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(1738). "Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others" (1738). "The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn from the moderns what is fittest" (1738).

Poor Richard in these gamy years spoke often of women, tenderly and cynically in turn. "A house without a woman and firelight is like a body without soul or sprite" (1733).

You cannot pluck roses without fear of thorns,

Nor enjoy a fair wife without danger of horns (1734).

"Neither a fortress nor a m d will hold out long after they

begin to parley" (1734). "Marry your son when you will, but your daughter when you can" (1734). "A little house well filled, a little field well tilled, and a little wife well willed, are great riches" (1735).

When $ [Mars] and 5 [Venus] in conjunction lie. Then, maids, whate'er is asked of you deny (1735).

"A ship under sail and a big-belHed woman are the handsomest two things that can be seen common" (1735). "Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely" (1736). "He that takes a wife takes care" (1736). "Why does the blind man's wife paint herself?" (1736). "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards" (1738).

These varied sayings run through Foor Richard side by side with the stricter—and some of them later—maxims of prudence that Franklin put into Father Abraham's summary. (Those marked with a star are thought to be original with Franklin.*'^) "Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them" (1733). "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" (1735). "Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee" (1735). "God helps them that help themselves" (1736). "Creditors have better memories than debtors" (1736). *"An empty bag cannot stand upright" (1740). *"The sleeping fox catches no poultry. Up! Up!" (1743). *"If you'd have it done, go; if not, send" (1743), *"Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other" (1743). *"The used key is always bright" (1744). "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water" (1746). "For want of a nail the shoe is lost; for want of a shoe the

horse is lost; for want of a horse the rider is lost" (1752). "In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith but by the want of it" (1754). * "Three removes is as bad as a fire" (1758), Poor Richard took wisdom and wit where he could find them: from Dryden, Pope, Prior, Gay, Swift, Bacon, La Rochefoucauld, Rabelais, and many other known masters. There are sayings in Latin, Spanish, French, German, and Welsh. The rustic philosopher drew also on the stream of popular adages, whether already gathered into printed collections or still only current in ordinary speech. In this profusion and uncertainty of sources Poor Richard never hesitated to rework his texts to suit his purpose and his audience. Whatever passed through Franklin's mind brought away some of its qualities and its flavour. Writing, he thought, should be "smooth, clear, and short." The Scottish proverb: "Fat housekeepers make lean executors" he simplified to: "A fat kitchen, a lean will" (1733). Another proverb ran in its Scottish version: "A gloved cat was never a good hunter"; and in an English version: "A mufBed cat is no good mouser." Franklin sharpened it: "The cat in gloves catches no mice" (1754). To what had been: "Many strokes fell great oaks" Franklin gave a more pointed antithesis: "Little strokes fell great oaks" (1751). "Three may keep counsel if two of them are away" became in his handling more cynical, and plainer, as: "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead" (1735). There was a stock saying: "Good wits jump" which Swift put into the mouth of one of his foolish talkers in Genteel and bigenious Conversation. Franklin laughingly dramatized it: "Great wits jump, says the poet, and hit his head against the post" (1735). "The king's cheese goes half away in parings" was an old fling at the wastefulness of courts. Franklin made another application: "The king's cheese is half wasted in parings; but no matter, 'tis made of the people's milk" (1735). And in one of his proverbs Franklin, proverbial for prudence, took the imprudent side. An Italian proverb had been translated into English as: "It is better to have an tgg today than tomorrow a hen." Thomas Fuller in 1732 had firmly turned it to: "It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today." Franklin turned it back to the spendthrift: "An egg today is better than a hen tomorrow" (1734).

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There is one larger example of Franklin's method with his sources.*^' In the almanac for 1739 he gave a True Prognostication which came direct from the Fantagruelian Prognostication at the end of the Urquhart-Motteux version of Rabelais. Of the eclipses of the year Pantagruel says in a rush of words: "Saturn will be retrograde, Venus direct, Mercury unfixed as quicksilver. . . . For this reason the crabs will go sidelong and the rope-makers backward . . . bacon will run away from pease in Lent; the belly will waddle before; the bum will sit down first; there will be not a bean left in a twelfth-cake, nor an ace in a flush; the dice will not run as you wish, though you cog them . . . brutes shall speak in several places; Shrovetide will have its day . . , such a hurly-burly was never seen since the devil was a little boy; and there will be above seven-and-twenty irregular verbs made this year, if Priscian do not hold them in. If God do not help us, we shall have our hands and hearts full." Poor Richard, writing for cramped pages, had to be brief. Writing for Pennsylvania, he left out the Catholic and medieval touches in Pantagruel, and put American notes in their place. "During the first visible eclipse," he wrote, "Saturn is retrograde; for which reason the crabs will go sidelong and the rope-makers backward. The belly will wag before, and the a shall

sit down first. Mercury will have his share in these affairs, and so confound the speech of people that when a Pennsylvanian would say panther he shall say painter. When a New Yorker thinks to say this he shall say diss. And the people in New England and Cape May will not be able to say conjo for their lives, but will be forced to say keoiv by a certain involuntary twist in the root of their tongues. No Connecticut man nor Marylander will be able to open his mouth this year but Sir shall be the first or the last syllable he pronounces, and sometimes both. Brutes shall speak in many places, and there will be above seven-and-twenty irregular verbs made this year, if grammar don't interpose.—Who can help these misfortunes!" And so on through the prognostication, fitting the original to fresh uses.

Frankhn, creating the character of Poor Richard, also assumed it, as another role like that of the complete tradesman. The rising philosopher could not be for ever in his leather apron,

behind his conscious wheelbarrow. He wanted to speak out. Young, he might not be Hstened to in his own person. As Poor Richard he had a dramatic hcence to speak as he chose. He could pretend to be an astrologer and yet make fun of superstition. He could pretend to be old and wise, packing his almanac with wisdom in the verses and proverbs which were all he had space for. If he laid frequent stress on prudence, that was in part because the folk-wisdom on which he drew is largely prudence, which is the ordinary wisdom of ordinary men. At the same time, Franklin believed in prudence. He was not a mystic but a moralist, and the first law of his nature was order. Order in human life, he held, begins in the daily habits of men looking out for themselves. They must work to be happy, and save to be secure. There were plenty of mysteries about men, but industry and frugality were not mysterious. A man who practised them might go beyond them to more important things, as Franklin aimed to. Industry and frugality were the simple, natural road to freedom.

Franklin could see that the times called for Poor Richard's counsel. Philadelphia had not yet become what he helped to make it. Besides the orderly Quakers and Germans there were many immigrants to that hopeful town who had been misfits in Europe and did not soon adjust themselves in America. They looked for the sudden riches they had been told about. They hunted for buried treasure. Disappointed, they drifted off to the back country or to the West Indies. Because some men profited by speculation, many men speculated, wasting time and money. In the shortage of skilled labour, so much work was badly done that the pride of craftsmanship was lost. People who had had no chance to save in England did not learn to save in Pennsylvania. They waited for miracles. Franklin, bred in settled Boston, felt that Philadelphia must be industrious and frugal before it could be anything else. This middle way was the way of the new world. Few men of privilege had come from Europe to America. They had not needed to emigrate. Few of the helpless European poor had come. They had not been able to. The colonists were "middling people" and they must work and save if they were to survive and prosper. Franklin as Poor Richard

was merely insisting that the first thing to build in their house was the plain foundation. But with how much wit and charm he insisted!

VII

After 1732 the separate currents of Franklin's life drew gradually together in the single, broad stream which was his character moving through history. He had investigated his own mind till he knew it and was at home there. His physical existence was established in a comfortable marriage. Troubled by neither metaphysics nor lost, he turned from introspection to "more satisfactory studies." In 1733 he began to teach himself languages. He learned enough French, Italian, and Spanish to read what he wanted of them, and to make Latin easier. He learned to read German. Of these he could speak and write only French, inaccurately, but he commanded them all for his special object, which was to extend his knowledge in any humane direction. If the centre of his world was Philadelphia, he would make it the centre of a large and liberal world.

How close together his business and his friendships ran appears from the accounts*^^ he kept and from the minutes of the Library Company. A compositor whom Franklin had known in London, Thomas Whitemarsh, came to Philadelphia and took Meredith's place some time in 1730. The next year the Assembly of South Carolina voted a bounty of ^1000 to encourage a printer to set up there. Franklin shipped Whitemarsh off to Charleston in September with "a printing-house and materials." The two were to be partners in the business and, presumably, in the bounty. The Assembly preferred another printer, the governor thought Whitemarsh the better workman. (Franklin even at a distance had a way with governors.) The bounty went to the rival, who had come from Boston, but he died in 1732 and left Whitemarsh sole printer to the government and editor of the South Carolina Gazette, started 8 January on the model of the Gazette in Philadelphia. Whitemarsh died of yellow fever in September 1733. South Carolina voted another bounty of

PHILADELPHIA Master : i I'j

£ looo. Franklin sent Louis Timothee (who began to call himself Lewis Timothy) to Charleston.

Timothee was a French Protestant, married to a Dutch woman in Holland, who had come to Philadelphia in September 173 i and in October had advertised himself in Franklin's newspaper as ready to give lessons in French. He was one of the deserving newcomers whom the Junto encouraged. Being a printer, he seems to have succeeded Whitemarsh as Franklin's journeyman, and the following May had charge of the experimental, unsuccessful Philadelphische Zeitimg. Living with his family in the house where the Junto met, he was chosen to be the Library Company's first librarian. When he went to South Carolina late in 1733, the terms of agreement were that Franklin should pay one-third of the expenses of the six-year partnership and take one-third of the profit. Timothy revived the South Caroli?ia Gazette, became public printer, and published the laws of the province, with a few pamphlets and John Wesley's earliest Collection of Psalms and Hyvms (1737). Frankhn admired Timothy's learning but wished he were more systematic in his accounts. His widow, after Timothy died in 1738, ably carried on the partnership and bought the business for her son Peter. Franklin's influence did not end with his partnership. Peter Timothy helped found a library in Charleston in 1743, urged and defended the use of the lightning rod. He became provincial postmaster and clerk of the South Carolina Assembly, who corresponded with Franklin in London on public affairs and told him about his namesake Benjamin Franklin Timothy.^^

A George Webb, perhaps the Junto's tricky Oxford scholar, applied for the first South Carolina bounty and got no part of it. Stephen Potts remained in Philadelphia as Franklin's bookbinder. Hugh Meredith came back from North Carolina by 1739 and for nine years had occasional small sums from Franklin, who finally engaged him to buy rags for paper. Meredith fell behind in his accounts and made off with some books Franklin had put in his hands to sell. When Franklin invented the stove that has since been named after him, he declined to patent it and turned the model over to Robert Grace to manufacture at his furnace in Chester County. To promote the sales Franklin

uS : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

wrote An Account of the Neio-Invejited Pejinsyhaniaii Fire-Flaces (1744)^*' and published it, but Grace paid for the printing. His stoves were on sale for at least a time at Franklin's post office. When Grace was in difficulties in 1749 Franklin helped him.^^

Then there was Franklin's family. He sold in his shop the Crown soap that his brothers John and Peter made, and they sold books and paper for him in theirs. James Franklin had settled in 1727 in Newport, where he issued his almanac called Poor Robin and became printer for the colony. In September 1732 he undertook the Rhode Island Gazette, though it ran for only a year. Benjamin sent him three hundred almanacs the following August. (Now for a time there were Gazettes in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, all of them celebrating—advertising-Poor Richard.) During 1733 Frankhn saw New England again. It was probably in the fall, for he gave his wife power of attorney on 30 August, as if he were to be away. "Having become easy in my circumstances, I made a journey thither to visit my relations, which I could not sooner well afford." For the first time he saw his sister Jane Mecom's children in Boston, one of whom was named Benjamin and was to become his uncle's apprentice and partner. "In returning, I called at Newport to see my brother, then settled there with his printing-house. Our former differences were forgotten, and our meeting was very cordial and affectionate. He was fast declining in his health, and requested of me that, in case of his death, which he apprehended not far distant [February 1735], I would take home his son, then but ten years of age, and bring him up to the printing business. This I accordingly performed, sending him a few years to school before I took him into the office. His mother carried on the business till he was grown up, when I assisted him with an assortment of new types, those of his father being in a manner worn out. Thus it was that I made my brother ample amends for the service I had deprived him of by leaving him so early."^"

Ten years, and the runaway youngest son of the Franklins had become a second head of the family. Five years a tradesman, and Frankhn was in easy circumstances though he had chosen one of the least promising trades in a provincial town. The industry and frugality about which he talked cannot account for his swift

PHILADELPHIA MaStCT : Up

progress. That he talked about them so much makes it clear that they came less from his nature than from his discipline. Other men besides Franklin in Philadelphia were as industrious and as frugal as he. No other man had a mind so capacious and ingenious and incessant, so able at once to persuade and to charm. It was Franklin's luck that it was easier for him to be outstanding in Philadelphia than it would have been in London. But from the first he was outstanding, and he throve by the exercise of natural gifts of which Poor Richard could not tell the secrets.

Franklin's quick success did not slow down his business. By 1734 he was public printer for Delaware and New Jersey as he later was for Maryland also. His appointment to be clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1736— and until 1 751— enabled him to make sure the government printing came to him. After he became postmaster at Philadelphia in 1737 he could use his own riders to distribute his own papers. The circulation of the Gazette increased, and the number of its advertisements. Franklin allowed Bradford to send his Mercury by the carriers until October 1739, when Alexander Spotswood, deputy postmaster-general, forbade it because Bradford had not yet turned in his accounts for the Philadelphia post office since 1734. Then there was a new clash between the rival printers.

