Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (36 page)

On his last evening at Twyford, the Shipleys had insisted on throwing a birthday party, in absentia, for his Philadelphia grandson, 2-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache. “That he may be as good as his grandfather,” Mrs. Shipley said in her toast. Franklin responded that he hoped that Benny would, in fact, turn out much better. To which Bishop Shipley added, “We will compound the matter and be contented if he should not prove
quite
so good.”
⁶

The odd thing about all this affection for Benny was that Franklin had never met him, nor showed much of an inclination to do so. He had not even met the boy’s father. But at that moment, Richard Bache was arriving in England on a mission to find his famous father-in-law. Bache appeared unannounced on Craven Street, where Mrs. Stevenson joyously greeted him. Franklin, however, had already departed, after little more than a week in London, for another extended vacation.

Traveling with Richard Jackson, Pennsylvania’s other agent in England, Franklin left in late August 1771 for three months in Ireland and Scotland, hoping to see if the relationship those countries were trying to forge within the British Empire might serve as a model for America. There were some promising signs. When they visited the Irish Parliament, Jackson was accorded the right to sit in the chamber because he was a member of England’s Parliament. On seeing the famous Franklin, the Speaker proposed that, because he represented American legislatures, he should be accorded such a privilege as well. “The whole House gave a loud, unanimous Aye,” Franklin reported to Cushing. “I esteemed it a mark of respect for our country.”

On the other hand, much of what he saw in Ireland distressed him. England severely regulated Irish trade, and absentee English landlords exploited Irish tenant farmers. “They live in wretched hovels of mud and straw, are clothed in rags, and subsist chiefly on potatoes,” he noted. His shock at the disparity between rich and poor made him all the more proud that America was building a vibrant middle class. The strength of America, he wrote, was its proud freeholders and tradesmen, who had the right to vote on public affairs and ample opportunity to feed and clothe their families.
⁷

While in Dublin, Franklin happened to run into his nemesis, Lord Hillsborough, whose family estate was in northern Ireland. Surprisingly, Hillsborough insisted that he and Jackson stop by on their way to Scotland. Franklin was conflicted. “As it might afford an opportunity of saying something on American affairs,” he wrote one friend, “I concluded to comply with his invitation.” But he subsequently wrote his son that he had “determined not to go.” As it turned out, Jackson insisted on going, and Franklin could not find another coach so had to follow along.

It was an astonishingly friendly visit. At Hillsborough’s house, Franklin was “detained by a thousand civilities” for almost a week. The minister “seemed attentive to everything that might make my stay in his house agreeable.” That even included “putting his own cloak about my shoulders when I went out, that I might not take cold.”

In discussing Ireland’s poverty, Hillsborough blamed it on England for restraining manufacturing there. Wasn’t the same true, Franklin asked, about England’s policy toward America? To Franklin’s pleasure, Hillsborough responded that “America ought not to be restrained in manufacturing.” He even suggested a subsidy for American silk industries and winemaking. He would be pleased to hear Franklin’s “opinion and advice” on that, as well as on how to form a government for Newfoundland. Would Franklin consider these issues and when he returned to London “favor him with my sentiments?”

“Does not all this seem extraordinary to you?” he wrote his son. In a letter to Thomas Cushing, he suggested there might be a more cynical explanation. Hillsborough’s behavior might be “meant only, by patting and stroking the horse, to make him more patient when the reins are drawn tighter and the spurs set deeper into his sides.” Or, perhaps “he apprehended an approaching storm and was desirous of lessening beforehand the number of enemies he had so imprudently created.”
⁸

Franklin arrived, through storms and floods, in Edinburgh late on a Saturday and spent one night “lodged miserably” at an inn. “But that excellent Christian, David Hume, agreeable to the precepts of the gospel, has received the stranger and I now live with him,” Franklin reported the next day. His old friend Hume had built a new house, and he took pride that the sheep’s head soup made by his cook was the best in Europe. The talk at the table was also enviable: philosophy (Hume had recently befriended Rousseau in Paris), history, and the plight of the American colonies.

After ten days, Franklin traveled west toward Glasgow to see Lord Kames, his other favorite Scottish philosopher. Kames was also a great botanist who cultivated arbors of diverse trees; the ones Franklin planted on his visit are alive today. On his way back to Edinburgh, Franklin stopped at the Carron iron works, where James Watt was developing the steam engine, so that he could continue his study of industrialization. Among the ordnance they saw being cast, some of which would be used against the colonies in a few years, were cannons that weighed up to thirty-two tons.

