Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (21 page)

Indeed, it is unreasonable, I think, to believe that Franklin fabricated the June date or other facts of his kite experiment. There is no case of his ever embellishing his scientific achievements, and his description and the account by Priestley contain enough specific color and detail to be convincing. Had he wanted to embellish, Franklin could have claimed that he flew his kite before the French scientists carried out their version of his experiment; instead, he generously admitted that the French scientists were the first to prove his theory. And Franklin’s son, with whom he later had a vicious falling-out, never contradicted the well-told tale of the kite.

So why did he delay reporting what may be his most famous scientific feat? There are many explanations. Franklin almost never printed immediate accounts of his experiments in his newspaper, or elsewhere. He usually waited, as he likely did in this case, to prepare a full account rather than a quick announcement. These often took him a while to write out and then recopy; he did not publicly report his 1748 experiments, for example, until his letter to Collinson in April 1749, and there was a similar delay in conveying his results for the following year.

He also may have feared being ridiculed if his initial findings turned out to be wrong. Priestley, in his history of electricity, cited such worries as being the reason Franklin flew his kite secretly. Indeed, even as the experiments were being carried out that summer, many scientists and commentators, including the Abbé Nollet, were calling them foolish. He thus may have been waiting, as Cohen speculates, to repeat and perfect the experiments. Another possibility, suggested by Van Doren, is that he wanted the revelation to coincide with the publication of the article about lightning rods in his new almanac edition that October.
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Whatever his reason for delaying the report of his experiment, Franklin was prompted that summer to convince the citizens of Philadelphia to erect at least two grounded lightning rods on high buildings, which were apparently the first in the world to be used for protection. That September, he also erected a rod on his own house with an ingenious device to warn of the approaching of a storm. The rod, which he described in a letter to Collinson, was grounded by a wire connected to the pump of a well, but he left a six-inch gap in the wire as it passed by his bedroom door. In the gap were a ball and two bells that would ring when a storm cloud electrified the rod. It was a typical combination of amusement, research, and practicality. He used it to draw charges for his experiments, but the gap was small enough to allow the safe discharge if lightning actually struck. Deborah, however, was less amused. Years later, when Franklin was living in London, he responded to her complaint by instructing her, “if the ringing frightens you,” to close the bell gap with a metal wire so the rod would protect the house silently.

In some circles, especially religious ones, Franklin’s findings stirred controversy. The Abbé Nollet, jealous, continued to denigrate his ideas and claimed that the lightning rod was an offense to God. “He speaks as if he thought it presumption in man to propose guarding himself against the thunders of Heaven!” Franklin wrote a friend. “Surely the thunder of Heaven is no more supernatural than the rain, hail or sunshine of Heaven, against the inconvenience of which we guard by roofs and shades without scruple.”

Most of the world soon agreed, and lightning rods began sprouting across Europe and the colonies. Franklin was suddenly a famous man. Harvard and Yale gave him honorary degrees in the summer of 1753, and London’s Royal Society made him the first person living outside of Britain to receive its prestigious gold Copley Medal. His reply to the Society was typically witty: “I know not whether any of your learned body have attained the ancient boasted art of multiplying gold; but you have certainly found the art of making it infinitely more valuable.”
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In describing to Collinson how metal points draw off electrical charges, Franklin ventured some theories on the underlying physics. But he admitted that he had “some doubts” about these conjectures, and he added his opinion that learning
how
nature acted was more important than knowing the theoretical reasons
why:
“Nor is it much importance to us to know the manner in which nature executes her laws; it is enough if we know the laws themselves. It is 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. It is a pleasure indeed to know them, but we can preserve our china without it.”

This attitude, and his lack of grounding in theoretical math and physics, is why Franklin, ingenious as he was, was no Galileo or Newton. He was a practical experimenter more than a systematic theorist. As with his moral and religious philosophy, Franklin’s scientific work was distinguished less for its abstract theoretical sophistication than for its focus on finding out facts and putting them to use.

