Part 12

After his withdrawal from business he remained postmaster of Philadelphia, and in 1753, after he had held that office for sixteen years, he was appointed Postmaster-General of all the colonies, with William Hunter, of Virginia, as his colleague, and he retained this position until dismissed from it by the British government in 1774, on the eve of the Revolution. There was some salary attached to these offices, that of Postmaster-General yielding three hundred pounds. The postmastership of Philadelphia entailed no difficult duties at that time, and his wife assisted him; but when he was made Postmaster-General he more than earned his salary during the first few years by making extensive journeys through the colonies to reform the system. The salary attached to the office was not to be allowed unless the office produced it; and during the first four years the unpaid salary of Franklin and his colleague amounted to nine hundred and fifty pounds. He procured faster post-riders, increased the number of mails between important places, made a charge for carrying newspapers, had all newspapers carried by the riders, and reduced some of the rates of postage.

But he was not the founder of the modern post-office system, nor was he the first Postmaster-General of America, as some of his biographers insist. He merely improved the system which he found and increased its revenues as others have done before and since.

The leisure he sought by retirement was enjoyed but a few years. He became more and more involved in public affairs, and soon spent most of his time in England as agent of Pennsylvania or other colonies, and during the Revolution he was in France. There was a salary attached to these offices. As agent of Pennsylvania he received five hundred pounds a year, and when he represented other colonies he received from Massachusetts four hundred, from Georgia two hundred, and from New Jersey one hundred. These sums, together with the thousand pounds a year from Hall, would seem to be enough for a man of his habits; but apparently he used it all, and was often slow in paying his debts.

In a letter written to Mrs. Stevenson in London, while he was envoy to France, he expresses surprise that some of the London tradespeople still considered him their debtor for things obtained from them during his residence there some years before, and he asks Mrs. Stevenson, with whom he had lodged, how his account stands with her. The thousand pounds from Hall ceased in 1766, and after that his income must have been seriously diminished, for the return from his invested savings is supposed to have been only about seven hundred pounds. He appears to have overdrawn his account with Hall, for there is a manuscript letter in the possession of Mr. Howard Edwards, of Philadelphia, written by Hall March 1, 1770, urging Franklin to pay nine hundred and ninety-three pounds which had been due for three years.

He procured for his natural son, William, the royal governorship of New Jersey, and he was diligent all his life in getting government places for relatives. This practice does not appear to have been much disapproved of in his time; he was not subjected to abuse on account of it; and, indeed, nepotism is far preferable to some of the more modern methods.

When Governor of Pennsylvania, after the Revolution, he declined, we are told, to receive any salary for his three years' service, accepting only his expenses for postage, which was high in those times, and amounted in this case to seventy-seven pounds for the three years. This is one of the innumerable statements about him in which the truth is distorted for the sake of eulogy. He did not decline to receive his salary, but he spent it in charity, and we find bequests of it in his will.

As minister to France he had at first five hundred pounds a year and his expenses, and this was paid. He was also promised a secretary at a salary of one thousand pounds a year; but, as the secretary was never sent, he did the work himself with the assistance of his grandson, William Temple Franklin, who was allowed only three hundred pounds a year.

He considered himself very much underpaid for his services in resisting the Stamp Act, for his mission to Canada in 1776 at the risk of his life, and for the long and laborious years which he spent in France. Certainly five hundred pounds a year and expenses was very small pay for his diplomatic work in Paris, but during the last six years of his mission there he received two thousand five hundred pounds a year, which would seem to be sufficient compensation for acting as ambassador, as well as merchant to buy and ship supplies to the United States, and as financial agent to examine and accept innumerable bills of exchange drawn by the Continental Congress (Bigelow's Works of Franklin, vol. ix. p. 127). In 1788, two years before his death, he made a statement of these claims for extra service and sent it to Congress, accompanied by a letter to his friend, Charles Thomson, the secretary.

He thought that Congress should recognize these services by a grant of land, an office, or in some other way, as was the custom in Europe when an ambassador returned from a long foreign service; and he reminded Thomson that both Arthur Lee and John Jay had been rewarded handsomely for similar services. But the old Congress under the Articles of Confederation was then just expiring, and took no notice of his petition; and when the new Congress came in under the Constitution, it does not appear that his claims were presented. It is a mistake to say, however, as some have done, that the United States never paid him for his services and still owes him money. These claims were for extra services which the government had never obligated itself to pay.