Back at Hume’s house in Edinburgh, Franklin spent another few days enjoying the intellectual circle there. He met with Adam Smith, who reportedly showed him some early chapters of the
Wealth of Nations
that he was then writing. Perhaps suspecting that they would never see their American friend again, Hume hosted a farewell dinner that included a variety of Franklin’s favorite Scottish academics and writers, including Lord Kames.
⁹

Franklin had planned to stay longer with Hume, but two letters caught up with him while he was there. One was from his son-in-law, Richard Bache. Having missed Franklin in London, he wrote, he had gone to visit his own parents in Preston, a city in the north of England near Manchester. The other was from Polly. “Mr. Bache is at Preston, where he will wait with the pleasing expectation of seeing you on your return. We were all very much pleased with him.” So Franklin hastened his departure for London and decided to visit his new in-law on the way.

Sally Franklin Bache, not surprisingly, was fretting back in Philadelphia about how her husband and father would get along. “If it should not be as cordial as I could wish,” she wrote Richard, “I know when you consider it is my father, your goodness to and affection for me will make you try a little to gain his esteem and friendship.” As it turned out, her fears were unfounded. “I can,” Bache joyously wrote Deborah, “with great satisfaction, tell you that he received me with open arms and with a degree of affection I did not expect.” He was particularly pleased that everyone told him he looked like Franklin, a revelation in those pre-Freudian times that was not seen as a reflection of Sally’s taste in a husband. “I should be glad to be like him in any respect,” Bache enthused.

Indeed, the old charmer wowed everyone in Bache’s family, particularly his mother, Mary Bache, a “stately” and “serious” widow of 68, who had borne twenty children. During the visit, she stayed up until midnight talking to Franklin. A few weeks later, Franklin sent her a thank-you note with some oysters and (his vanity not fully conquered) a portrait of himself. Mrs. Bache carried it back and forth from the parlor to the dining room so she could view it all the time. “It is so like the original you cannot imagine with what pleasure we look at it, as we can perceive in it the likeness of my son as well as yourself.”
¹⁰

Bache traveled back to London with Franklin, stayed with him for a while on Craven Street, and tried hard to please. “His behavior here has been agreeable to me,” Franklin told Deborah. But his affection did not extend to offering Bache the help he sought in winning a public appointment, such as customs inspector. “I am of the opinion that almost any profession a man has been educated in is preferable to an office held…subject to the caprices of superiors.” Instead, he advised Bache to go home, become a merchant “selling only for ready cash,” and to “always be close” to his wife. This advice, it must be remembered, came from a man who had lived across an ocean from his wife for much of fifteen years and had been clinging to his appointment as a royal postmaster.

As for Sally, he advised that she should learn accounting (always a theme) and help her husband out. “In keeping a store, if it be where you dwell, you can be serviceable to him as your mother was to me; for you are not deficient in that capacity, and I hope are not too proud.” The Baches, ever mindful, would end up living in Deborah’s house, opening a store in one of Franklin’s Market Street buildings, and advertising “for cash only” a variety of silks and textiles for sale. When this dry goods shop turned out to be, as Bache complained to Franklin, a “sorry concern,” he converted it to a “wine and grocery business,” which also fared poorly. It was not the status or situation a woman of Sally’s education and Bache’s ambition felt was their due, but they followed Franklin’s injunction to be not too proud.
¹¹

Deborah wrote Franklin so often about their grandson Benny that one can detect a note of caution creeping into his responses: “I can see you are quite in love with him, and your happiness wrapped up in his.” He praised her for not stepping in during an argument when Sally was trying to discipline Benny: “I feared, from your fondness of him, that he would be too much humored, and perhaps spoiled.”

He felt differently, however, about spoiling Polly Stevenson’s new son, William Hewson, who had been born that spring. “Pray let him have everything he likes,” he had written to Polly. “It gives [children] a pleasant air and…the face is ever after the handsomer for it.” In the same letter, he responded sanguinely to Polly’s teasing news that her mother had a new male friend. “I have been used to rivals,” replied Franklin, “and scarce ever had a friend or a mistress in my whole life that other people did not like as well as myself.”

Within two years, Billy Hewson had become Franklin’s surrogate grandson. Responding to yet another letter from his wife describing their own grandson, Franklin wrote: “In return for your history of your
grandson,
I must give you a little of the history of my
godson.
He is now 21 months old, very strong and healthy, begins to speak a little, and even to sing. He was with us a few days last week, grew fond of me, and would not be contented to sit down to breakfast without coming to call Pa.” He did deign to add, however, that watching Billy “makes me long to be at home to play with Ben.”
¹²

When he poured the teaspoon of oil on the pond in Clapham and noted that it spread for a half acre, Franklin had come close to a discovery that would not be made for another century: determining the size of a molecule. If he had taken the volume of the teaspoon of oil (2 cubic centimeters) and divided it by the half-acre area it covered (2,000 square meters), he would have arrived at a ballpark figure (10
^-7
centimeters) for the thickness of an oil molecule. As Charles Tanford noted in his wonderful book,
Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves,
“Franklin had actually correctly determined the scale of magnitude of molecular dimensions, the first person ever to do so, but he did not recognize it.”

