Part 3

Poor Richard had something to say on practically every subject under the sun. He was in turn witty, wise, and, in keeping with the time he lived in, somewhat bawdy. No matter that he was sometimes inconsistent and contradictory, that he might praise saving money at one moment and make fun of the miser the next. Americans—farmers, businessmen, wives and workmen—chuckled at him, laughed with him, and perhaps at times took his moral lessons to heart. Many of his maxims became embedded in the American language.

Because of _Poor Richard_, prosperity touched the family that had hitherto known only economy and hard work. One day Franklin came down to breakfast to find that Deborah had served his bread and milk not in his usual two-penny earthenware crock, but in a china bowl. Instead of his old pewter spoon, there was one of silver.

“What is the meaning of this, Debby?”

“My Pappy can afford a china bowl and a silver spoon now,” she said.

4 THE CIVIC-MINDED CITIZEN

There were two children in the Franklin family now. The first was William, the other, Francis Folger, whom the father called Franky. He was proud of his sons. He had reason to want to be a good example to them.

One day he drew up a list of thirteen “virtues” as follows:

Temperance (eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation) Silence (speak not but what may benefit others or yourself) Order Resolution (perform without fail what you resolve) Frugality Industry Sincerity Justice (wrong none by doing injuries) Moderation Cleanliness Tranquillity Chastity Humility (imitate Jesus and Socrates)

Franklin’s ambitious project was to try to achieve all these virtues, thus to approach as near as possible moral perfection. This was no New Year’s Resolution to be lightly made and quickly forgotten. He purchased a small notebook, ruled the pages with red ink, making seven vertical columns, one for each day of the week, and thirteen horizontal columns, one for each virtue.

Each time he felt he had failed to practice one of his virtues he made a black mark in the proper square. Thus if he put a cross in the Tuesday column opposite Silence, he judged he had that day talked too much about trivial matters. The thirteenth virtue, Humility, suggested by a Quaker friend, was a check on the others; if he was proud of his mastery over any of his virtues, he would be lacking in humility.

He kept this notebook regularly for a long time. The virtue which gave him most trouble was Order (let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time). Eventually he had to decide that he was not an orderly person and never would be. Nor did he ever claim that he achieved anywhere near “moral perfection” in any of the others, although he did give credit years later to his daily discipline for “the constant felicity of my life.”

It is unlikely that in any other part of the world a grown and prospering businessman would have resolved to make himself more virtuous, with all the diligence of a schoolboy attacking a problem in arithmetic. His act was typically American. The colonies were young and growing and pliable, not old and set in their ways like the European nations. Young countries, like young people, harbor the seeds of idealism, yearnings for greatness, deep-rooted desires to be better in any or every sphere of activity than their predecessors or contemporaries. The youthful spirit that was part and parcel of America remained with Benjamin Franklin to the end of his days.

He was always trying to enlarge his mental horizons. For that aim he taught himself French, Italian, Spanish, and German, not yet dreaming that he would ever have practical use for these languages. He was at the same time widening his business activities, starting a branch of his printing shop in Charleston, South Carolina, on a partnership arrangement. It was the first of many branches.

In 1733, after an absence of ten years, he went back to Boston to see his family. His parents were well but there were some sad changes. Four of his sisters and one of his brothers had died. Jane, his beautiful young sister, closer to him than anyone else in the family, had been married for six years to a saddler named Edward Mecom, and had two boys, but her husband was in poor health and her children were also sickly. Tragedy had cast its first shadow over her. She would in the years to come lose her husband and twelve children, two of them dying insane, as the result of some unknown inherited sickness.

James was living in Newport, and on his way back to Philadelphia, Franklin paid this older brother a visit. Their reunion was cordial and old differences were ignored if not forgotten. James too was sick and knew that death was not far away. His former apprentice promised to take care of James’ son and teach him the printing business. When James died two years later, Franklin sent the boy to school for five years and then took him into his home as an apprentice, thus making James “ample amends for the service I had depriv’d him of by leaving him so early.”

All his life he would be giving aid—jobs, partnerships, loans, gifts and, less welcome, advice—to his family, his in-laws, his nieces, nephews, friends, and children of friends. The assistance was sometimes unappreciated and seldom rewarded. It played havoc with virtue number four, Frugality. Nor, as he had omitted the virtue of generosity from his list, did he ever give himself any good marks for such services.

Sorrow struck him personally on November 21, 1736, when Francis Folger, a grave and sweet-faced lad of four, died of smallpox. In the midst of his terrible grief, Franklin refuted a false rumor. It was not true, he wrote in the _Gazette_, that his boy had died as the result of smallpox inoculation. Had he been inoculated, his life might have been spared. He felt it important that his readers should know that he considered inoculation “a safe and beneficial practice.”