The Geiitlemmi's Magazine had been founded in London in 1731, and Franklin decided to follow its profitable lead in Philadelphia. For his editor he chose a lawyer named John Webbe who had contributed to the Gazette a series of Essays on Government long ascribed to Franklin. The two were to be partners in the venture, Franklin to pay all the expenses, Webbe to have 25 per cent of the profits on the sale of the first two thousand copies, 50 per cent on sales above that. Franklin, thinking of the magazine as a mere compilation which would call for only part of Webbe's time, thought these terms fair. Webbe hoped he could do better, and took the scheme to Bradford, as George Webb years before had taken the scheme for the Gazette to Keimer. Bradford on 6 November 1740 announced in the Mercury that he would begin to publish The A77ierican Magazifie the following March. Franklin on 13 November announced in the Gazette that The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for All the British Plantations in

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Ajuerica would appear in January. "This magazine, in imitation of those in England, was long since projected; a correspondence is settled with intelligent men in most of the colonies. ... It would not, indeed, have been published quite so soon, were it not that a person to whom the scheme was communicated in confidence has thought fit to advertise it in the last Mercury, without our participation; and probably with a view, by starting before us, to discourage us from prosecuting our first design and reap the advantage of it wholly to himself."'^^ Webbe and Bradford, knowing Franklin's plans, had announced their magazine as cheaper than the one he had in mind. He now planned to sell his magazine not by the year's subscription but by the single copy, "sixpence sterling or ninepence Pennsylvania money."

Webbe angrily replied in three numbers of the Mercury. Franklin paid no attention until the third accused him of excluding Bradford's newspaper from the mails. Then the editor-postmaster published Spotswood's order, and pointed out that Webbe knew about it. Webbe retorted that Bradford, after being excluded, had bribed the riders to carry the Mercury, and that Franklin must have known about that. So, acrimoniously, the two printers raced to see who would be first with the first magazine in America, The American Magazine seems to have been three days ahead of the General Magazine, of which the first issue seems to have come out i6 February 1741, dated January. Bradford's ran for three monthly issues, Franklin's for six. Both were unsuccessful; Franklin did not mention his magazine in his Autobiography, and most of his biographers have done no more than mention it.

In part this is because Franklin wrote little himself for what was a repository of matters from many sources. As in the Gazette, he did not so much take sides as let both sides have their say. The three chief topics dealt with were the war which had broken out between England and Spain, the problem of paper currency, and the Great Awakening as recently proclaimed by George Whitefield. Along with state papers Franklin reprinted news, miscellaneous extracts from books and pamphlets, essays, dialogues, characters, poems. The General Magazine is a curious anthology of American literary primitives for 1741. And the

department called Historical Chronicle is still a useful survey of events month by month for half a year.

Franklin, unsuccessful for once at home, turned to New York. One of his printers was James Parker, a former apprentice to William Bradford, who in 1733 had run away to Philadelphia. On 20 February 1742 Franklin and Parker formed a silent partnership. Franklin was to equip his former journeyman with a press and types, transport them to New York, pay a third of the expenses of the business there, and receive a third of the profits. William Bradford retired. Parker (and the silent Franklin) took over the New York Gazette and in 1743 became public printer for that province. In 1746 Parker was made librarian of the Corporation of the City of New York. A better printer than Franklin, he had a career something like his master's and partner's: printer, librarian, postmaster, captain of a troop of horse, lay reader, controller of the North American post office, and eventually judge. Printer for New York and New Jersey, he was also printer for Yale College, and at his shop (and Franklin's) in New Haven he established the Cojinecticut Gazette 12 April 1755. By that time FrankUn had retired from active business, but his capital still had partners.

Two of them were his nephews. James Franklin's son James after his father's death had come to Philadelphia, gone to school, and been apprenticed to his uncle 5 November 1740. He was to serve for seven years for "sufficient meat, drink, clothes, lodging, and washing fitting for an apprentice," and at the end of his term was to have "one good new suit of clothes, besides his common apparel."'^ When that time came he went back to Newport, with his new types, to the business which his mother with his uncle's help had kept going since his father died. Benjamin Mecom, Jane Franklin's son, born 1732, went to serve his apprenticeship with Parker in New York. In 1748 Franklin sent Thomas Smith, a journeyman who had worked for him both in New York and Philadelphia, to St. John in Antigua, to open its first printing-house and to start the Afitigua Gazette about September of that year. But Smith died in the summer of 1752, and Frankhn in August sent Benjamin Mecom to take his place. "That island," Franklin wrote reassuringly on 14 September to

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his sister and her husband in Boston, "is reckoned one of the healthiest in the West Indies. My late partner there enjoyed perfect health for four years, till he grew careless and got to sitting up late in taverns, which I have cautioned Benny to avoid. . . . He has the place on the same terms with his predecessor, who, I understand, cleared from five to six hundred pistoles during the four years he lived there. I have recommended him to some gentlemen of note for their patronage and advice."'^^

Benjamin Mecom, not yet twenty when he went to be almost his own master in Antigua, was too much a Franklin not to be restless. As printer he had the Leeward Islands to himself. He revived the Antigua Gazette^ and published it till June 1756. But he disliked the long leash on which he felt he ran. Franklin explained in a patient letter to his sister on 28 June 1756. He had sent Benny, he said, as his partner, for one-third of the profits. "After this, finding him diligent and careful, for his encouragement I rehnquished that agreement and let him know that, as you were removed into a dearer house, if he paid you yearly a certain sum, I forget what it was, towards discharging your rent, and another small sum to me, in sugar and rum for my family use, he need keep no farther accounts of the profits but should enjoy all the rest himself." The total was not above twenty pounds a year, and Franklin intended to give Benjamin the printing-house as soon as he should prove that he was stable,

"This proposal of paying you and me a certain annual sum did not please him; and he wrote to desire I would explicitly tell him how long that annual payment was to continue . . . and finally insisted that I would name a certain sum that I would take for the printing-house, and allow him to pay it off in parts as he could, and then the yearly payments to cease; for, though he had a high esteem for me, yet he loved freedom, and his spirit would not bear dependence on any man, though he were the best man living."^'' This letter came to Philadelphia when Franklin was away, and could not be answered promptly. Benjamin Mecom resolved to leave Antigua. Buying the press outright, he moved it early in 1757 to Boston, where he was something of a beau among the printers, with ruffles, wig, and gloves. In March 1758 he issued the first separate edition of

Father Abraham's Speech from Foor Richard Improved. But he did not prosper. He removed his press to New York in 1763, with no better fortune. Leaving his own press in storage, he rented Parker's (really Franklin's) in New Haven, where he was also Parker's deputy in the post office. But there, and later in Philadelphia and in Burhngton, Mecom was too little a Franklin to make his way, and finally went mad about 1776.

At one time or another Franklin had partnerships with William Smith in Dominica (where he founded the Freeport Gazette), with a printer named Daniel in Kingston, Jamaica, and perhaps with other printers in North Carolina and Georgia. Nearer home he had for partners his wife's relative William Dunlap, Samuel Holland, and John Henry Miller at Lancaster, and in Philadelphia Gotthard Armbruester (1747-50), Johannes Boehm (1749-51), and Anthony Armbruester (1754-58) for his German publications. One of these was the brief Hoch Teutsche und Ejiglische Zeitiing which in 1752 gave its readers news from the Pejinsylvania Gazette in two languages. But most of his partnerships after 1748, however numerous, were slight affairs, almost as much to encourage printing and printers as to bring a return on his money.

His principal partners were James Parker in New York (and New Jersey and Connecticut) and David Hall in Philadelphia. Hall had learned his trade in Edinburgh and then had gone to Watts's in London, where he met William Strahan, later Franklin's correspondent. Strahan recommended Hall to Franklin, and Franklin invited him to come to America in 1743, agreeing either to make him partner or to employ him for a year and pay his passage back to England if he wanted to go. Hall came, and Franklin at once found him "obliging, discreet, industrious, and honest." Perhaps he had something to do with making Logan's Cato Major the next year Franklin's masterpiece in the printer's art. They shipped five hundred copies of the book to Strahan in London. (Strahan turned them over to a bookseller who as late as 1781 had never accounted for them.) Hall became foreman, and Foor Richard for 1748 became Foor Richard Improved. On 29 January 1748 Franklin wrote to Cadwallader Colden that he had a partner, and on 29 September: "I too am taking the proper measures for obtaining leisure to enjoy life and my

124 '■ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

friends, more than heretofore, having put my printing-house under the care of my partner, David Hall, absolutely left oif bookselling, and removed to a more quiet part of town."^^ For eighteen years the partnership paid Franklin an average of £^6j a year, and the firm was know^n as Franklin and Hall till 1766.''^ So long as he lived by printing Franklin was satisfied to have his work neat and readable, and barely went beyond this. During his later years in England and France he became interested in fine printing and had some of the best European printers among his friends. Printing was his trade. He had chosen it as a boy under the eye of his father, who thought a man's trade should be his pride. It was that for the son, who began his will: "I, Benjamin Frankhn, Printer, late Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America to the Court of France, now President of Pennsylvania. . . ."'^^ Printer first, then ambassador. And at the other end of his career, in 1728 when he set up in business, he had written for himself the most famous of American epitaphs,^" humorously in the language of his trade:

The Body of

B Franklin Printer,

(Like the Cover of an old Book

Its Contents torn out

And stript of its Lettering & Gilding)

Lies here. Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be lost;

For it will, (as he believ'd) appear once more.

In a new and more elegant Edition

Revised and corrected,

By the Author.

Philadelphian

FOR the twenty years 1728-48 Franklin, like any tradesman of his time, worked and lived in the same house, near the busy courthouse and the noisy market. While the Godfreys were still his tenants, Franklin with Meredith shared their living quarters above the shop, which Godfrey shared as glazier. After the Godfreys and Meredith had left and Franklin had married, the new^ household and the growing business filled the premises. There were the young couple and Deborah's mother, with her salves and ointments, and soon the mysterious son William. The apprentice Joseph Rose must have lived with them, and probably for a time the journeyman Thomas Whitemarsh. Two years after the marriage Francis Folger was born, and before or after his death four years later, Franklin's nephew James came from Newport, first to be sent to school with William and then to succeed young Rose as apprentice. A brother and a sister of Deborah seem also to have lived with the Franklins for uncertain periods. Their daughter Sarah was born 3 i August (11 September, New Style) 1743 and baptized at Christ Church 5 October. It is likely that various journeymen lodged and boarded in the house.

Though the household was mixed it was compact. Franklin at first seldom entertained his friends at home, but saw them at tav-

12S

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erns or, chiefly, at the meetings of the Junto. He and his wife had little to do with other tradesmen, except on business. The more formal gentry of Philadelphia long looked, condescendingly if approvingly, on Franklin as a tradesman, and never accepted his wife or included her in invitations to their houses. Her life was her husband, her children, and her house and shop. Nor was Franklin during these years away from home as much as may be thought. He had no daily journeys to and from his work. He simply got up and came downstairs, to his press, his shop, his accounts, and, after 1737, his post office. His house was his plain castle, his study, his laboratory, and a place to stand while he moved his world.

Paragraphs and advertisements in the Gazette tell much of what is known about his private life. In December 1734, when his sons were four and two years old, he advertised for "a servant . . . that is a scholar and can teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic." When William was twelve he (that is, his father for him) advertised on 17 June 1742: "Strayed, about two months ago, from the Northern Liberties of this city, a small bay mare branded IW on the near shoulder and buttock. She, being but little and barefooted, cannot be supposed to have gone far; therefore if any of the town boys find her and bring her to the subscriber, they shall, for their trouble, have the liberty to ride her when they please." Not many young tradesmen's sons in Philadelphia had ponies to ride or, like Francis, their portraits painted in early childhood. Francis died of smallpox on 21 November 1736. Franklin, a humorous and indulgent father but a conscientious citizen, in the Gazette for 6-13 December corrected the false report that the child had died from being inoculated: "inasmuch as some people are by that report (joined with others of the like kind, and perhaps equally groundless) deterred from having that operation performed on their children. I do hereby sincerely declare that he was not inoculated but received the distemper in the common way of infection; and I suppose the report could only arise from its being my known opinion that inoculation was a safe and beneficial practice; and from my having said among my acquaintance that I intended to have the child inoculated as soon as he should have recovered sufficient strength from a flux with

PHILADELPHIA Philadclphiaji : i2'j

which he had been long afflicted." In Poor Richard for the next year Franklin among the adages and jokes put his saddest verses:

The Thracian infant, entering into life, Both parents mourn for, both receive with grief; The Thracian infant snatched by Death away, Both parents to the grave with joy convey.

This Greece and Rome, you with derision view. This is mere Thracian ignorance to you; But if you weigh the custom you despise, This Thracian ignorance may teach the wise.