Still, we should not minimize the theoretical importance of his discoveries. He was one of the foremost scientists of his age, and he conceived and proved one of the most fundamental concepts about nature: that electricity is a single fluid. “The service which the one-fluid theory has rendered to the science of electricity,” wrote the great nineteenth-century British physicist J. J. Thompson, who discovered the electron 150 years after Franklin’s experiments, “can hardly be overestimated.” He also came up with the distinction between insulators and conductors, the idea of electrical grounding, and the concepts of capacitors and batteries. As Van Doren notes, “He found electricity a curiosity and left it a science.”

Nor should we underestimate the practical significance of proving that lightning, once a deadly mystery, was a form of electricity that could be tamed. Few scientific discoveries have been of such immediate service to humanity. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him the “new Prometheus” for stealing the fire of heaven. He quickly became not only the most celebrated scientist in America and Europe, but also a popular hero. In solving one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, he had conquered one of nature’s most terrifying dangers.

But as much as he loved his scientific pursuits, Franklin felt that they were no more worthy than endeavors in the field of public affairs. Around this time, his friend the politician and naturalist Cadwallader Colden also retired and declared his intention to devote himself full time to “philosophical amusements,” the term used in the eighteenth century for scientific experiments. “Let not your love of philosophical amusements have more than its due weight with you,” Franklin urged in response. “Had Newton been pilot but of a single common ship, the finest of his discoveries would scarce have excused or atoned for his abandoning the helm one hour in time of danger; how much less if she had carried the fate of the Commonwealth.”

So Franklin would soon apply his scientific style of reasoning—experimental, pragmatic—not only to nature but also to public affairs. These political pursuits would be enhanced by the fame he had gained as a scientist. The scientist and statesman would henceforth be interwoven, each strand reinforcing the other, until it could be said of him, in the two-part epigram that the French statesman Turgot composed, “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”
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Philadelphia, 1749–1756

The ingenious lad who did not get to go to Harvard, who skewered that college’s pretensions with ill-disguised envy as a teenage essayist, and whose thirst for knowledge had made him the best self-taught writer and scientist of his times had for years nurtured the dream of starting a college of his own. He had discussed the idea in his Junto back in 1743, and after his retirement he became further motivated by the joy he found in science and reading. So in 1749 he published a pamphlet on “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania” that described, with his usual indulgence in detail, why an academy was needed, what it should teach, and how the funds might be raised.

This was not to be a religiously affiliated, elite bastion like the four colleges (Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, and Princeton) that already existed in the colonies. The focus, as to be expected from Franklin, would be on practical instruction, such as writing, arithmetic, accounting, oratory, history, and business skills, with “regard being had to the several professions for which they are intended.” Earthly virtues should be instilled; students would live “plainly, temperately and frugally” and be “frequently exercised in running, leaping, wrestling and swimming.”

Franklin’s plan was that of an educational reformer taking on the rigid classicists. The new academy should not, he felt, train scholars merely to glorify God or to seek learning for its own sake. Instead, what should be cultivated was “an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, one’s country, friends and family.” That, Franklin declared in conclusion, “should indeed be the great
aim
and
end
of all learning.”

The pamphlet was crammed with footnotes citing ancient scholars and his own experience on everything from swimming to writing style. Like any good Enlightenment thinker, Franklin loved order and precise procedures. He had displayed this penchant by outlining, in the most minute detail imaginable, his rules for running the Junto, Masonic lodge, library, American Philosophical Society, fire corps, constable patrol, and militia. His proposal for the academy was an extreme example, crammed with exhaustive procedures on the best ways to teach everything from pronunciation to military history.

Franklin quickly raised £2,000 in donations (though not the £5,000 he recalled in his autobiography), drew up a constitution that was as detailed as his original proposal, and was elected president of the board. He also happened to be on the board of the Great Hall that had been built for the Rev. Whitefield, which had fallen into disuse as religious revivalism waned. He was thus able to negotiate a deal to have the new academy take over the building, divide it into floors and classrooms, and leave some space available for visiting preachers and a free school for poor children.