The year of his son’s death, he was appointed clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and the following year he was made postmaster of Philadelphia. These were his first official positions, and there was pay and prestige attached to both. What matter if the Assembly sessions were so tedious he worked out mathematical puzzles to keep himself awake, and that his home on High Street now housed the city post office in addition to the Franklins, various relatives of both of them for varying lengths of times, servants, apprentices, and on occasion journeymen who had no other lodgings.

He had six of these workmen now, including a Swede and a German, which made it possible to print in those languages. They were all kept busy. He was public printer for Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. Besides the _Almanack_ and the _Gazette_, a number of books were coming off the High Street presses: Cato’s _Moral Distichs; The Constitution of the Free-Masons_, the first Masonic book printed in America; Cadwallader Colden’s _An Explication of the First Causes of Motion in Matter_; and Richardson’s _Pamela_, the first novel printed in America.

Their stationer’s shop now sold books as well as an astounding range of miscellany: goose quills, chocolate, cordials, cheese, codfish, compasses, scarlet broadcloth, four-wheeled chaises, Seneca rattlesnake root with directions on how to use it for pleurisy, ointments and salves for the “itch” and other ailments, made by the Widow Read, Debby’s mother, and fine green Crown soap, unique in the colonies, produced by Franklin’s brothers John and Peter who had learned the secret of its composition from their father.

In all this hustle and bustle, Franklin reigned as instigator and executor. He was a little heavier, his brown hair somewhat thinner, his face more mature, and his manner more calm and assured, but in his eyes was the same merriment of the Boston youth. Around the house and shop, he dressed in working clothes, red flannel shirt, leather breeches, and his old leather apron.

For meetings of the Masons or for dinners with prominent Philadelphians who were now demanding his company, he had more elegant attire. On such occasions he might wear his best black cloth breeches, velvet jacket, a Holland shirt with ruffles at the wrist and neck, calfskin shoes, high-quality worsted stockings, and a fashionable wig.

Debby never accompanied him to such affairs, nor would she have been comfortable if she had done so. The years of their marriage had put a wider social and intellectual gap between them. While Franklin had cultivated his mental powers and learned to speak as an equal to anyone, she was the same Debby he had married, grown older and plumper. Her voice was still rough, her language uncouth, her manners hearty, and her taste in clothes flamboyant. He never tried to change her. He appreciated her loyalty, her industry, her warm heart, and asked for nothing more. “My plain Country Joan,” he called her in a ballad he wrote and sang for the members of the Junto:

Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate, I sing my plain Country Joan, These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life, Blest day that I made her my own.

As for Debby, had anyone told her that her husband would one day be among the most famous men in the world, she would have laughed in his face. Not her “Pappy”—as she always called him. Not that he wasn’t the best of husbands, a good provider, and really handy at doing things around the house.

She must have clapped her hands in delight at the stove he set up in their common room in 1740. Houses then were mostly heated by fireplaces. Large or small, they had in common that one was scorched on approaching the fire too closely and chilled at the far side of the room. It was impossible for a woman to sit by the window to sew on a winter day. Her fingers would be too stiff with cold to hold a needle. It was taken for granted that everyone had colds during the winter months, especially the women, who of necessity were indoors more than the men. There was the problem of smoke too. With the usual fireplace, most of the smoke came into the room instead of going up the chimney, blackening curtains and spreading soot everywhere.

Franklin’s Pennsylvania Fireplace, later called the Franklin Stove, was made of cast iron, could be taken apart and moved easily from room to room. It spread no smoke and, most amazingly, heated the entire room an almost equal temperature.

Debby’s sole complaint about her husband had to do with the way he spoiled his son William. Ever since the death of little Franky, he humored the boy to excess. William had a string of private schoolmasters—one of them decamped with Franklin’s wardrobe when William was nine. He had his own pony, like the sons of the rich. Whatever the boy wanted, he managed to wangle from his indulgent father. “The greatest villain on earth,” Debby once called this clever lad. The two of them never did get along.

Even William had to take second place after their first and only daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743. Sarah would bring to her father joy and comfort to modify the pain caused by his son.

He was busy that year with a new project. In May he issued a circular letter headed “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in North America,” which be mailed to men of learning throughout the colonies. Now that the first drudgery of settling was over, he wrote, the time had come “to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock.”

For this purpose, he proposed formation of an organization whose members, through meetings or by correspondence, would exchange information on all new scientific discoveries or inventions, and he offered his own services as secretary “till they shall be provided with one more capable.” From this letter grew the American Philosophical Society, which came into being the following year. (The words “philosophical” and “scientific” were then used as synonyms.) Its activities were parallel to those of the famous Royal Society in London.