(Long afterwards Franklin wrote to his sister Jane that his grandson "brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom since seen equalled in everything, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh."^)

In the Gazette Franklin regularly and amusingly reminded his subscriber that the paper ought to be paid for. When he had lent books and they had not been returned, he advertised them as missing, perhaps only pretending that he had forgotten who had them. Deborah Franklin's prayer book was taken out of her pew in Christ Church, and the newspaper for 23-30 June 1737 said: "The person who took it is desired to open it and read the Eighth Commandment, and afterwards return it into the same pew again; upon which no further notice will be taken." In February 1739, according to an announcement on the 22d, William Lloyd, who had been a schoolmaster and claimed to know Latin and Greek, stole a half-worn sagathy [silk and wool or silk and cotton] coat from Franklin's house, "four fine homespun shirts, a fine Holland shirt ruffled at the hands and bosom, a pair of black broadcloth breeches, new seated and lined with leather; two pair of good worsted stockings, one of a dark colour and the other a lightish blue, a coarse cambric handkerchief marked with an F in red silk, a new pair of calfskin shoes." Franklin had already begun to be, as the French police noted years later, particular about his linen, but his sagathy coat was not as new as the frugal new seat and leather hning of his broadcloth breeches. His wife's clothes, stolen in 1750, were gayer: "a woman's long

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scarlet coat, with double cape; a woman's gown of printed cotton, of the sort called brocade, very remarkable, the ground dark with large red roses and other large red and yellow flowers and smaller blue and white flowers, with many green leaves," according to the Gazette for i November.

Traces of Franklin as printer and scientist now and then appeared in his advertisements. In November 1738 "a small manuscript treatise upon the dry gripes" had been dropped somewhere in the streets, and the owner asked that it be brought, if found, to the printer for a handsome reward. This was presumably Thomas Cadwalader's A7i Essay on the West-India Dry Gripes which Franklin published in 1745, and which may have led to his own important observations on lead poisoning—caused in this case by the lead pipes through which Jamaica rum was distilled. The following June Franklin's apprentice Joseph Rose announced that, "with the leave of my master," he had undertaken to collect and print his father's poems, and in return for each manuscript sent him he would give a printed book when the work was finished. In August somebody, probably Franklin, had lost "a magnifying glass set in a cup of wood about the bigness of a tailor's thimble." And in the first issue for that year the public was informed: "Benjamin Franklin, printer, is removed from the house he lately dwelt in, four doors nearer the river, on the same side of the street."^ The Gazette had made the official announcement, on 27 October 1737 that "the post office of Philadelphia is now kept at B. Franklin's, in Market Street."

The Gazette gives a running account of what Franklin had to sell in the shop which he opened about the time of his marriage. Though his stock was never perhaps as large in a single week as may appear, he sold as time went on many things besides stationery and books in a lively confusion of sights and smells, indoors and out: soap, ballads, slates and pencils, ink and ink powders, pounce and pounce boxes, sealing wax, wafers, lead pencils, fountain pens (what they then were is not known), quills for pens, ink horns, sand glasses, mezzotints, maps, sack (Spanish wine), lampblack, chocolate, linseed oil, coffee, powdered mustard, compasses and scales, patent medicines, dividers and protractors, a second-hand chaise, another with four wheels, Rhode

Island cheese and cod fish, quadrants, fore-staffs, nocturnals, mariners' compasses, lumber, edgings, scarlet cloth, black broadcloth, white stockings, duck, iron stoves, a horse for riding or driving, tea, saffron, lottery tickets, mackerel by the barrel, a copper still, spermaceti, palm oil, spectacles, a fishing net. Franklin also bought linen rags to send to paper-mills: 55,476 pounds between 1735 and 1741.^

At his shop he was a kind of general trader, offering for sale the unexpired time of indentured servants. "A servant man's time for near three years, to be disposed of. He is a joiner by trade and a very good workman." "A likely servant maid's time for four years to be disposed of. She works well with her needle." "A very good tailor, having one year and ten months to run; fit for either town or country business. And a servant lad for six years, fit for country business." "To be sold for her passage. A likely young woman, well clothed, can sew and do household work. Term of time as you can agree with her. N. B, Her passage is ;r8. Also a breeding Negro woman about twenty years of age. Can do any household work."^ For Franklin dealt in slaves too, sold for other owners or bought by him as an investment. The servants in his household \\ere usually white, though Deborah in her old age had a little slave boy to whom she was much attached. "A likely Negro wench about fifteen years old, has had the smallpox, been in the country above a year and talks English. Inquire of the printer hereof." "A likely young Negro fellow about nineteen or twenty years of age, to be disposed of. He is very fit for labour, being used to plantation work, and has had the smallpox." "Two likely young Negroes, one a lad about nineteen, the other a girl of fifteen."^

His shop was as full of goods as his head was of ideas. Here was a philosopher who could not really be interrupted. Interruptions came, and he dealt with them one by one, punctually and effortlessly, and then wxnt back to the real business of his mind: moral reflections, foreign languages, varied sciences, the comfort and safety of Philadelphia and of mankind in general. His mind was a federation of purposes, working harmoniously together. Other philosophers might be dark and profound, but Franklin moved serenely through the visible world, trying to understand

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it all. Other men of action might lay single plans and endlessly persist in them, but Franklin met occasions as they rose and acted on them with a far-sighted opportunism. His mind grew as his world grew.

II

Franklin's projects for the good of the public came naturally out of his own experience and character. Wanting more books than he had or could afford, he planned and furthered a library which would supply books for him and everybody. Disliking all waste that might be avoided, he next set about a scheme for the control of iire, the fiercest enemy of property. Boston managed its fires better than Philadelphia, Franklin, back from his visit to his native town, talked with the members of the Junto. When they agreed with him that something should be done, he wrote a letter to himself and published it 4 February 1735 in the Gazette, as from an old citizen, on Frotection of Toivns frovi Fire.^ People should be careful, the old citizen said, about carrying coals from room to room or up and downstairs, "unless in a warming-pan shut," and about narrow hearths and wooden mouldings on the sides of fireplaces. Chimney sweeps should be licensed by the mayor, and responsible for their work. So much for prevention. As to putting fires out, let them consider "the example of a city in a neighbouring province. There is, as I am well informed, a club or society of active men belonging to each fire engine, whose business is to attend all fires with it whenever they happen." Such men became skilled from practice. They had quarterly meetings at which they talked over what they had learned. "Since the establishment of this regulation it seems there has been no extraordinary fire in that place; and I wish there never may be any here." The old citizen hoped that Philadelphia would remember that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

The town read, and agreed with the Junto and Franklin. A volunteer company of thirty men was formed. They equipped themselves with "leather buckets, with strong bags and baskets (for packing and transporting of goods), which were to be brought to every fire." They met once a month and spent "a so-

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cial evening together, in discoursing and communicating such ideas as occurred to us upon the subject of fires. . . . Many more desiring to be admitted than we thought convenient for one company, they were advised to form another, which was accordingly done; and this went on, one new company being formed after another, till they became so numerous as to include most of the inhabitants who were men of property."' The Union Fire Company, formed by Franklin 7 December 1736, was the first of the companies which made Philadelphia, so far as fires were concerned, one of the safest cities in the world.

After firemen, policemen. "The city watch was one of the first things that I conceived to want regulation. It was managed by the constables of the respective wards in turn; the constable warned a number of housekeepers [householders] to attend him for the night. Those who chose never to attend paid him six shillings a year to be excused, which was supposed to be for hiring substitutes, but was in reality much more than was necessary for that purpose, and made the constableship a place of profit; and the constable, for a little drink, often got such ragamuffins about him as a watch that respectable housekeepers did not choose to mix with. Walking the rounds, too, was often neglected and most of the nights spent in tippling. I thereupon wrote a paper to be read in Junto, representing these irregularities, but insisting more particularly on the inequahty of the six-shilHng tax of the constables, respecting the circumstances of those who paid it, since a poor widow housekeeper, all whose property to be guarded by the watch did not perhaps exceed the value of fifty pounds, paid as much as the wealtiest merchant, who had thousands of pounds' worth in his stores."^ Proposing that the tax be equitable, Franklin urged also that the city choose proper watchmen and pay them for regular services. His programme, approved by the central Junto, was taken to the lesser clubs—the Vine, the Union, the Band—and made to seem to have originated there. These plans were carried out less promptly than those for fire companies, and dragged on for years. Franklin had here not only to bring in something new but also to get rid of something already in existence.

Thoroughly secular, though no longer anti-clerical, Franklin worked little through the churches. Their traditions made them

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too rigid, and their sects too discordant, for his purposes. He seldom went to church, because Sunday was still his day for study. But he had been brought up a Presbyterian, and he was once persuaded by the minister of that denomination to attend its services for five Sundays. Franklin found the sermons "very dry, uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens."^ They were, he thought, not worth the reading they cost him. A livelier preacher, named Hemphill, came to Philadelphia from Ireland and preached sermons which Franklin liked for their emphasis on good works. The orthodox Presbyterians disapproved. "I became his zealous partisan, and contributed all I could to raise a party in his favour. . . . There was much scribbling pro and con upon the occasion; and, finding that though an elegant preacher he was but a poor writer, I lent him my pen and wrote for him two or three pamphlets."^'' The orthodox party triumphed when it was learned that Hemphill had purloined his sermons from English books, though Franklin thought good sermons preferable to bad, no matter who had written them. Hemphill "left us in search elsewhere of better fortune, and I quitted the congregation, never joining it after, though I continued many years my subscription for the support of its ministers."^^ The Franklin family had a pew in the Episcopalian Christ Church, where the two younger children were baptized and they and both their parents were buried. Franklin gave help in the church's business affairs, subscribed to the building fund, and served (1752-53) as one of the managers of a lottery to raise money for a steeple and a chime of bells.

Freemasonry, secret, sociable, and unified, was more congenial than churches to Franklin. The earliest known lodge in America was St. John's in Philadelphia, and its earliest records are dated 1730. Franklin seems not to have been among the first members, but the Gazette was alert. On 8 December of that year it had an article pretending to reveal the Masonic mysteries. Franklin became a Mason in February. On 13 May he admitted that he had been in error in December. In June 1732 he drafted the lodge's by-laws. On the 24th of that month he became warden, and two years later on the same day (St. John the Baptist's day) grand

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master of St. John's lodge, a month after he had printed the Constitutions, the first Masonic book in America. From 1735 to 1738 he was the lodge's secretary. On 10 June 1749 he was elected grand master of the province, and the next year, yielding that post to William AJlen the chief justice, became deputy grand master. He seems to have been always active in Masonic affairs, met with the lodge in Boston when he was there, and had a notable part in the building of the first Masonic temple in America, dedicated on 24 June 1755 while Braddock was on his way to his defeat.^^

In the Gazette is Franklin's story of an outrageous episode which, though only a burlesque of the Masonic ritual and utterly disavowed by St. John's lodge, was blamed on the Masons, Franklin among them. Evan Jones, a chemist, had a gullible apprentice, Daniel Rees, who wanted to be a Mason. Jones and some of his friends in June 1737 pretended to initiate the boy. In the ceremony a bowl of burning rum was thrown at him and he was fatally burned. Jones was tried for murder and acquitted; for manslaughter and found guilty, and sentenced to be burned in the hand. Bradford in the Mercury charged Franklin with having been present and having relished the tragic buffoonery, including the blasphemous oath the boy had sworn.^^ Frankhn answered the charges in his newspaper for 7-15 February 1738:

"Some time in June last Mr. Danby, Mr. Alrihs, and myself were appointed by the Court of Common Pleas as auditors to settle an affair between Dr. Jones and Armstrong Smith, then depending in said Court. We met accordingly at a tavern in Market Street on the Saturday morning before the tragedy was

acted in the doctor's cellar. Dr. Jones appeared, and R n^"* as

his attorney, but Smith could not readily be found. While we waited for Smith in order to hear both parties together, the

doctor and R n began to entertain us with an account of

some diversion they had lately had with the doctor's apprentice, who being desirous of being made a Freemason, they had persuaded him they could make him one, and accordingly had taught him several ridiculous signs, words, and ceremonies, of which he was very fond. 'Tis true I laughed (and perhaps heartily, as my manner is) at the beginning of their relation; but when they came to those circumstances of their giving him

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a violent purge, leading him to kiss J.'s posteriors, and administering to him the diabolical oath which R n read to us, I

grew indeed serious, as I suppose the most merry man (not inclined to mischief) would on such an occasion. Nor did any

one of the company except the doctor and R n themselves

seem in the least pleased with the affair, but the contrary. Mr. Danby in particular said that if they had done such things in England they would be prosecuted. Mr. Alrihs, that he did not believe they could stand by it. And myself, that when the young man came to know how he had been imposed on, he would never forgive them,

"But the doctor and R n went on to tell us that they designed to have yet some further diversion, on pretence of raising

him to a higher degree in Masonry. R n said it was intended

to introduce him bhndfolded and stripped into a room where the company, being each provided with a rod or switch, should chastise him smartly; which the doctor opposed, and said he had a better invention. They would have a game of snapdragon in a dark cellar, where some figures should be dressed up, that by the pale light of burning brandy would appear horrible and frighten

him d bly. Soon after the discourse, the young man himself

coming in to speak with his master, the doctor pointed at me, and said to him: 'Daniel, that gentleman is a Freemason. Make a sign to him.' Which whether he did or not, I cannot tell; for I was so far from encouraging him in the delusion, or taking him by the hand, or calling him brother and welcoming him into the fraternity, as is said, that I turned my head to avoid seeing him make his pretended sign, and looked out of the window into the garden.