He died quite well off for those times, leaving an estate worth, it is supposed, considerably over one hundred thousand dollars. The rapid rise in the value of houses and land in Philadelphia after the Revolution accounts for a part of this sum. He owned five or six large houses in Philadelphia, the printing-house which he built for his grandson, and several small houses. He had also a number of vacant lots in the town, a house and lot in Boston, a tract of land in Nova Scotia, another large tract in Georgia, and still another in Ohio. His personal property, consisting mostly of bonds and money, was worth from sixty to seventy thousand dollars.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Pp. 209-217.

[16] Bigelow's Franklin from His Own Writings, vol. ii. p. 511.

[17] Bigelow's Works of Franklin, vol. v. p. 376; also vol. x. p. 78; Adams's Works, vol. i. p. 659.

V

SCIENCE

The exact period at which Franklin began to turn his attention to original researches in science is difficult to determine. There are no traces of such efforts when he was a youth in Boston. He was not then interested in science, even in a boyish way. His instincts at that time led him almost exclusively in the direction of general reading and the training of himself in the literary art by verse-writing and by analyzing the essays of the _Spectator_.

The atmosphere of Boston was completely theological. There was no room, no opportunity, for science, and no inducement or even suggestion that would lead to it, still less to original research in it. We find Franklin in a state of rebellion against the prevailing tone of thought, writing against it in his brother's newspaper at the risk of imprisonment, and in a manner more bitter and violent than anything he afterwards composed. If he had remained in Boston it is not likely that he would ever have taken seriously to science, for all his energies would have been absorbed in fighting those intolerant conditions which smothered all scientific inquiries.

In Pennsylvania he found the conditions reversed. The Quakers and the German sects which made up the majority of the people of that province in colonial times had more advanced ideas of liberty and free thought than any of the other religious bodies in America, and in consequence science flourished in Pennsylvania long before it gained entrance into the other colonies. The first American medical college, the first hospital, and the first separate dispensary were established there. Several citizens of Philadelphia who were contemporaries of Franklin achieved sufficient reputation in science to make their names well known in Europe.

David Rittenhouse invented the metallic thermometer, developed the construction of the compensation pendulum, and made valuable experiments on the compressibility of water. He became a famous astronomer, constructed an orrery to show the movements of the stars which was an improvement on all its predecessors, and conducted the observations of the transit of Venus in 1769. Pennsylvania was the only one of the colonies that took these observations, which in that year were taken by all the European governments in various parts of the world. The Legislature and public institutions, together with a large number of individuals, assisted in the undertaking, showing what very favorable conditions for science prevailed in the province.[18]

These were the conditions which seem to have aroused Franklin. Without them his mind tended more naturally to literature, politics, and schemes of philanthropy and reform; but when his strong intellect was once directed towards science, he easily excelled in it. Some of the early questions discussed by the Junto, such as "Is sound an entity or body?" and "How may the phenomena of vapors be explained?" show an inclination towards scientific research; and it is very likely that he studied such subjects more or less during the ten years which followed his beginning business for himself.

In his _Gazette_ for December 15, 1737, there is an essay on the causes of earthquakes, summarizing the various explanations which had been given by learned men, and this essay is supposed to have been written by him. Six years afterwards he made what has been usually considered his first discovery,--namely, that the northeast storms of the Atlantic coast move against the wind; or, in other words, that instead of these storms coming from the northeast, whence the wind blows, they come from the southwest. He was led to this discovery by attempting to observe an eclipse of the moon which occurred on the evening of October 21, 1743; but he was prevented by a heavy northeaster which did great damage on the coast. He was surprised to find that it had not prevented the people of Boston from seeing the eclipse. The storm, though coming from the northeast, swept over Philadelphia before it reached Boston. For several years he carefully collected information about these storms, and found in every instance that they began to leeward and were often more violent there than farther to windward.

He seems to have been the first person to observe these facts, but he took no pains to make his observations public, except in conversation or in letters to prominent men like Jared Eliot, of Connecticut, and these letters were not published until long afterwards. This was his method in all his investigations. He never wrote a book on science; he merely reported his investigations and experiments by letter, usually to learned people in England or France. There were no scientific periodicals in those days. The men who were interested in such things kept in touch with one another by means of correspondence and an occasional pamphlet or book.