One of Franklin’s first contributions to the new society was a paper on his “Pennsylvania Fireplace,” which he and Debby had been enjoying several years, including diagrams and instructions on how to install it. He refused to patent his invention: “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.”

Also in 1743 he printed his “Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” a pamphlet suggesting an academy of learning to match Yale, Harvard, and William and Mary College at Williamsburg. He launched this plan not as his own but as coming from some “public-spirited gentlemen,” a tactical approach he had figured out to be more effective than using his own name.

The academy, he wrote, should be “not far from a river, having a garden, orchard, meadow, and a field or two.” It should have a library. The students—youths from eight to sixteen—should “diet together plainly, temperately, and frugally.” They should be trained in running, leaping, wrestling, and swimming.

Subjects studied should be “those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.” All should be taught to “write a fair hand” and to learn drawing, “a universal language, understood by all nations.” They should learn grammar, with Addison, Pope, and Cato’s _Letters_ as models. He stressed the importance of elocution: “pronouncing properly, distinctly, emphatically.” The curriculum should include mathematics, astronomy, history, geography, ancient customs, morality, but not Latin and Greek, unless a student had “an ardent desire to learn them.”

Franklin’s ideal and surprisingly modern academy was also to teach practical matters: invention, manufactures, trade, mechanics, “that art by which weak men perform such wonders ...,” planting and grafting. There should be “now and then excursions made to the neighboring plantations of the best farmers, their methods observed and reasoned upon for the information of youth.”

This “Proposal” was the genesis of the University of Pennsylvania, which in six years’ time—1749—became a reality. (Franklin was elected first president, a post he held seven years.)

Philadelphia had as yet no regular police force. Its dark and narrow streets were in theory guarded by the local citizens, appointed in rotation by the ward constables. Often citizens preferred to pay the six shillings required to hire a substitute, money which might be dissipated in drink, leaving streets unguarded, or to pay the very ruffians against whom protection was needed. To abolish such abuses, Franklin persuaded his Junto members to campaign for a paid police force, which was voted a few years later.

Also through the Junto, he called public attention to Philadelphia’s fire hazards and means of avoiding them. From this effort came the Union Fire Company, the first organized firemen in the colonies. Subsequently, he was responsible for the first fire insurance company in the colonies.

Since 1739, England had been at war with Spain, and in 1744, war with France erupted. The struggle involved the colonies when, in July 1747, French and Spanish privateers plundered two plantations on the Delaware River, a little below New Castle. There were rumors of a French plan to sack Philadelphia. The city had no defenses. The Quaker-dominated Assembly had refused to vote money for war purposes.

Seeing danger threaten, Franklin published “Plain Truth,” a pamphlet which succeeded in convincing even the Quakers of the need for preparedness. Under his leadership, Pennsylvania’s first volunteer militia, with some 10,000 members, was formed. He was offered the post of colonel in the Philadelphia branch. He declined, preferring to serve as a common soldier. William, now sixteen, was also in service, not in the militia but in a company raised by the British for a campaign against French Canada.

In 1748, France, Spain and England settled their difficulties temporarily in the peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. For the time being, the colonies were free from danger of invasion or attack. At last the Franklin family could return to normal life.

He was forty-two and by the standards of the time a rich man. Since his income was sufficient for his needs, he made up his mind to retire. A fellow printer named David Hall took over the management of his printing shop. Franklin moved to a quiet part of town, at Race and Second streets, and bought a 300-acre farm in Burlington, New Jersey, where he could practice the art of a gentleman farmer.

It was time, he believed, to devote the remaining years of his life to his friends, to his writing, to the pursuit of learning. Particularly a branch of learning that had occupied his attention on and off for the past several years—the study of electricity.

5 THE THUNDER GIANT

A few years before his retirement, Franklin, on a visit to Boston, attended a display of electrical tricks given by a Dr. Adam Spencer of Scotland. There is no record of the nature of these “electrical tricks.” Franklin commented later that Dr. Spencer was no expert and that they were imperfectly performed. Since he had never seen anything of the sort before, he was “surpris’d and pleased.”

That sparks could be produced by friction had been known since ancient times. Little more was known about electricity until, in the first part of the eighteenth century, a young Frenchman, Charles François du Fay, identified two different types of electricity: _vitreous_, produced by rubbing glass with silk; _resinous_, produced by rubbing resin with wool or fur. Such frictional electricity was brief-lived. Sparks flashed and were gone, and that was the end of it.