"And all those circumstances, with that of my desiring to have notice that I might be present at the snapdragon, are absolutely false and groundless. I was acquainted with him, and had a respect for the young lad's father, and thought it a pity his son should be so imposed upon; and therefore followed the lad downstairs to the door when he went out, with a design to call him back and give a hint of the imposition; but he was gone out of sight and I never saw him afterwards; for the Monday night following, the affair in the cellar was transacted which proved

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his death. As to the paper or oath, I did desire R n when

he had read it to let me see it; and, finding it a piece of a very extraordinary nature, I told him I was desirous to show it to some of my acquaintance, and so put it in my pocket. I communicated it to one who mentioned it to others, and so many people flocked to my house for a sight of it that it grew troublesome; and therefore when the mayor sent for it, I was glad of the opportunity to be discharged from it. Nor do I yet conceive that it was my duty to conceal or destroy it. And being subpoenaed on the trial as a witness for the king, I appeared and gave my evidence fully, freely, and impartially, as I think it becomes an honest man to do."^^ To the truth of this statement of the case John Danby and Harmanus Alrihs made affidavit.

In Boston, where there was now a lodge of Masons, the News Letter published Bradford's account of the scandalous accident, and Franklin's parents were troubled. They wrote to ask not only about Freemasonry but about his religious opinions. Franklin on 13 April answered both of them in a letter to his father, "When the natural weakness and imperfection of human understanding is considered, the unavoidable influence of education, custom, books, and company upon our ways of thinking, I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false. And perhaps the same may be justly said of every sect, church, and society of men, when they assume to themselves that infallibility which they deny to the Pope and councils. I think opinions should be judged of by their influences and effects; and, if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded he holds none that are dangerous; which I hope is the case with me.

"I am sorry you should have any uneasiness on my account; and if it were a thing possible for one to alter his opinions in order to please another, I know none whom I ought more willingly to oblige in that respect than yourselves. But, since it is no more in a man's power to think than to look like another, me-thinks all that should be expected from me is to keep my mind open to conviction, to hear patiently and examine attentively, whatever is offered me for that end; and, if after all I continue

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in the same errors, I believe your usual charity will induce you to rather pity and excuse than blame me. In the meantime your care and concern for me is what I am very thankful for.

"My mother grieves that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is, I make such distinctions very little my study. I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue; and the Scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined what we thought but what we did; and our recommendation will not be that we said 'Lord! Lord!' but that we did good to our fellow-creatures. See Alatt. xxv.

"As to the Freemasons, I know no way of giving my mother a better account of them than she seems to have at present, since it is not allowed that women should be admitted into that secret society. She has, I must confess, on that account some reason to be displeased with it; but for anything else, I must entreat her to suspend her judgment till she is better informed, unless she will believe me when I assure her that they are in general a very harmless sort of people, and have no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion and good manners."^*^

While Frankhn was writing these tactful, affectionate words, which comforted his father and mother, George Whitefield was on his way from England to Georgia, The Great Awakening had begun with Jonathan Edwards at Northampton, Massachusetts, four years before, and John Wesley in Georgia had planted the first American seeds of Methodism. (Timothy— Franklin's partner in Charleston—published Wesley's first hymns.) But Edwards stayed in Massachusetts, and Wesley went back to England. The chief preacher of the Awakening was Whitefield, who from Georgia to Massachusetts called upon sinners to repent and upon drowsy Christians to rise and glow. When he came to Philadelphia late in 1739, Franklin took a philosopher's and a philanthropist's interest in him. "The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it was matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admired and respected him notwithstanding his common abuse of them by

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assuring them that they were naturally half beasts and half devils. It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing re-Hgious, so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street."^'^

Franklin, himself no public speaker, carefully noted White-field's oratory. "He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observed the most exact silence. He preached one evening from the top of the courthouse steps, which are in the middle of Market Street and on the west side of Second Street, which crosses it at right angles. Being among the hindmost in Market Street, I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the river; and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front Street, when some noise in that street obscured it. Imagining then a semicircle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were filled with auditors to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I computed that he might be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconciled me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to the ancient stories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted."^^

It was an advantage to Whitefield, Franklin realized, that as an itinerant he could preach old sermons to new audiences. "His delivery . . . was so improved by frequent repetitions that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice was so perfectly well turned and well placed that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music."^^ Yet Franklin could be moved in spite of his cool reason. Talking to Whitefield, he had refused to contribute to the scheme for building an orphanage in Georgia out of money raised in Philadelphia. Georgia lacked materials and workmen, and it would be more expensive to send them there than to build the orphanage in Philadelphia and

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bring the children to it, "I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver. And he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all."-"

The preacher and the philosopher were on the friendliest terms. Franklin printed Whitefield's sermons, gave him worldly counsel, and invited him to lodge in the crowded quarters above the press and shop in Market Street. When the regular clergy refused their pulpits to the evangelist, Franklin had a hand in buying ground and building a house "expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people at Philadelphia; the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general; so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service."-^ Perhaps not many Philadelphians had so large a conception of the building's possible use. Its original trustees came one from each sect, though after the Moravian had died, the others chose Franklin as "merely an honest man and of no sect at all."-^ Whitefield prayed for Franklin's conversion, "but never had the satisfaction of beheving that his prayers were heard."^^

Yet Whitefield, stirring the colonies and making them aware of one another as they heard about his long, tumultuous progress through town after town, sharpened in Franklin his interest in "all the British plantations in America" for which he planned the General Magazine announced the month Whitefield left Philadelphia for Georgia again. Franklin was becoming intercolonial. As clerk of the Assembly since 1736 he had been kept attentive to Pennsylvania affairs. As postmaster since 1737 he had been made to think often of more than Pennsylvania. The mails were still irregular, but the line stretched now from Boston to Charleston and passed both ways through Philadelphia. Ships from

Europe, from the West Indies, and from other continental ports brought bags of mail to his post office, which was a corner of his shop. On the day each week when the mail left, north and south, he might have to give his whole time to it. Franklin had a chance to read other newspapers besides his own. In particular he watched to see what men of learning there were in America and what they did. He had an impulse to bring them somehow together as he had brought the members of the Junto when he was a journeyman. He printed a circular letter dated 14 May 1743 and sent it to various correspondents, proposing that they unite to form the American Philosophical Society.-^

What he had in mind was unmistakably an intercolonial Junto. Philadelphia was to be the centre of the society, and there were always to be at Philadelphia seven members—a physician, a botanist, a mathematician, a chemist, a mechanician, a geographer, and a general natural philosopher—besides the president, treasurer, and secretary. (Of the first ten members in Philadelphia, five are known to have belonged to the Junto.) The Philadelphia members were to meet once a month, or oftener, transact their philosophical business, consider such reports or queries as might have been sent in by correspondents, and arrange to keep all the members informed of what all of them were doing. Quarterly abstracts of valuable communications were to be sent, postage-free, to each member, who was to pay an annual piece of eight (worth about one dollar).

"The first drudgery of settling new colonies," Franklin said, "which confines the attention of people to mere necessaries, is now pretty well over; and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock of knowledge." The extent of the country kept them apart and ignorant of each other's speculations. What was needed was systematic correspondence among them, through the society, on such subjects as these: "all new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, their virtues, uses, etc.; methods of propagating them, and making such as are useful, but particular to some plantations, more general; improvements of vegetable juices, as ciders, wines, etc.; new methods of curing or preventing diseases; all new-discovered fossils in different countries, as mines, minerals, and quarries; new and use-

1^0 : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

ful improvements in any branch of mathematics; new discoveries in chemistry, such as improvements in distillation, brewing, and assaying of ores; new mechanical inventions for saving labour, as mills and carriages, and for raising and conveying of water, draining of meadows, etc.; all new arts, trades, and manufactures that may be proposed or thought of; surveys, maps, and charts of particular parts of the sea coasts or inland countries; course and junctions of rivers and great roads, situation of lakes and mountains, nature of the soil and productions; new methods of improving the breed of useful animals; introducing other sorts from foreign countries; new improvements in planting, gardening, and clearing land; and all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life. . . .

"Benjamin Franklin, the writer of this Proposal, offers himself to serve the Society as their secretary, till they shall be provided with one more capable."

Franklin could offer to act as secretary, which he knew would be the Society's most laborious and responsible post, because he himself, like the colonies, now saw the end of the "first drudgery" of his business. iMost men as prosperous as he would have lost interest in philosophy. He was more interested than ever. Most philosophers with as many irons in the fire as he still had would have thought themselves distracted. Franklin was specialized to versatility. His inquiring temper did not call for isolation. It was important that new things should be known, not that he himself should find them out. He was philanthropist and publicist as well as scientist. Let as many men as possible pool their knowledge for the good of all men, and he would serve them in any way that might be needed.

That summer he visited New England again, and could do little about his proposal till November. Then he went seriously to work, and by April 1744 the Society was organized in Philadelphia and had had several meetings. Of his Junto friends, Thomas Godfrey was the Society's mathematician, Samuel Rhoads its mechanician, William Parsons its geographer, and William Coleman its treasurer—and Franklin its secretary. Besides these, there were Thomas Hopkinson as president, Thomas Bond as physician, John Bartram as botanist, and Phineas Bond as general natu-

ral philosopher. Among them were able men. Godfrey had already invented his quadrant and had been recognized by the Royal Society. John Bartram was well under way in his career as, Linnaeus said, the greatest "natural botanist" in the contemporary world. Thomas Bond, an excellent physician, was soon to plan and, with Franklin's help, establish the Pennsylvania Hospital. As corresponding members the Society had Robert Hunter Morris, chief justice of New Jersey, and Archibald Home, its secretary, and John Coxe and Hugh Alartyn of Trenton. In New York the first member was James Alexander, lawyer and member of the Council, who had defended Peter Zenger in his famous trial. "And there are a number of others," Franklin wrote on 5 April 1744 to Cadwallader Colden,^'^ "in Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, and the New England colonies, who we expect to join us as soon as they are acquainted that the Society has begun to form itself."

The Society was less active for years than Franklin had hoped it would be. "The members . . . here are very idle gentlemen," he wrote to Colden after a year and a half. "They will take no pains."-'"' Their meetings were perhaps irregular, minutes were not always kept, and no proceedings or abstracts were published. Franklin's satisfaction in his scheme came chiefly from the correspondence between him and Colden, begun after the two had met accidentally on the road during the summer of 1743. Colden, official and scholar in New York, had written his important History of the Five India?! Nations (1727), had classified the plants on and around his Orange County manor according to the Lin-naean system, and was almost equally at home in mathematics, medicine, physics, and mental and moral philosophy. He invented—independently if not first—the process now called stereotyping, and asked Franklin for his opinion of it. He wrote about the pores of the skin, and Franklin not only answered in detail but worked out mechanical experiments to prove his point. Franklin asked Colden if the diurnal motion of the earth might not cause ships sailing across the Atlantic to be slower on the westward than on the eastward voyage.^^ Colden thought, not. Franklin was unpretending. "I ought to study the sciences I dabble in before I presume to set pen to paper."-* He was "very willing and ready" to print Colden's Explication of the First Causes

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(9/ Motion in Matter, ajid of the Caiise of Gravitation (1745) "at my own expense and risk. If I can be the means of communicating anything valuable to the world, I do not always think of gaining, or even of saving, by my business." At the end of 1745 he had resolved to publish an Aviericaji Philosophical Miscella?jy, monthly or quarterly, himself to do all the work and take all the responsibility. Golden had proposed the miscellany, Franklin was to carry it out.^'^ It went no further than proposal and resolution. Writing his account of the Pennsyivanian fireplace (Franklin stove), the inventor remembered that he was a member of the American Philosophical Society which he was then organizing. Though this was a pamphlet to help Robert Grace sell the stoves he manufactured on Franklin's model, and Grace paid the printer's bill, Franklin fortified his treatise with learned notes, one of them in Latin. He began with a scientific explanation of how heated air rises and cold air comes in to take its place. He described the various heating arrangements then in use, especially the "improved" fireplaces with small openings which caused such draughts of cold air: "it rushes in at every crevice so strongly as to make a continual whistling or howling; and 'tis very uncomfortable as well as dangerous to sit against any such crevice. . . . Women, particularly, from this cause (as they sit much in the house) get colds in the head, rheums, and defluxions, which fall into their jaws and gums, and have destroyed early many a fine set of teeth in these northern colonies. Great and bright fires do also very much contribute to damage the eyes, dry and shrivel the skin, and bring on early the appearances of old age."^*^ Having artfully appealed to women, Franklin went on to explain as if to mechanics, with the help of the drawings by Lewis Evans, precisely how the Pennsyivanian fireplace was constructed. Then one by one he gave fourteen advantages, and answered the objections that had been raised. After this, as if his argument were complete and unanswerable, he directed workmen how to install the new stoves. And of course there was the saving in fuel. "My common room, I know, is made twice as warm as it used to be, with a quarter of the wood I formerly consumed there."^^ This was in November 1744. Franklin and his family and friends had "used warm rooms for these four winters past."'^- He must have invented his stove in 1740—not, as is com-

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monly said, in 1742. But he did not publish his account of it till there was a Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

He seems to have left no record but a circumstantial legend of how he introduced the yellow willow {Salix vitellina) to America. The legend says that he found an imported, discarded osier basket sprouting in Dock creek and planted some of the shoots in Isaac (or Charles) Norris's garden, where they grew and made the tree generally known.^^

Ill

Before there was a Philosophical Society Franklin's own scientific interests, like those of the colonies, had been dispersed and casual. His mind, growing tired of business and relieved by the coming of David Hall to be his foreman, swung in inquisitive directions. Though it was patient, it seems never to have known fatigue or languor. Forced to sit idle, as he sometimes was in dragging sessions of the Assembly, he would work out mathematical puzzles. "Being one day in the country at the house of our common friend, the late learned Mr. Logan," Franklin told Peter Collinson some time after Logan's death in 1751, "he showed me a folio French book filled with magic squares, wrote, if I forget not, by one M. Frenicle [Bernard Frenicle de Bessy], in which, he said, the author had discovered great ingenuity and dexterity in the management of numbers; and, though several other foreigners had distinguished themselves in the same way, he did not recollect that any one Englishman had done anything of the kind remarkable. I said it was perhaps a mark of the good sense of our English mathematicians that they would not spend their time in things that were merely difjiciles nugce, incapable of any useful application. He answered that many of the arithmetical or mathematical questions publicly proposed and answered in England were equally trifling and useless. 'Perhaps the considering and answering such questions,' I replied, 'may not be altogether useless, if it produces by practice an habitual readiness and exactness in mathematical disquisitions, which readiness may on many occasions be of real use.' 'In the same way,' says he, 'may the making of these squares be of use.' I then confessed to him

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

that in my younger days, having once some leisure which I still think I might have employed more usefully, I had amused myself in making these kind of magic squares, and at length had acquired such a knack at it that I could fill the cells of any magic square, of reasonable size, with a series of numbers as fast as I could write them, disposed in such a manner as that the sums of every row, horizontal, perpendicular, or diagonal, should be equal; but not being satisfied with these, which I looked on as common and easy things, I had imposed on myself more difficult tasks, and succeeded in making other magic squares with a variety of properties, and much more curious. He then showed me several in the same book, of an uncommon and more curious kind; but, as I thought none of them equal to some I remembered to have made, he desired me to let him see them; and, accordingly, the next time I visited him, I carried him a square of 8 which I found among my old papers, and which I will now give you, with an account of its properties. . . .

