimated twenty thousand mourners, the largest gathering the city had seen, followed the funeral procession to Christ Church Burial Ground, where he lies beside Deborah ^[1].

Few Americans left fingerprints on so many institutions. The library, the fire company, the learned society, the university, and the postal system Franklin organized all survive in some form, and his Autobiography, first published in 1791, became one of the most read accounts of a self-made life ever written ^[3]. His portrait has appeared on the United States hundred dollar bill since 1914, a fitting home for the man who preached that time is money ^[1].

Scientists still honor him as a founder of electrical theory; the terms battery, charge, conductor, positive, and negative all trace to his papers ^[5]. Diplomats study his Paris mission as a model of persuasion. Historians debate his contradictions, the slaveholder turned abolitionist, the loyal Briton turned revolutionary, and biographers from Carl Van Doren to Walter Isaacson have kept the Benjamin Franklin biography a perennial genre of its own ^[2].

Basic Benjamin Franklin facts, the kite, the stove, the almanac, the treaty, only hint at the range of the man. Turgot's famous Latin epigram said he snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants. More than two centuries later, his name marks an institute in Philadelphia, counties and towns across the country, and the enduring American idea that a tradesman's son can remake his world ^[4].