Was there any way in which electric charges could be preserved from the rapid decay which they underwent in the air? Around 1747 two scientists were working independently on this problem—E. C. von Kleist of Pomerania and Pieter van Musschenbroek of the University of Leyden. Within a few months of each other, they had found a method of storing electricity in a container. The Leyden jar, this container was named. It was the first electrical condenser.

In one experiment Musschenbroek suspended a glass phial of water from a gun barrel by a wire which went down through a cork in the phial a few inches into the water. The gun barrel, hanging on a silk rope, had a metallic fringe inserted into the barrel which touched an electrically charged glass globe. A friend who was watching him, a man named Cunaeus, happened to grasp the phial with one hand and the wire with another. Immediately he felt a strange and startling sensation—reportedly the first manmade electric shock in history.

Musschenbroek repeated what Cunaeus had done, this time using a small glass bowl as his “Leyden jar.” “I would not take a second shock for the King of France,” he said.

Van Kleist in Pomerania produced the same effect. He lined the inside and outside of his Leyden jar with silver foil, charged the inner coat heavily, connected it with the outer foil by a wire which he held in his hand—and felt a violent shock run into his arm and chest.

A Leyden jar could take any number of forms. Even a wine bottle would serve. The type used most frequently during the next few years was a glass tube, some two and a half feet long, and just big enough around so that a man might grasp it easily in his hand. The advantage of this size and shape was that it could most conveniently be electrified, which was then done by hand, by rubbing the glass with a cloth or buckskin. This simple device gave impetus to research on electricity throughout Europe. It also provided a new form of entertainment.

Performers went from town to town with their Leyden jars, giving spectators the thrill of receiving electric shocks, and extolling the marvels of “electrical fire.” Louis XV of France invited his guests to watch a novel spectacle arranged by his court philosopher, Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet. The King’s Guard in full uniform lined up before the throne, holding hands. The first one was instructed to grasp the wire or chain connected to the Leyden jar. They all jumped convulsively into the air as an electric current passed through them.

In Italy some scientists tried to cure paralysis by electric shock, claiming moderate success. In May 1748, for instance, Jean-François Calgagnia, thirty-five years old, was given an electric shock from a simple cylinder-type Leyden jar. Since the age of twelve, his left arm had been so paralyzed he could not lift his hand to his head. After the first electrical treatment he at once raised his arm and touched his face. There is no record as to whether the cure was permanent.

After Franklin became aware of this phenomenon, he was agog to try experiments on his own. He wrote of his interest to a London friend, Peter Collinson, a Quaker merchant and member of the Royal Society. Collinson promptly sent him a glass tube, along with suggestions as to how it might be used for electrical experiments. This was all Franklin needed to get started.

He was not trained in scientific matters as were many of his European contemporaries. He was unfamiliar with scientific jargon, and could only write about what he was doing in everyday language. But he had those qualities that are innate in any scientist, with or without a university degree—an inquiring mind, patience, and persistence.

His experiments, beginning with the winter of 1746, covered a wide range. He melted brass and steel needles by electricity, magnetized needles, fired dry gunpowder by an electric spark. He stripped the gilding from a book, and he electrified a small metallic crown above an engraving of the King of England—so that whoever touched the crown received a shock!

His home was soon so crowded with curious visitors trooping up and down the stairs, he could hardly get any work done. He solved the problem by having a glass blower make tubes similar to his, passing them out to friends so they could make their own experiments.

Several of the Junto members worked closely with him. At first they electrified the tube, as was still done in Europe, by vigorously rubbing one side of it with a piece of buckskin. One of the club members, a Silversmith named Philip Synge, devised a sort of grindstone, which revolved the tube as one turned a handle. To charge the tube with electricity, all that was needed was to hold the buckskin against the glass as it revolved, a vast saving in physical labor.

Another invention of Franklin and his associates was the first storage battery. For electrical plates they used eleven window glass panes about six by eight inches in size, covered with sheets of lead, and hung on silk cords by means of hooks of lead wire. They found it as easy to charge this “battery” with frictional electricity as to charge a single pane of glass.

Among his disciples was an unemployed Baptist minister named Ebenezer Kinnersley. Franklin suggested he might both serve science and earn his living if he held electrical demonstrations. Kinnersley’s first announcement of a lecture, held in Newport, described “electrical fire” as having “an appearance like fishes swimming in the air,” claiming this fire would “live in water, a river not being sufficient to quench the smallest spark of it.” He promised his audience such wonders as “electrified money, which scarce anybody will take when offered ... a curious machine acting by means of electric fire, and playing a variety of tunes on eight musical bells ... the force of the electric spark, making a fair hole through a quire of paper....”

Kinnersley lectured in the colonies and the West Indies and was hugely successful. Neither he nor any of the other collaborators could rival Franklin’s own achievements.