"The properties are: (i) That every straight row, horizontal or vertical, of 8 numbers added together makes 260, and half each row half 260. (2) That the bent row of 8 numbers, ascending and descending diagonally, viz., from 16 ascending to 10, and

PHILADELPHIA PhUadelpkian : 14^

from 23 descending to 17, and every one of its parallel bent rows of 8 numbers, make 260. Also the bent row from 52, descending to 54, and from 43 ascending to 45, and every one of its parallel bent rows of 8 numbers, make 260. Also the bent row from 45 to 43 descending to the left, and from 23 to 17 descending to the right, and every one of its parallel bent rows of 8 numbers, make 260. i\lso the bent row from 52 to 54 descending to the right, and from 10 to 16 descending to the left, and every one of its parallel bent rows of 8 numbers, make 260. Also the parallel bent rows next to the above-mentioned, which are shortened to 3 numbers ascending and 3 descending, etc., as from 53 to 4 ascending, and from 29 to 44 descending, make, with the 2 corner numbers, 260. Also the 2 numbers, 14, 61 ascending, and 36, 19 descending, with the low^er 4 numbers situated like them, viz., 50, I descending and 32, 47 ascending, make 260. iVnd, lastly, the 4 corner numbers, with the 4 middle numbers, make 260. . . .

"Mr. Logan then showed me an old arithmetical book in quarto, wrote, I think, by one [Michel] Stifelius, which contained a square of 16 that he said he should imagine must have been a work of great labour; but if I forget not, it had only the common properties of making the same sum, viz., 2056, in every row, horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. Not willing to be outdone by Mr. Stifelius, even in the size of my square, I went home and made that evening the following magical square of 16, which, besides having all the properties of the foregoing square of 8, i.e., it would make the 2056 in all the same rows and diagonals, had this added: that a four-square hole being cut in a piece of paper of such a size as to take in and show through it just 16 of the little squares, when laid on the greater square, the sum of the 16 numbers so appearing through the hole, wherever it was placed on the greater square, should likewise make 2056. This I sent to our friend the next morning, who, after some days, sent it back in a letter with these words: 'I return to thee thy astonishing or most stupendous piece of the magical square, in which'—but the compliment is too extravagant, and therefore, for his sake as well as my own, I ought not to repeat it. Nor is it necessary; for I make no question but you will readily allow this square of 16 to be the most magically magical of any magic square ever made by any

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

magician."^* (But Barbeu Dubourg, when he was translating Franklin's works twenty years later, found two mistakes in the square.^^)

Just when Franklin made his early magic square of 8 or his later of i6 is not certain, but neither can have been far from the years when he was turning from business to science without having yet found a subject which compelled him. In the transition he became something of a man of pleasure in sober Philadelphia. Comfortable at home, he was convivial in taverns, where he drank rum and Madeira, sang songs, and wrote some.

The antediluvians were all very sober,

For they had no wine and they brewed no October;

All wicked, bad livers, on mischief still thinking.

PHILADELPHIA Fhiladelphiaii : 747

For there can't be good living where there is not good drinking.

Derry-down. 'Twas honest old Noah first planted the vine, And mended his morals by drinking its wine; And thenceforth justly the drinking of water decried; For he knew that all mankind by drinking it died.

Derry-down.^^

\A'ine and friendship were better than love.

Fair Venus calls; her voice obey; In beauty's arms spend night and day. The joys of love all joys excel, And loving's certainly doing well.

Chorus

Oh! no!

Not so!

For honest souls know

Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.

Then let us get money, like bees lay up hone\-; We'll build us new hives and store each cell. The sight of our treasure shall yield us great pleasure; We'll count it and chink it and jingle it well.

Chorus. Oh! no! etc.

If this does not fit \"e, let's govern the city;

In power is pleasure no tongue can tell.

By crowds though you're teased, your pride shall be pleased,

And this can make Lucifer happy in hell.

Chorus. Oh! no! etc.

Then toss off your glasses and scorn the dull asses Who, missing the kernel, still gnaw the shell; What's love, rule, or riches? Wise Solomon teaches They're vanit\', vanity, vanity still.

Chorus

That's true!

He knew!

He'd tried them all through;

Friends and a bottle still bore the bell.'^''

1^8 : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Another song domestically celebrated a love nearer home than Venus. At a supper of the Junto or of some other convivial club it was laughingly pointed out that they were all married men and yet were singing the praise of poets' mistresses. The next morning at breakfast John Bard—who left Philadelphia for New York in 1746—received a new and proper song from Franklin, who asked him to be ready to sing it at the next meeting.

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. My dear friends, etc.

Not a word of her face, of her shape, of her air.

Or of flames or of darts you shall hear; I beauty admire but virtue I prize.

That fades not in seventy years.

Am I loaded with care, she takes off a large share,

That the burden ne'er makes me to reel; Does good fortune arrive, the joy of my wife

Quite doubles the pleasure I feel. . . .

Some faults have we all, and so has my Joan,

But then they're exceedingly small; And now I'm grown used to them, so like my own,

I scarcely can see them at all. . . .^^

And in a fourth, which was not by Franklin, he took a special, philosophical delight of which in old age he told a friend. "I like . . . the concluding sentiment in the old song called The Old Man^s Wish, wherein, after wishing for a warm house in a country town, an easy horse, some good authors, ingenious and cheerful companions, a pudding on Sundays, with stout ale and a bottle of Burgundy, etc., etc., in separate stanzas, each ending with this burden:

May I govern my passions with absolute sway. Grow wiser and better as my strength wears away, Without gout or stone, by a gentle deca\',

he adds:

PHILADELPHIA PhUadelphiaji : 149

With courage undaunted may I face m\- last day, And when I am gone may the better sort say: In the morning when sober, in the evening when mellow, He's gone and has left not behind him his fellow. For he governed his passions, etc. . . .

I have sung that wishing song a thousand times when I was young. "^^

Every year in Foor Richard Franklin put into print for his town or country readers the notes he had made on human life, from observation or reading. His song in praise of fellowship had a prose version: "Great beauty, great strength, and great riches are really and truly of no great use; a right heart exceeds all" (1739). In his almanac he first announced his reasonable view of the nature of sin: "Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is hurtful" (1739). "He that falls in love with himself \\\\\ have no rivals" (1739). "Proclaim not all thou know^est, all thou owest, all thou hast, nor all thou canst" (1739). "Thou hadst better eat salt with the philosophers of Greece than sugar with the courtiers of Italy" (1740). "Some are justly laughed at for keeping their money foolishly, others for spending it idly; he is the greatest fool that lays it out in a purchase of repentance" (1740). "Learn of the skilful; he that teaches himself hath a fool for a master" (1741). "Lying rides upon debt's back" (1741). "Up, sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough" (1741). Once he referred by name to himself:

Ben beats his pate and fancies wit will come;

But he may knock, there's nobody at home (1742),

(Poor Richard was smiling at his creator.) "He that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night" (1742). "Sloth (hke rust) consumes faster than labour wears" (1744). "The eye of a master will do more work than his hand" (1744). "Help, hands; for I have no lands" (1745). "Light-heeled mothers make leaden-heeled daughters" (1745). "What's proper is becoming: See the blacksmith with his white silk apron" (1746). "The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine" (1746). "A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things" (1746).

This last note for the almanac of 1746 Franklin made in 1745.

/JO : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

His father died that year, and the son wrote two of the jocular pieces which, though not in his collected works, have surreptitiously been kept alive in manuscript copies and—lately—private and less private printings.

Writing on 17 August to the lawyer James Read, Franklin took a scholar's liberties in a learned language. "I have been reading your letter over again, and, since you desire an answer, I sit me down to write you; yet as I write in the market, [it] will I believe be but a short one, though I may be long about it. . . . Your copy of Kempis must be a corrupt one if it has that passage as you quote it: in 07nnibus requiem qiuesivi, sed non inveni, nisi in angulo cum libello. The good father understood requiem (pleasure) better, and wrote in angulo cum piiella. Correct it thus without hesitation. I know there is another reading, in angulo puellce; but this reject, though more to the point, as an expression too indelicate."^*' There were too many interruptions in the market, and Franklin had to be brief, in English.

The best known of his surreptitious writings. Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress, is in the form of a letter to a friend dated 25 June. "I know of no medicine fit to diminish," he began, "the violent natural inclinations you mention; and if I did, I think I should not communicate it to you. Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness. ... It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility, and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. . . . But if you will not take this counsel, and persist in thinking a commerce with the sex inevitable, then I repeat my former advice, that in all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones." One by one Franklin gave his sensible reasons, which were much like Lord Chesterfield's, though homelier.

"Because they have more knowledge of the world, and their minds are better stored nith observations, their conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreeable. . . . Because

there is no hazard of children, . . . Because through more experience they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an intrigue. . . . Because in every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the fluids that fill the muscles appears first in the highest part. The face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the neck; then the breast and arms; the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: so that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old one from a young one. . . . Because the sin is less. The debauching a virgin may be her ruin and make her for life unhappy. . . . Because the compunction is less. The having made a young girl miserable may give you frequent bitter reflection; none of which can attend the making an old woman happy. . . . And lastly, they are so grateful! Thus much for my paradox. But still 1 advise you to marry directly."^^

(To this same year has wrongly been ascribed the broadest of Franklin's surreptitious pieces, A Letter to the Royal Academy at Brussels, which was written in France after that academy was founded in 1772. On 23 January 1782, writing to William Car-michael from Passy, Franklin gave permission to print any of his "little scribblings" except this one; "which, having several English puns in it, cannot be translated, and besides has too much grossierete to be borne by the polite readers of this nation. "^^ On 16 September 1783 Franklin sent a copy of the letter to Richard Price in London, as "a little jocular paper I wrote some years since in ridicule of a prize question given out by a certain academy on this side the water." Price showed it to Priestley, and the two clergymen were "entertained with the pleasantry of it."^^ It was a burlesque of such preposterous scientific schemes as Rabelais and Swift had ridiculed. "Let it be considered of how small importance to mankind, or to how small part of mankind have been useful, those discoveries in science that have heretofore made philosophers famous. Are there twenty men in Europe this day the happier, or even the easier, for any knowledge they have picked out of Aristotle? What comfort can the vortices of Descartes give to a man who has whirlwinds in his bowels? The knowledge of Newton's mutual attraction of the particles of matter, can it afford ease to him who is racked by their mutual repulsion and the cruel distensions of occasion?" Broadly but gravely.

1^2 : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Franklin proposed researches which might make crepitation less distressing to individuals, more agreeable to society. "The generous soul who now endeavours to find out whether the friends he entertains like best claret or Burgundy, champagne or Madeira, would then inquire also whether they chose [the perfume of] musk or lily, rose or bergamot, and provide accordingly."^^)

In 1746 Franklin wrote the Reflections on Courtship ajid Marriage which, though the first of his books to be published in Europe (Edinburgh, 1750), has been steadily neglected by his editors and biographers. The printer, who was Franklin, pretended not to know who the author was: the manuscript had come secretly to the press and may not have been meant for publication. It was in the form of two letters to a friend, carrying on one side of an argument started "the other day" among a group of bachelors, most of whom had thought women ignorant and vain, a peril and a nuisance to men. The anonymous writer, also Franklin, defended women. Given the same education as men, he thought, they would be as reasonable and sensible. But usually they were untaught, and they were courted with flattery and nonsense. Look at courtship. Too often it was undertaken for mercenary reasons or in headstrong desire. Franklin thought that interest was a more common motive than passion. Interested suitors did not tell the truth about themselves, and so made later disappointments likely. Passionate suitors were in such haste that there was no chance for friendship to develop. But friendship was the only sound basis for marriage—reasonable friendship. "iMarriage, or an union of the sexes, though it be in itself one of the smallest societies, is the original fountain from whence the greatest and most extensive governments have derived their beings. 'Tis a monarchical one, having reason for its legislator and prince: an authority more noble and sublime than any other state can boast of."^^ Neither reason nor nature prescribed who should rule in marriage, and men had the right only if they were more reasonable than women. Marriage was a voluntary contract, binding on both parties to it, for the sake of their common welfare and pleasure.