During the same period in which he was making observations on northeast storms he invented the "Pennsylvania Fireplace," as he called it, a new sort of stove which was a great improvement over the old methods of heating rooms. He published a complete description of this stove in 1745, and it is one of the most interesting essays he ever wrote. It is astonishing with what pleasure one can still read the first half of this essay written one hundred and fifty years ago on the driest of dry subjects. The language is so clear and beautiful, and the homely personality of the writer so manifest, that one is inclined to lay down the principle that the test of literary genius is the ability to be fascinating about stoves.

He explained the laws of hot air and its movements; the Holland stove, which afforded but little ventilation; the German stove, which was simply an iron box fed from outside, with no ventilating properties; and the great open fireplace fed with huge logs, which required such a draft to prevent the smoke from coming back into the room that the outer door had to be left open,--and if the door was shut the draft would draw the outer air whistling and howling through the crevices of the windows. His "Pennsylvania Fireplace" was what we would now call an open-fireplace stove. It was intended to be less wasteful of fuel than the ordinary fireplace and to give ventilation, while combining the heating power of the German and Holland stoves. It continued in common use for nearly a century, and modified forms of it are still called the Franklin stoves.

One of its greatest advantages was that it saved wood, which, for some time prior to the introduction of coal, had to be brought such a long distance that it was becoming very expensive. Franklin refused to take out a patent for his invention; for he was on principle opposed to patents, and said that as we enjoyed great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be willing to serve them by inventions of our own. He afterwards learned that a London ironmonger made a few changes in the "Pennsylvania Fireplace" and sold it as his own, gaining a small fortune.

Franklin's invention was undoubtedly an improvement on the old methods of heating and ventilation; but he was not, as has been absurdly claimed, the founder of the "American stove system," for that system very soon departed from his lines and went back to the air-tight stoves of Germany and Holland.

It was not until 1746 or 1747, after he had been making original researches in science for about five years, that he took up the subject of electricity, and he was then forty-one years old. It appears that Mr. Peter Collinson, of London, who was interested in botany and other sciences, and corresponded largely on such subjects, had presented to the Philadelphia Library one of the glass tubes which were used at that time for producing electricity by rubbing them with silk or skin. Franklin began experimenting with this tube, and seems to have been fascinated by the new subject. On March 28, 1747, he wrote to Mr. Collinson thanking him for the tube, and saying that they had observed with its aid some phenomena which they thought to be new.

"For my own part, I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done; for what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintance, who from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have, during some months past, had little leisure for anything else."

It will be observed that he speaks of crowds coming to see the experiments, and this confirms what I have already shown of the strong interest in science which prevailed at that time in Pennsylvania, and which had evidently first aroused Franklin. In fact, a renewed interest in science had been recently stirred up all over the world, and people who had never before thought much of such things became investigators. Voltaire, who resembled Franklin in many ways, had turned aside from literature, and at forty-one, the same age at which Franklin began the study of electricity, had become a man of science, and for four years devoted himself to experiments.

Franklin was by no means alone in his studies. Besides the crowds who were interested from mere curiosity, there were three men--Ebenezer Kinnersley, Thomas Hopkinson, and Philip Syng--who experimented with him, and it was no mere amateurish work in which these men were engaged. Franklin was their spokesman and reported the results of his and their labor by means of letters to Mr. Peter Collinson. Within six months Hopkinson had observed the power of points to throw off electricity, or electrical fire, as he called it, and Franklin had discovered and described what is now known as positive and negative electricity. Within the same time Syng had invented an electrical machine, consisting of a sphere revolved on an axis with a handle, which was better adapted for producing the electrical spark than the tube-rubbing practised in Europe.

The experiments and the letters to Collinson describing them continued, and about this time we find Franklin writing a long and apparently the first intelligent explanation of the action of the Leyden jar. Then followed attempts to explain thunder and lightning as phenomena of electricity, and on July 29, 1750, Franklin sent to Collinson a paper announcing the invention of the lightning-rod, together with an explanation of its action.