The academy opened in January 1751 as the first nonsectarian college in America (by 1791 it came to be known as the University of Pennsylvania). Franklin’s reformist instincts were thwarted at times. Most of the trustees were from the wealthy Anglican establishment, and they voted over his objection to choose as the school’s rector the Latin rather than English master. William Smith, a flighty minister from Scotland whom Franklin had befriended, was made the provost, but he and Franklin soon had a bitter falling-out over politics. Nonetheless, Franklin remained a trustee for the rest of his life and considered the college one of his proudest achievements.
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Soon after the college opened, Franklin moved on to his next project, raising money for a hospital. The public appeal he published in the
Gazette,
which vividly described the moral duty people have to help the sick, contained the typical Franklin ringing refrain: “The good particular men may do separately in relieving the sick is small compared with what they may do collectively.”

Raising money was difficult, so he concocted a clever scheme: he got the Assembly to agree that, if £2,000 could be raised privately, it would be matched by £2,000 from the public purse. The plan, Franklin recalled, gave people “an additional motive to give, since every man’s donation would be doubled.” Political opponents would later criticize Franklin for being too conniving, but he took great joy in this example of his cleverness. “I do not remember any of my political maneuvers the success of which gave me at the time more pleasure, or that in after thinking about it I more easily excused myself for having made use of cunning.”
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By coming up with what is now known as the matching grant, Franklin showed how government and private initiative could be woven together, which remains to this day a very American approach. He believed in volunteerism and limited government, but also that there was a legitimate role for government in fostering the common good. By working through public-private partnerships, he felt, governments could have the best impact while avoiding the imposition of too much authority from above.

There were other streaks of conservatism, albeit what would now be labeled compassionate conservatism, in Franklin’s political style. He believed very much in order, and it would end up taking a lot to radicalize him into an American revolutionary. Though charitable and very much a civic activist, he was wary of the unintended consequences of too much social engineering.

This was reflected in a ruminative letter on human nature he sent to his London friend Peter Collinson. “Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of providence,” Franklin wrote, “we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.” Perhaps even welfare for the poor was an example. He asked whether “the laws peculiar to England which compel the rich to maintain the poor have not given the latter a dependence.” It was “godlike” and laudable, he added, “to relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures,” but might it not in the end “provide encouragements for laziness”? He added a cautionary tale about the New Englanders who decided to get rid of blackbirds that were eating the corn crop. The result was that the worms the blackbirds used to eat proliferated and destroyed the grass and grain crops.

But these were questions more than assertions. In his political philosophy, as in his religion and science, Franklin was generally non-ideological, indeed allergic to anything smacking of dogma. Instead, he was, as in most aspects of his life, interested in finding out what worked. As one writer noted, he exemplified the Enlightenment’s “regard for reason and nature, its social consciousness, its progressivism, its tolerance, its cosmopolitanism, and its bland philanthropy.” He had an empirical temperament that was generally averse to sweeping passions, and he espoused a kindly humanism that emphasized the somewhat sentimental (but still quite real) earthly goal of “doing good” for his fellow man.
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What made him a bit of a rebel, and later much more of one, was his inbred resistance to establishment authority. Not awed by rank, he was eager to avoid importing to America the rigid class structure of England. Instead, even as a retired would-be gentleman, he continued in his writings and letters to extol the diligence of the middling class of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and leather-aprons.

Out of this arose a vision of America as a nation where people, whatever their birth or social class, could rise (as he did) to wealth and status based on their willingness to be industrious and cultivate their virtues. In this regard, his ideal was more egalitarian and democratic than even Thomas Jefferson’s view of a “natural aristocracy,” which sought to pluck selected men with promising “virtues and talents” and groom them to be part of a new leadership elite. Franklin’s own idea was more expansive: he believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and ambition. His proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men.

Franklin’s political attitudes, along with his religious and scientific ones, fit together into a rather coherent outlook. But just as he was not a profound religious or scientific theorist—no Aquinas or Newton—neither was he a profound political philosopher on the order of a Locke or even a Jefferson. His strength as a political thinker, as in other fields, was more practical than abstract.