Franklin was specific. Married persons should avoid petty quarrelling. "What fermentations and heats often arise from breaking of china, disordering a room, dinner not being ready at

PHILADELPHIA Philadelphia?! : / 55

a precise hour, and a thousand other such impertinent bagatelles, . . . These sort of matrimonial squabbles put one in mind of a little venomous insect they have in the West Indies, like a gnat, who when they bite create a great itching which, if much scratched, raises an inflammation so malignant that a leg has been lost by it, and sometimes mortifications ensue that have been attended with death."^*' Husband and wife, punctilious in their manners, must also be scrupulous about their persons. Here, suddenly, Franklin sounds a little like Swift, with his modern nerves: "Let us survey the morning dress of some women. Downstairs they come, pulling up their ungartered, dirty stockings; slipshod, with naked heels peeping out; no stays or other decent conveniency, but all flip-flop; a sort of a clout thrown about the neck, without form or decency; a tumbled, discoloured mob or nightcap, half on and half off, with the frowzy hair hanging in sweaty ringlets, staring like Medusa with her serpents; shrugging up her petticoats, that are sw^eeping the ground and scarce tied on; hands unwashed, teeth furred, and eyes crusted— but I beg your pardon, I'll go no farther with this sluttish picture, which I am afraid has already turned your stomach."*^ Swift, fastidious to the point of sickness, had just died or was dying when Franklin wrote. Franklin was stronger, and his disgust lasted only for a paragraph, but at the end of his Reflections he printed Swift's Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage with its grim advice.

More like Franklin was The Speech of Polly Baker,^^ which, written in Philadelphia, somehow got to England and was printed in the Gentleviaji's Magazine for April 1747. Being prosecuted the fifth time "at Connecticut near Boston in New England" for having a bastard child, the heroine robustly defended herself for following the laws of her nature if not of the province. "Abstracted from the law, I cannot conceive (may it please your honours) what the nature of my offence is. I have brought five fine children into the world, at the risk of my life; I have maintained them well by my own industry, without burdening the township, and would have done it better if it had not been for the heavy charges and fines I have paid. Can it be a crime (in the nature of things, I mean) to add to the king's subjects, in a new country that really w^ants people? . . . How can it be beheved

Zy^ : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

that heaven is angry at my having children, when to the little done by me towards it, God has been pleased to add His divine skill and admirable workmanship in the formation of their bodies and crowned the whole by furnishing them with rational and immortal souls? ... If you, gentlemen, must be making laws, do not turn natural and useful actions into crimes by your prohibitions." Let them think of her first seducer, who was now a magistrate. Let them think of "the great and growing number of bachelors" who "by their manner of living leave unproduced (which is little better than murder) hundreds of their posterity to the thousandth generation. Is not this a greater offence against the public good than mine? Compel them, then, by law, either to marriage or to pay double the fine of fornication every year. What must poor young women do, whom customs and nature forbid to solicit the men, and who cannot force themselves upon husbands, when the laws take no care to provide them any and yet severely punish them if they do their duty without them? The duty of the first and great command of nature and nature's God, increase and multiply; a duty from the steady performance of which nothing has been able to deter me, but for its sake I have hazarded the loss of the public esteem and have frequently endured public disgrace and punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble opinion, instead of a whipping to have a statue erected to my memory." The court was so much impressed by her argument that the next day she was married to one of the judges—by whom she had fifteen children.

It is hardly accident that Franklin's salty year came when, just before and after forty, he had at last a clear sense of the leisure toward which he had long been working. It is no wonder that his spirits rose or that in cheerful moments he amused himself and his friends with philosophical ribaldries. A philosopher who had arrived at freedom might take his ease in the lively world. But Franklin had no impulse to be merely a provincial wit and man of pleasure, and soon he had an important ruling passion. "In 1746, being at Boston, I met there with a Dr. Spence, who was lately arrived from Scotland and showed me some electric experiments. They were imperfectly performed, as he was not very expert; but, being on a subject quite new to me, they equally surprised and pleased me."'*^ At home again, Franklin himself

PHILADELPHIA FUladelphtan : / j j

began to experiment. Spence came to Philadelphia, and Franklin bought his apparatus. Collinson sent more to the Library Company. Franklin gave up the winter to electricity. "I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done," he wrote to Collinson 28 March 1747; "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."^°

Electrician

NOW that electricity has become a daily commonplace it is hard to realize what fresh, strange news it was when Franklin first thought—perhaps first heard—of it in Boston in the summer of 1746. Before that year he might have known that various bodies may be electrified by rubbing, so that they will attract lighter objects, and that the attracting force may be transferred to other bodies. He might have read of frictional machines, mounted rotating spheres of sulphur or glass, which could be used to charge insulated conductors with what was called the electric fluid. European scientists already distinguished two kinds of electricity: vitreous, produced on glass rubbed with silk, and resinous, produced on resin rubbed with wool or fur. But not until January 1746 had Pieter van Musschenbroek at Ley den discovered the electric bottle later known as the Ley den jar, the simplest and for years the only known condenser, which was the basis of early electrical research. William Watson in London quickly followed Musschenbroek in his experiments and concluded that all bodies contained electricity: uncharged bodies the normal or equilibrium amount, charged bodies more or less than that as they contained vitreous or resinous electricity, or vice versa. Franklin in the fall or winter of the year went forward from the year's chief discovery in science.

"My house," he says, "was continually full, for some time,

1S6

PHILADELPHIA Electrtciaii : / 57

with people who came to see these new wonders. To divide a Uttle this encumbrance among my friends, I caused a number of similar tubes"—similar to the one Collinson had sent the Library Company—"to be blown at our glass-house, with which they furnished themselves, so that we had at length several performers."^ Philip Syng, a member of the Junto and a skilled silversmith, contrived a machine to save them labour. "The European papers on electricity," Franklin wrote in the earliest of the reports which he regularly made to Collinson, "frequently speak of rubbing the tube as a fatiguing exercise. Our spheres are fixed on iron axes which pass through them. At one end of the axis there is a small handle with which you turn the sphere like a common grindstone."- Thomas Hopkinson, president of the American Philosophical Society, first noticed that points "throw off the electrical fire." Ebenezer Kinnersley, a Baptist minister with no pastorate, discovered that the Leyden jar could be electrified as strongly through the tinfoil coating as through the wire leading into it, and independently rediscovered the "contrary electricities" of glass and sulphur. His lectures—planned and encouraged by Franklin—in Philadelphia, Boston, Newport, and New York during 1751-52 made Kinnersley's experiments nearly as famous in America as Franklin's.

But Franklin, carefully crediting his friends with whatever they found out, was the real master of the new knowledge. In his busy house in Market Street, working with such pieces of apparatus as a saltcellar, a vinegar cruet, a pump handle, or the gold on the binding of a book, and "little machines I had roughly made for myself,"^ he had the most spacious views and the most painstaking methods. Within a few months he could write to Colhnson, on 28 March 1747, that "we have observed some particular phenomena that we look upon to be new."^ By 11 July, when he wrote at length, he had already hit upon two of his fundamental contributions: his conception of electricity as a single fluid, and his substitution of the terms positive and negative, or plus and minus, for vitreous and resinous electricity; and he was full of "the wonderful effect of pointed bodies, both in drawing off and throwing off the electrical fire,"^ which was to suggest the lightning rod.

Within another month he had written Collinson two more

1^8 : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

long letters, and then on 14 August sent a hurried note after them. "On some further experiments since, I have observed a phenomenon or two that I cannot at present account for on the principle laid down in those letters, and am therefore become a little diffident of my hypothesis and ashamed that I expressed myself in so positive a manner. In going on with these experiments how many pretty systems do we build which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy! If there is no other use discovered of electricity, this however is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain man humble. I must now request that you would not expose those letters; or if you communicate them to any friends you would at least conceal my name."*' In a letter dated i September, he began: "The necessary trouble of copying long letters which perhaps, when they come to your hands, may contain nothing new or worth your reading (so quick is the progress made with you in electricity) half discourages me from writing any more on that subject."^ Yet again he wrote at some length, this time briUiant observations on the Leyden jar, which was still mysterious. Then public affairs, particularly the defence of the province against the French, claimed him, and for a year he had little time for science. But on 29 September 1748 he had retired from his printing business and moved to his new house at the corner of Race and Second Streets, and could write to Cad-wallader Golden: "I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give myself and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness: leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy men as are pleased to honour me with their friendship or acquaintance."^ The winter of 1748-49 was as fruitful as that of 1746-47.

In the report to CoUinson of 29 April 1749 Franklin, continuing his observation on the Leyden jar, first pointed out the great part played by the dielectric—the glass—and told of making, for the first time in history, "what we called an electrical battery, consisting of eleven panes of large sash-glass, armed with thin leaden plates pasted on each side, placed vertically and supported at two inches' distance on silk cords, with thick hooks of leaden wire, one from each side, standing upright, distant from each other, and convenient communications of wire and chain from

PHILADELPHIA Ekctncian : / 55?

the giving side of one pane to the receiving side of the other; that so the whole might be charged together and with the same labour as one single pane."*^ How important these matters were he could not know. He gave nearly as much space to telling of devices he and his friends had worked out to astound the curious. "Chagrined a little that we have been hitherto able to produce nothing in this way of use to mankind, and the hot weather coming on when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, it is proposed to put an end to them for this season, somewhat humorously, in a party of pleasure on the banks of Schuylkill. Spirits, at the same time, are to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river, without any other conductor than the water: an experiment which we some time since performed, to the amazement of many. A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle; when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France, and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery."^"

Later that year Franklin made an entry in "the minutes I used to keep of the experiments I made, with memorandums of such as I purposed to make. . . . November 7, /7^j>. Electrical fluid agrees with lightning in these particulars, i. 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, i o. 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."^^ Other scientists before Franklin had suspected that Hghtning was electricity. He set out to find a method of proving it.

A use for the discovery was promptly in his mind. It cannot have been more than a few weeks before he wrote a letter which Collinson sent to the Gentlevian's Magazine for May 1750, where it has eluded Franklin's editors. "There is something, however, in the experiments of points, sending off or drawing on the elec-

l60 : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

trical fire, which has not been fully explained, and which I intend to supply in my next. For the doctrine of points is very curious, and the effects of them truly wonderful; and, from what I have observed on experiments, I am of opinion that houses, ships, and even towers and churches may be effectually secured from the strokes of lightning by their means; for if, instead of the round balls of wood or metal which are commonly placed on the tops of weathercocks, vanes, or spindles of churches, spires, or masts, there should be a rod of iron eight or ten feet in length, sharpened gradually to a point like a needle, and gilt to prevent rusting, or divided into a number of points, which would be better, the electrical fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike; and a light would be seen at the point, like the sailors' corpuzante [corposant: St. Elmo's fire]. This may seem whimsical, but let it pass for the present until I send the experiments at large." Here is Franklin's earliest suggestion of the lightning rod, made when he seems not yet to have thought of the need of a ground wire.

Now he turned his attention to thunder-storms—which he called thunder-gusts—and wrote out a new hypothesis for Collin-son which, though undated, must belong to the first half of 1750. Franklin then supposed that clouds formed over the ocean had more electricity in them than clouds formed over the land, and that when they came close enough together their different charges were equalized by the passage of lightning between them. "If two gun barrels electrified will strike at two inches' distance, and make a loud snap, to what a great distance may 10,000 acres of electrified cloud strike and give its fire, and how loud must be that crack? "^^ When clouds came close to the earth their electricity was discharged through "high hills and high trees, lofty towers, spires, masts of ships, chimneys, etc., as so many prominencies and points."^^

By 29 July 1750 Franklin was ready to draw up for Collinson, who had sent the first electrical tube, and Thomas Penn, who had sent the Library Company "a complete electrical apparatus," a summary of the Opinions and Conjectures, concerning the Properties and Effects of the Electrical Matter, Arising from Experiments and Observations, Made at Philadelphia, ij^p. Now, nine months after he had privately determined to make his great ex-

PHILADELPHIA Electrtcia?! : 161

periment, he publicly proposed it, through Collinson to the Royal Society. Let the experiment be made. Alake the truth useful to mankind. "Nor is it of much importance to us to know the manner in which nature executes her laws: 'tis enough if we know the laws themselves. 'Tis of real use to know that china left in the air unsupported will fall and break; but how it comes to fall, and why it breaks, are matters of speculation. 'Tis a pleasure indeed to know them, but we can preserve our china without it."

