Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790)

Famous as an author, a humanist, an inventor, a musician, a philosopher, a printer, an internationally known scientist, and a statesman, Benjamin Franklin was one of the most remarkable of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was one of the signers of the Constitution and served as one of the most influential diplomats of the new nation. Although he was often looked on as an amateur in his scientific work, he earned renown in the history of physics for his many discoveries related to electricity and lightning.

A product of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, a period when reason was advocated as the primary source for authority in cultural life, Franklin invented the lightning rod, bifocal eyeglasses, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass harmonica. He communicated his extraordinary accomplishments in graceful, smart prose, and as a self-taught master of many subjects—including publishing and journalism, as well as science and engineering—he remains a popular icon of U.S. initiative and curiosity, as well as an early science communicator.

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts. Franklin's formal schooling ended early, but he continued his education on his own by reading every book he could get his hands on. He taught himself simple algebra and geometry, English grammar, foreign languages, history, and science. He began an apprenticeship in his brother James's printing shop and moved to London to continue his training as a printer; he then returned to Philadelphia to open his own printing shop. In June 1727, he helped to establish the Junto, a society of young men who met together on Friday evenings for friendliness and self-improvement that has been described as the first U.S. club. In 1729, he began the publication of the Pennsylvania Gazette, and in 1730, he married Deborah Read.

He proposed Pennsylvania's first university and the first U.S. city hospital and organized the country's first subscription library. Annually, from 1732 to 1758, he published Poor Richard's Almanac, where many polemics in favor of U.S. independence appeared alongside aphorisms and commonsense observations. Franklin became known as one of the first important writers in U.S. journalism. He is also remembered as one of the U.S. great thinkers. His ideas and words of wisdom helped to lay the foundation for the United States. At 42 years of age, he was wealthy enough to retire and started to carry out his experiments with electricity, thereby embarking on a new career of scientific research.

In 1750, he wrote to the British Royal Society, the oldest scientific organization in the world, expounding his electrical theory that stated that there were two kinds of electricity, positive and negative. His book Experiments and Observations on Electricity was published in London in 1751. Franklin proposed that electricity flowed from one place to another, a phenomenon everyone had observed, because of the “desire” for a negative material to move to a positive one in order to achieve natural balance. He claimed that electricity would therefore be attracted to a positive iron rod and away from properties that might otherwise lie in its path. So he performed his now famous kite experiment in 1752: As has been widely reported, at least, he attached an iron wire to a kite and was hit by the shock from a storm cloud. Franklin's lightning conductors would catch the imagination of Europe in the 1770s.

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