This was evident in one of his most important political tracts, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” which he wrote in 1751. The abundance of unsettled land in America, he said, led to a faster population growth. This was not a philosophical surmise but an empirical calculation. He observed that the colonists were only half as likely as the English to remain unmarried, that they married younger (around age 20), and that they averaged twice as many children (approximately eight). Thus, he concluded, America’s population would double every twenty years and surpass that of England in one hundred years.

He turned out to be right. America’s population surpassed that of England by 1851, and kept doubling every two decades until the frontier ran out at the end of that century. Adam Smith cited Franklin’s tract in his 1776 classic,
The Wealth of Nations,
and Thomas Malthus, famous for his gloomy views on overpopulation and inevitable poverty, also used Franklin’s calculations.

Franklin, however, was no Malthusian pessimist. He believed that, at least in America, increased productivity would keep ahead of population growth, thus making everyone better off as the country grew. In fact, he predicted (also correctly) that what would restrain America’s population growth in the future was likely to be wealth rather than poverty, because richer people tended to be more “cautious” about getting married and having children.

Franklin’s most influential argument—one that would play a significant role in the struggles ahead—was against the prevailing British mercantilist desire to restrain manufacturing in America. Parliament had just passed a bill prohibiting ironworks in America, and it held fast to an economic system based on using the colonies as a source of raw materials and a market for finished products.

Franklin countered that America’s abundance of open land would preclude the development of a large pool of cheap urban labor. “The danger, therefore, of these colonies interfering with their Mother Country in trades that depend on labor, manufactures, etc., is too remote to require the attention of Great Britain.” Britain would soon be unable to supply all of America’s needs. “Therefore Britain should not too much restrain manufactures in her colonies. A wise and good mother will not do it. To distress is to weaken, and weakening the children weakens the whole family.”
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The seriousness of this tract on imperial affairs was balanced by a satirical one he wrote around the same time. Britain had been expelling convicts to America, which it justified as a way to help the colonies grow. Writing as Americanus in the
Gazette,
Franklin sarcastically noted that “such a tender parental concern in our Mother Country for the welfare of her children calls aloud for the highest returns of gratitude.” So he proposed that America ship a boatload of rattlesnakes back to England. Perhaps the change of climate might tame them, which is what the British had claimed would happen to the convicts. Even if not, the British would get the better deal, “for the rattlesnake gives warning before he attempts his mischief, which the convict does not.”
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One great moral issue historians must wrestle with when assessing America’s Founders is slavery, and Franklin was wrestling with it as well. Slaves made up about 6 percent of Philadelphia’s population at the time, and Franklin had facilitated the buying and selling of them through ads in his newspaper. “A likely Negro woman to be sold. Enquire at the Widow Read’s,” read one such ad on behalf of his mother-in-law. Another offered for sale “a likely young Negro fellow” and ended with the phrase “enquire of the printer hereof.” He personally owned a slave couple, but in 1751 he decided to sell them because, as he told his mother, he did not like having “Negro servants” and he found them uneconomical. Nevertheless, he would later, at times, have a slave as a personal servant.

In “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” he attacked slavery on economic grounds. Comparing the costs and benefits of owning a slave, he concluded that it made no sense. “The introduction of slaves,” he wrote, was one of the things that “diminish a nation.” But he mainly focused on the ill effects to the owners rather than the immorality done to the slaves. “The whites who have slaves, not laboring, are enfeebled,” he said. “Slaves also pejorate the families that use them; white children become proud, disgusted with labor.”

The tract was, in fact, quite prejudiced in places. He decried German immigration, and he urged that America be settled mainly by whites of English descent. “The number of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small,” he wrote. “Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country, for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind.”

As the final sentence indicates, he was beginning to reexamine his “partiality” to his own race. In the first edition of “Observations,” he remarked on “almost every slave being by nature a thief.” When he reprinted it eighteen years later, he changed it to say that they became thieves “from the nature of slavery.” He also omitted the entire section about the desirability of keeping America mainly white.
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