Now repeating his suggestion of lightning rods, Franklin provided also for "a wire down the outside of the building into the ground, or down round one of the shrouds of a ship and down her side till it reaches the water. . . . To determine the question whether the clouds that contain lightning are electrified or not, I would propose an experiment to be tried where it may be done conveniently. On the top of some high tower or steeple place a kind of sentry box. , . . big enough to contain a man and an electrical stand [an insulator]. From the middle of the stand let an iron rod rise and pass bending out of the door, and then upright twenty or thirty feet, pointed very sharp at the end. If the electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a man standing on it when such clouds are passing low might be electrified and afford sparks, the rod drawing fire to him from a cloud. If any danger to the man should be apprehended (though I think there would be none), let him stand on the floor of his box and now and then bring near to the rod the loop of a wire that has one end fastened to the leads, he holding it by a wax handle; so the sparks, if the rod is electrified, will strike from the rod to the wire and not affect him."^^

Franklin did not know enough about lightning to know how dangerous such an experiment might be, and the experience he had two days before Christmas the same year did not disturb his plans. "Being about to kill a turkey by the shock from two large glass jars, containing as much electrical fire as forty common phials, I inadvertently took the whole through ni)' own arms and body, by receiving the fire from the united top wires with one hand while the other held a chain connected with the outsides of both jars. The company present (whose talking to me, and to one another, I suppose occasioned my inattention to what I was about) say that the flash was very great and the crack as loud as

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a pistol; yet, my senses being instantly gone, I neither saw the one nor heard the other; nor did I feel the stroke on my hand. ... I then felt what I know not well how to describe: a universal blow throughout my whole body from head to foot, which seemed within as well as without; after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick shaking of my body, which gradually remitting, my sense as gradually returned. . . . That part of my hand and fingers which held the chain was left white, as though the blood had been driven out, and remained so eight or ten minutes after, feeling like dead flesh; and I had a numbness in my arms and the back of my neck which continued till the next morning but wore off. ... I am ashamed to have been guilty of so notorious a blunder; a match for that of the Irishman . . . who, being about to steal powder, made a hole in the cask with a hot iron." "The greatest known effects of common lightning," Franklin thought the next year, might be exceeded by linking up enough electric bottles, "which a few years since could not have been believed and even now may seem to many a little extravagant to suppose. So we are got beyond the skill of Rabelais's devils of two years old, who, he humorously says, had only learnt to thunder and lighten a little round the head of a cabbage. "^^

Again Franklin, soon to be a member of the Assembly and active in the founding of a new college and a new hospital, was drawn away from philosophic leisure. The Royal Society listened to his papers, offered to it by Collinson, but did not value them enough to publish them in full. "One paper, which I wrote for Mr. Kinnersley, on the sameness of lightning with electricity, I sent to Dr. Mitchel [John Mitchell, who had been Franklin's correspondent while living in Virginia], an acquaintance of mine and one of the members also of that society, who wrote me word that it had been read, but was laughed at by the connoisseurs."^^ John Fothergill, a London physician who was later to be one of Franklin's best friends in England, urged that the electrical letters be printed. Collinson turned them over to Edward Cave for his Gentleinafi's Magazine, but he issued them in a separate pamphlet as Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia i?i Ajiierica (1751), with a preface by Fothergill. Watson, Franklin's English rival in electrical research, read an

PHILADELPHIA ElectHcian : 16^

abstract of the pamphlet to the Royal Society on 6 June of that year, in which he asked the members to notice how much Franklin's observations "coincide with and support those which I some time since communicated to the Society," but said not a word about the experiment to find out if lightning was electricity and could be prevented by iron rods from doing mischief. (Franklin in his own copy of the pamphlet carefully credited Hopkinson, Kinnersley, and Syng with the discoveries they had made/^)

France was more hospitable to the new idea. A bad translation of Franklin s book came into the hands of Buifon, then keeper of the Jardin du Roi, who advised Thomas-Frangois D'Alibard to make a better version, published in Paris early in 1752. Scientists and public were at once excited. The king himself saw the "Phil-adelphian experiments" performed by "M. de Lor, master of experimental philosophy." BufFon, D'iVlibard, and de Lor determined to carry out the greater experiment which Franklin had proposed. D'Alibard, first to be successful, did nothing that might not have been done in Philadelphia. In a garden at Marly, six leagues from Paris, he set up an iron rod, an inch through and forty feet long, pointed with brass. Having no cake of resin with which to insulate it from the ground, he used a stool which was merely a squared plank with three wine bottles for legs. At twenty minutes past two on the afternoon of 10 May 1752, there was a single clap of thunder followed by hail. D'Alibard was just then absent. A former dragoon named Coiffier, left to watch the experiment, heard the thunder and hurried to the rod with an electric phial. Sparks came from the iron with a crackling sound. Coiffier sent a child for the prior of Marly, who had heard the thunder and was already on his way. iMeeting the child in the road, he began to run. The villagers, believing that Coiffier had been killed, ran after the prior through the beating hail. Terrified, they stood back ten or a dozen paces from the rod, but in broad daylight they could see the sparks and hear the crackling while Raulet the prior drew off all the electric fire. He sat down and wrote a letter which Coiffier took to D'Ahbard, who three days later made his report to the Academie Royale des Sciences. Following the course which Franklin had outlined, he said, he had arrived at incontestable proof. Frankhn's idea was no longer a conjecture.^^

l6^ : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

On 18 May the experiment was repeated by de Lor in Paris. The Abbe iMazeas was commanded by the king to send word to the Royal Society in London that he greatly applauded Franklin and CoUinson. John Canton made a successful experiment in London 20 July. In England as well as France, and in Belgium, Franklin's theory was proved again and again during the summer of 1752. He was famous in Europe before he knew it in America.

II

Before that he had thought of another way of proving his theory, and with the help of his electrical kite had drawn lightning from a cloud. The episode of the kite, so firm and fixed in legend, turns out to be dim and mystifying in fact. Franklin himself never wrote the story of the most dramatic of his experiments. All that is known about what he did on that famous day, of no known date, comes from Joseph Priestley's account, published fifteen years afterwards but read in manuscript by Franklin, who must have given Priestley the precise, familiar details.

"As every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery (the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure to all my readers, I shall endeavour to gratify them with the communication of a few particulars which I have from the best authority.

"The Doctor, having published his method of verifying his hypothesis concerning the sameness of electricity with the matter of lightning, was waiting for the erection of a spire [on Christ Church] in Philadelphia to carry his views into execution; not imagining that a pointed rod of a moderate height could answer the purpose; when it occurred to him that by means of a common kite he could have better access to the regions of thunder than by any spire whatever. Preparing, therefore, a large silk handkerchief and two cross-sticks of a proper length on which to extend it, he took the opportunity of the first approaching thunder-storm to take a walk in the fields, in which there was a shed convenient for his purpose. But, dreading the ridicule which too commonly attends unsuccessful attempts in science, he communicated his intended experiment to nobody but his son"—then

twenty-one, not a child as in the traditional illustrations of the scene—"who assisted him in raising the kite.

"The kite being raised, a considerable time elapsed before there was any appearance of its being electrified. One very promising cloud had passed over it without any effect; when, at length, just as he was beginning to despair of his contrivance, he observed some lose threads of the hempen string to stand erect, and to avoid one another, just as if they had been suspended on a common conductor. Struck with this promising appearance, he immediately presented his knuckle to the key, and (let the reader judge of the exquisite pleasure he must have felt at that moment) the discovery was complete. He perceived a very evident electric spark. Others succeeded, even before the string was wet, so as to put the matter past all dispute, and when the rain had wet the string he collected electric fire very copiously. This happened in June 1752, a month after the electricians in France had verified the same theory, but before he heard of anything they had done."^^

Priestley, writing what he could have learned only from Franklin, and writing under Franklin's eye, could hardly have invented these minute circumstances. Nor is Franklin, with his powerful and exact memory, likely to have been wrong. If he had wanted—what was quite out of character for him—to claim more credit for originality than he deserved, he might as well have said he flew the kite before his theory had been verified in France. Instead, he allowed the French a month's priority. Yet there is this mystery about the matter: Franklin, who knew how startling the discovery was, and who had a genius for promptly making drama out of news, kept the electrical kite a secret till October. He mentioned it to none of his correspondents. He wrote nothing about it in the Gazette, and apparently did not tell Kinnersley, who lectured on electricity in Philadelphia during September without reference to his latest triumph.

Can Franklin deliberately have kept his secret till October so that he might publish at the same time, or almost the same time, in his newspaper and in his almanac the two most important pieces of his year's news? That is what he did. On 19 October his first account of the Electrical Kite appeared in the Gazette. The same issue advertised as in the press the new Foor Richard for 1753,

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which contained Frankhn's first positive statement of How to Secure Houses, etc., from Lightning.

"As frequent mention," he wrote in the Gazette, "is made in public papers from Europe of the success of the Philadelphia experiment for drawing the electric fire from clouds by means of pointed rods of iron erected on high buildings, etc., it may be agreeable to the curious to be informed that the same experiment has succeeded in Philadelphia, though made in a different and more easy manner, which is as follows:

"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, life 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 thunderclouds 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 twin will stand out every way and be attracted by an approaching finger. And when the rain has wet 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 may 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."^*^

"It has pleased God in His goodness to mankind," Franklin said in Poor Richard, "at length to discover to them the means of

PHILADELPHIA Electriciaii : 16']

securing their habitations and other buildings from mischief by thunder and Hghtning. The method is this: Provide a small iron rod (it may be made of the rod-iron used by the nailers) but of such a length that, one end being three or four feet in the moist ground, the other may be six or eight feet above the highest part of the building. To the upper end of the rod fasten about a foot of brass wire the size of a common knitting-needle, sharpened to a fine point; the rod may be secured to the house by a few small staples. If the house or barn be long, there may be a rod and point at each end, and a middling wire along the ridge from one to the other. A house thus furnished will not be damaged by lightning, it being attracted by the points and passing through the metal into the ground without hurting anything. Vessels, also, having a sharp-pointed rod fixed on the top of their masts, with a wire from the foot of the rod reaching down, round one of the shrouds, to the water, will not be hurt by lightning."

Again a question: Why were these two epoch-making announcements so circumspectly worded? Franklin described the kite experiment, but said only that it had succeeded in Philadelphia, not that he himself had performed it. (In all his later writings he mentions it but once, in that section of the Autobiography, written in 1788, which refers to D'Alibard and de Lor: "I will not swell this narrative with an account of that capital experiment, nor of the infinite pleasure I received in the success of a similar one I made soon after at Philadelphia, as both are to be found in the histories of electricity."^^) Speaking of lightning rods, Franklin said that a method of securing houses had been discovered, not that it had been put into practice by him, or in America. So far as his words in Foor Richard go, he might have been depending on the report from France that the experiments of the best naturalists there confirmed his theory of points as "a preservative against thunder." This he could have read in the Ge7itlenM7i's Magazine for May, which he had seen by 14 September^^ and possibly earlier.

Every simple explanation of the kite mystery leaves it still confused. Franklin, it has been guessed by cynics, invented the whole story. This is quite out of keeping with his record in science, in which he elsewhere appears always truthful and unpretending. It has been guessed by kinder sceptics that Franklin,

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talking with Priestley after fifteen years, mistook the month in which he had made his discovery: that he made it as he said, but in September. The important thing about his recollection is not that he flew the kite in June but that he flew it before he knew of the experiments in France. After that there was no need for Franklin to verify an experiment which had been satisfactorily verified, and it would not have been like him to do it. The chances that he did not do it at all are nearly as good as that he did it when proof was no longer called for. By 14 September he certainly knew about the French experiments, and had probably flown his kite. Yet he did not make the kite public in the Gazette till Poor Richard was ready with its news of Hghtning rods. A man who could keep such a secret for five weeks could as easily have kept it for four months.

Whether Franklin is supposed to have flown the most famous of all kites in June, or later, or never, little is known about him through this mysterious time. "We have had excessive hot weather now near two weeks," he wrote to Susanna Wright on 11 July. "This town is a mere oven. ... I languished for the country, for air and shade and leisure and converse, but fate has doomed me to be stifled and roasted and teased to death in a city."-^ Business sometimes obliges one to postpone philosophical amusements," he wrote to John Perkins on 13 August. "Whatever I have wrote of that kind are really, as they are entitled, but conjectures and suppositions; which ought always to give place when careful observation militates against them. I own I have too strong a penchant to the building of hypotheses; they indulge my natural indolence. 1 wish I had more of your patience and accuracy in making observations, on which alone true philosophy can be founded."-^ Writing to Cadwallader Golden on 14 September, Franklin, in answer to a letter written in May, apologized for his neglect of their correspondence, but said nothing about the kite, and left Golden to hear about it from the newspapers. That same month Frankhn "erected an iron rod to draw the lightning down into my house, in order to make some experiments on it, with two bells to give notice when the rod should be electrified."^^

His rod was "fixed to the top of my chimney and extending about nine feet above it. From the foot of this rod a wire (the

thickness of a goose-quill) came through a covered glass tube in the roof and down through the well of the staircase; the lower end connected with the iron spear of a pump. On the staircase opposite to my chamber door the wire was divided; the ends separated about six inches, a little bell on each end; and between the bells a little brass ball, suspended by a silk thread, to play between and strike the bells when clouds passed with electricity in them. After having frequently drawn sparks and charged bottles from the bell of the upper wise, I was one night awakened by loud cracks on the staircase. Starting up and opening the door, I perceived that the brass ball, instead of vibrating as usual between the bells, was repelled and kept at a distance from both; while the fire passed, sometimes in very large, quick cracks from bell to bell, and sometimes in a continued, dense, white stream, seemingly as large as my finger, whereby the whole staircase was inlightened as with sunshine, so that one might see to pick up a pin."-*' Those bells rang in his house for years.