In these papers he also suggested an experiment which would prove positively that lightning was a form of electricity. The two phenomena were alike as regarded light, color, crooked direction, noise, swift motion, being conducted by metals, subsisting in water or ice, rending bodies, killing animals, melting metals, and setting fire to various substances. It remained to demonstrate with absolute certainty that lightning resembled electricity in being attracted by points; and for this purpose Franklin proposed that a man stand in a sort of sentry-box on the top of some high tower or steeple and with a pointed rod draw electricity from passing thunder-clouds.

This suggestion was successfully carried out in France, in the presence of the king, at the county-seat of the Duke D'Ayen; and afterwards Buffon, D'Alibard, and Du Lor confirmed it by experiments of their own. But they did not use steeples; they erected lofty iron rods, in one instance ninety-nine feet high. Nevertheless, it was in effect the same method that Franklin had suggested. The experiment was repeated in various forms in England, and the Philadelphia philosopher, postmaster, and author of "Poor Richard" became instantly famous as the discoverer of the identity of lightning with electricity.

Two years before these experiments were inaugurated he had retired from business for various reasons, chief among which was his strong desire to devote more time to science. His letters continue to be filled with closely reasoned details of all sorts of experiments. So earnest were these Philadelphia investigators, that when Kinnersley wrote complaining that in travelling to Boston he found difficulty in keeping up his experiments, Franklin, in reply, suggested a portable electrical apparatus which would not break on a journey.

In a letter written to Collinson on October 19, 1752, Franklin says he had heard of the success in France of the experiment he had suggested for drawing the lightning from clouds by means of an elevated metal rod; but in the mean time he had contrived another method for accomplishing the same result without the aid of a steeple or lofty iron rod. This was the kite experiment of which we have heard so much, and he goes on to describe it:

"Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to reach to the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief when extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross, so you have the body of a kite; which being properly accommodated with a tail, loop, and string, will rise in the air, like those made of paper; but this being of silk is fitter to bear the wet and wind of a thunder gust without tearing. To the top of the upright stick of the cross is to be fixed a very sharp pointed wire, rising a foot or more above the wood. To the end of the twine, next the hand, is to be tied a silk ribbon, and where the silk and twine join, a key may be fastened. This kite is to be raised when a thunder-gust appears to be coming on, and the person who holds the string must stand within a door or window, or under some cover, so that the silk ribbon may not be wet; and care must be taken that the twine does not touch the frame of the door or window. As soon as any of the thunder clouds come over the kite, the pointed wire will draw the electric fire from them, and the kite, with all the twine, will be electrified, and the loose filaments of the twine, will stand out every way, and be attracted by an approaching finger. And when the rain has wetted the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle. At this key the phial may be charged: and from electric fire thus obtained, spirits may be kindled, and all the other electric experiments be performed, which are usually done by the help of a rubbed glass globe or tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated."

This is the only description by Franklin of the experiment which added so much to his reputation. Franklin and the kite became a story for school-books; innumerable pictures of him and his son drawing the lightning down the string were made and reproduced for a century or more in every conceivable form, and even engraved on some of our national currency.

The experiment was made in June, 1752; in the following October the above letter was written, and the news it contained appears to have rushed over the world without any effort on his part to spread it. He never wrote anything more concerning this experiment than the very simple and unaffected letter to Mr. Collinson. But people, of course, asked him about it, and from the details which they professed to have obtained grand statements have been built up describing his conduct and emotions on that memorable June afternoon on the outskirts of Philadelphia, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of the present Vine Street, near Fourth; how his heart stood still with anxiety lest the trial should fail; how with trembling hand he applied his knuckles to the key, and the wild exultation with which he saw success crown his efforts.

But it is safe to say that there were none of these theatrical exhibitions, and that he made the experiment in that matter-of-fact and probably half-humorous way in which he did everything. Nothing important depended on it, for he had already proved conclusively, not only by reasoning but by his suggested experiments which had been tried in Europe, that thunder and lightning were phenomena of electricity. The kite was used because there were in Philadelphia no high steeples on which he could try the experiment that had proved his discovery in France.

But it was Franklin's good fortune on a number of occasions to be placed in picturesque and striking situations, which greatly increased his fame. He did not foresee that kite-flying would be one of these, and as it was not essential to his discovery of the nature of lightning, he was disinclined at first to think much of it, and did not even report it to Mr. Collinson until after several months had elapsed. But the world fixed upon it instantly as something easy to remember. To this day it is the popular way of illustrating Franklin's discovery, and is all that most people know of his contributions to science.