Though he had, it seems, put up his rod chiefly to get electricity for experiments without the work of making it by laborious friction, he also thought it protected his house, as other rods protected other houses in Philadelphia that year.-"^ When on i October he wrote to Collinson about the kite he added a postscript about lightning rods. "I was pleased to hear of the success of my experiments in France, and that they begin to use points upon their buildings. Wg had before that placed them upon our academy and state house spires."-* This is the earliest American reference to lightning rods in actual use. Printing a copy of this letter in the Gazette for the 19th (of course long before the original reached ColHnson and the Royal Society), Franklin left off the postscript. The rods on the academy and state house were already known to Philadelphia. When they were put up is not clear from Franklin's "before that" in the postscript to Collinson. Did he mean before the French began to "erect points upon their buildings" in May or before he heard about it in September or earlier? If it was before May, why did he wait till September to install the rod on his house? The whole chronology of the episode is guesswork. But it may with some reason be guessed: (i) that Franklin, having proposed the experiment which D'iViibard

/yO : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

verified in xMay, was waiting for the high Christ Church spire which he thought he needed; (2) that in June he thought of another method of proving his theory and flew his kite; (3) that he then, without giving away his kite secret, suggested the rods on the lower spires, as much to obtain electricity as to safeguard the buildings; (4) and that he came to the idea of a rod on his house only after he had learned from the French that no greater height was needed. He felt certain enough of the value of such rods to recommend them confidently in Poor Richard the next month. But not till eight years later did Kinnersley report to Franklin, then in London, that a house in Philadelphia had unmistakably been struck by lightning and saved by his invention."^

Frankhn suggested if he did not erect the first lightning rod, and he probably flew the first electrical kite, but there are little mysteries about both his proof of his great conjecture and his application of it.

Ill

In 1752-53 these were not mysteries but wonders. A man in Philadelphia in America, bred a tradesman, remote from the learned world, had hit upon a secret which enabled him, and other men, to catch and tame the lightning, so dread that it was still mythological. To the public, as it gradually heard about him, he seemed a magician. To scientists, from the first, he seemed a master. He had resounding praise from France, even the applause of the king. When Franklin learned of this he felt, he told Jared Eliot on 12 April 1753, like the girl in the Tatler "who was observed to grow suddenly proud, and none could guess the reason, till it came to be known that she had got on a new pair of garters."^'' His account of the electrical kite was read at the Royal Society 21 December, almost as soon as it could get to London, and was published in the Transactions for that year. Harvard gave him the honorary degree of Aiaster of Arts in July 1753. Yale followed with the same degree in September, and William and Alary in April 1756. The Royal Society on 30 November 1753 awarded him the Sir Godfrey Copley

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gold medal "on account of his curious experiments and observations on electricity," and on 29 May 1756 elected him a member of the Society. "I had not the least expectation," he told Collin-son, "of ever arriving at that honour."^^ Giovanni Battista Beccaria made Franklin quickly known and accepted in the schools of Italy. His electrical writings were translated not only into French but also into German (1758) and Italian (1774). Throughout Europe he stood first among electricians, as electricity, for an excited time, stood first among scientific marvels. The Swedish physicist G. W. Richmann in St. Petersburg put up an experimental rod in July 1753 and was killed—as Franklin might have been if his kite or his rod had happened to draw a heavy bolt of lightning. Kinnersley in Philadelphia in 1754 took the trouble to explain in his lectures that lightning rods were not presumptuous or irreligious. On this point there were controversies.

Wonders could not run through the world then as they can now, thanks to electricity, but Franklin's fame reached far beyond those who did or could read his books, understand his ingenious experiments, and enjoy his easy, natural expositions. He had made one of the most dramatic guesses in the history of science, and he had verified his guess with a boy's plaything. He had appHed his knowledge to making men's houses, barns, ships safe from an incalculable danger. With what seemed the simplest key he had unlocked one of the darkest and most terrifying doors in the unknown universe. Here was another hero of the human race, even as against the terrifying gods. Franklin, Kant said, was a new Prometheus who had stolen fire from heaven.

In the six years between the summer of 1746, when Franklin first saw electrical experiments in Boston, and the summer of 1752, when he flew the electrical kite in Philadelphia, he made all his fundamental contributions to electricity. He made them because he had a fundamental mind, which almost at once mastered the general problem as it then existed and went deeper into it than any observer had yet gone. He found electricity a curiosity and left it a science. Indolence, he thought, disposed him too much to the building of hypotheses, and he claimed only to have been lucky in his guesses. His procedure came from the

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nature and method of his mind. But there was more in his science than a few bold conjectures. He steadily insisted on the need of painstaking experiments, scrupulous accuracy, and a stubborn refusal to surmise what the tested facts did not warrant. He regretted his weakness in mathematics and the frequent interruptions which broke off the chain of thought which he believed should be continuous in a scientist. Nobody ever gave more grateful attention than Franklin to experiments which contradicted this or that theory of his, or more readily accepted them if he was convinced that he had been in error. His hypotheses grew as his facts accumulated. It did not matter to him who got the credit. "These thoughts, my dear friend," he wrote to Collin-son at the end of his letter about hghtning rods, "are many of them crude and hasty; and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some reputation in philosophy I ought to keep them by me till corrected and improved by time and farther experience. But since even short hints and imperfect experiments in any new branch of science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good effect, in exciting the attention of the ingenious to the subject, and so become the occasion of more exact disquisition and more complete discoveries; you are at liberty to communicate this paper to whom you please; it being of more importance that knowledge should increase than that your friend should be thought an accurate philosopher."^^

As Franklin was not ambitious, neither did he expect too much from the world, which he knew as few scientists have known it. "There are everywhere a number of people who, being totally destitute of any inventive faculty themselves, do not readily conceive that others may possess it," he wrote to John Lining on i8 March 1755. "They think of inventions as miracles: there might be such formerly, but they are ceased. With these, everyone who offers a new invention is deemed a pretender: he had it from some other country or from some book. A man of their own acquaintance, one who has no more sense than themselves, could not possibly, in their opinion, have been the inventor of anything. They are confirmed, too, in these sentiments by frequent instances of pretensions to invention which vanity is daily producing. That vanity too, though an incitement to invention, is at the same time the pest of inventors. Jealousy and

PHILADELPHIA ElectHciafi : / 75

envy deny the merit or the novelty of your invention; but vanity, when the novelty and merit are established, claims it for its own. . . . Thus through envy, jealousy, and the vanity of competitors for fame, the origin of many of the most extraordinary inventions, though produced within but a few centuries past, is involved in doubt and uncertainty. We scarce know to whom we are indebted for the compass and for spectacles; nor have even paper and printing, that record everything else, been able to preserve with certainty the name and reputation of their inventors. One would not, therefore, of all faculties or qualities of the mind, wish for a friend or a child that he should have that of invention. For his attempts to benefit mankind in that way, however wxU imagined, if they do not succeed, expose him, though very unjustly, to general ridicule and contempt; and if they do succeed, to envy, robbery, and abuse."^^

It may have been knowledge of the world as much as modesty that kept Franklin from being too explicit or emphatic about his own inventions. Having no envy, jealousy, or vanity in himself, he would not run the risk of needlessly rousing them in others. When the Abbe Nollet, preceptor to the royal family in France, attacked the theories from America, Franklin did not, after a little reflection, bother to answer him. "I concluded to let my papers shift for themselves, believing it was better to spend what time I could spare from public business in making new experiments than in disputing about those already made."^^ He refused to patent the lightning rod, often called the Franklin rod, or to profit by it. Though he never lost sight of what was being done in electricity during his whole lifetime, he was perfectly willing to have his contributions to it absorbed in the enlarging science. They were absorbed, and it is now difficult to trace the details of his influence. His Principia made only a beginning.

But in one discoverable respect he still survives wherever electricity is spoken of. Franklin appears to have been the first to use, at least in print in English, these electrical terms, armature, battery, brush, charged, charging, condense, conductor, discharge, electrical fire, electrical shock, electrician, electrified, electrify, electrized, Leyden bottle, minus (negative or negatively), nega-

/74 ' BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

tively, non-conducting, non-conductor, non-electric, plus (positive or positively), stroke (electric shock), uncharged.^^ The Philadelphia Prometheus with his kite was also an American Adam in his electrical garden.

IV

Franklin was more conscipuous, and more methodical, in electricity than in any other branch of science, but his scientific curiosity swung freely in all directions. At twenty, on his voyage from London to Philadelphia, he was already a scientist, acute in observing and precise in reporting what he saw. During his heavy years of business as a printer he had little time for scientific studies, though even then he thought often about "natural philosophy," and made friends with such experts as he had a chance to meet—particularly the men who became the first members of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin, offering himself as secretary, did not pretend to be an expert himself. Yet in the year he proposed the Society, 1743, he made an observation which ranks him with the first and best meteorologists. He had not as Poor Richard forecast the weather annually since 1732 for nothing.

"We were to have an eclipse of the moon at Philadelphia, on a Friday evening [21 October] about nine o'clock. I intended to observe it, but was prevented by a north-east storm which came on about seven with thick clouds, as usual, that quite obscured the whole hemisphere. Yet when the post brought us the Boston newspaper, giving an account of the effects of the same storm in those parts, I found the beginning of the eclipse had been well observed there, though Boston lies north-east of Philadelphia about four hundred miles. This puzzled me, because the storm began with us so soon as to prevent any observation; and being a north-east storm, I imagined it must have begun rather sooner in places farther to the north-eastward than it did at Philadelphia. I therefore mentioned it in a letter to my brother who lived at Boston; and he informed me that the storm did not begin with them till near eleven o'clock, so that they had a good observation of the eclipse. And upon comparing all the other accounts I received from the several colonies, of the time of beginning of

the same storm ... I found the beginning to be always later the farther north-eastward. . . .

"From thence I formed an idea of the cause of these storms, which I would explain by a familiar instance or two. Suppose a long canal of water stopped at the end by a gate. The water is quite at rest till the gate is open, then it begins to move out through the gate; the water next the gate is first in motion, and moves towards the gate; the water next to the first water moves next, and so on successively till the water at the head of the canal is in motion, which is last of all. In this case all the water moves indeed towards the gate, but the successive times of beginning motion are the contrary w^ay, viz., from the gate backwards to the head of the canal. Again, suppose the air in a chamber at rest, no current through the room till you make a fire in the chimney. Immediately the air in the chimney, being rarefied by the fire, rises; the air next the chimney flows in to supply its place, moving towards the chimney; and in consequence the rest of the air successively, quite back to the door. Thus to produce our north-east storms I suppose some great heat and rarefaction of the air in or about the Gulf of Mexico; the air thence rising has its place supplied by the next more northern, cooler, and therefore denser and heavier air; that, being in motion, is followed by the next more northern air, etc., etc., in a successive current, to which current our coast and inland ridge of mountains give the direction of north-east, as they lie north-east and south-west. "^^

Franklin's alert, conjecturing mind here shows itself working in its most characteristic ways. Concerned with an eclipse, he noticed a storm. He read about it in the newspapers and wrote a letter to his brother asking for more information. Other accounts came from other colonies. He compared them all, reflected upon them, and worked out his hypothesis. It was continental in scope, but he reduced it to the simple image of water in a canal or air in a room. Submitting his explanation to John Perkins, Frankhn said: "If my hypothesis is not the truth, it is at least as naked. For I have not with some of our learned moderns disguised my nonsense in Greek, clothed it in algebra, or adorned it with fluxions. You have it ill puris naturalilmsr^'^ He threw off his powerful idea and left other men to realize that he had

l']6 : BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

taken a first step toward a knowledge of the great whirling wind systems now known as cyclones and anticyclones.

In 1744 Franklin, who had begun his correspondence with Cadwallader Golden on the subject of stereotyping, expounded the philosophy as well as the construction of the Pennsylvanian fireplaces, and in a letter to his father and mother answered their questions about various remedies for sickness. During 1745 he discussed with Golden the pores of the skin and the circulation of the blood. Electricity absorbed him in 1746-47, but five days after his first important letter to Gollinson, Franklin wrote with more than usual variety to Jared Eliot, clergyman and physician and farmer in Gonnecticut, soon to become the most widely read colonial writer on agriculture. Franklin told him about oil mills in Pennsylvania, the price of linseed oil, the kind of land used for hemp, and the weather for that summer and the two past; and offered his new opinion about north-east storms. He agreed with Eliot as to the source of most springs, but had another theory concerning springs on the sides of mountains. "Now I mention mountains, it occurs [to me] to tell you that the great Appalachian Mountains, which run from York River, back of these colonies, to the Bay of Mexico, show in many places, near the highest parts of them, strata of sea-shells; in some places the marks of them are in the solid rock. It is certainly the wreck of a world we live on! We have specimens of these sea-shell rocks, broken off near the tops of these mountains, brought and deposited in our Library as curiosities. If you have not seen the like, I'll send you a piece. Farther about mountains (for ideas will string themselves like ropes of onions); when I was once riding in your country, Mr. Walker showed me at a distance the bluff side or end of a mountain which appeared striped from top to bottom, and told me the stone or rock of that mountain was divided by nature into pillars; of this I should be glad to have a particular account from you. I think I was somewhere near New Haven when I saw it."^^ Then Franklin shifted to what seemed to him the bad economics of a law Gonnecticut had just passed to lay a tax on goods imported from neighbouring colonies.