Franklin was always better at practical applications than theoretical analysis. Rather than speculate about the size of molecules, he looked for uses for his oil-and-water experiments. Might it be possible to save ships from dangerous waves by dumping oil into the ocean? With three friends from the Royal Academy, he went to Portsmouth to see. “The experiment,” Franklin reported, “had not the success we wished.” The surface ripples were smoothed, but not the force of the underlying surges (another metaphor, perhaps). His report on his failed experiment was deemed useful enough, however, to be published in the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society.
¹³

Throughout his time in England, whenever he could escape the demands of politics, he continued his scientific inquiries. After he wired some lightning rods on St. Paul’s Cathedral, the keepers of the royal munitions asked him to propose ways to protect their buildings from lightning as well. This again embroiled Franklin in a dispute over whether lightning rods should have pointed or rounded tops; Franklin insisted on pointed ones, but (perhaps for political reasons) King George changed them to rounded ones after the American Revolution. Franklin also devised a system of hot-water pipes to keep the House of Commons warm.

Other excursions into science and invention during his years in London included:

• The Cause of Colds:
  Although germs and viruses had yet to be discovered, Franklin was one of the first to argue that colds and flu “may possibly be spread by contagion” rather than cold air. “Traveling in our severe winters, I have often suffered cold sometimes to the extremity only short of freezing, but this did not make me catch cold,” he wrote the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush in 1773. “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms, coaches, etc., and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration.” The best defense was fresh air. Throughout his life, Franklin liked good ventilation and open windows, even in the midst of winter.
  ¹⁴
  
• The Study of Exercise:
  One way to prevent colds, he argued, was regular exercise. The best way to measure exercise, he argued, was not by its duration but “by the degree of warmth it produces in the body.” This was one of the first theories linking exercise to calories of heat. For example, he explained, walking a mile up and down stairs produced five times more body warmth than walking a mile on a level surface. When swinging weights, Franklin calculated that this raised his pulse from 60 to 100 beats per minute. Again, he rightly calculated that body “warmth generally increases with quickness of pulse.”
  ¹⁵
  
• Lead Poisoning:
  As a printer, Franklin had noticed that the handling of hot lead type often caused a stiffness or paralysis. He also noticed that people in certain trades were prone to a severe illness called “dry belly ache.” A friend added a clue by noting that people who drank rum from stills that used metal coils also got the disease. Acting as an epidemiologist, Franklin became one of the first to discover the cause of this malady. “It affects among tradesmen those that use lead, however different their trades, as glazers, type-founders, plumbers, potters, white-lead makers and painters.” He suggested, among other things, that the coils of stills should be made of pure tin, instead of pewter that includes lead.
  ¹⁶
  
• Ships in Canals:
  When visiting Holland, Franklin and his friend Sir John Pringle, president of the Royal Society, were told that ships passing through shallow canals went more slowly than those in deeper canals. This was because, Franklin surmised, each time a boat moved one length of distance, it would have to displace an amount of water equal to the space that her hull took up under the water. That water would then have to pass alongside or underneath the boat. If the passage underneath was constrained by being shallow, more water would have to rush past the sides of the boat, thus slowing her down. Here was a scientific theory that had enormous practical importance. So Franklin reacted accordingly. “I determined to make an experiment of this,” he wrote Pringle. He built a fourteen-foot wooden trough that was six inches wide and deep, and in it he put a little boat that was tugged by a silk thread. The thread was placed over a pulley and pulled by the weight of a small coin. He repeatedly timed how fast the toy boat moved when the water was at various depths. The results showed that it took 20 percent more power or time to move a boat through a shallow canal than a deeper one.
  ¹⁷
  
• The Saltiness of Oceans:
  At the time, the prevailing opinion about why the oceans were salty was that they had originally been filled with fresh water, but over the eons they accumulated the salts and minerals that were dumped into them by rivers. Franklin surmised, in a letter to his brother Peter, that there was just as much evidence for the other hypothesis: “All the water on this globe was originally salt, and the fresh water we find in springs and rivers is the produce of distillation.” As it turns out, Franklin was incorrect in this case. The oceans, over the centuries, have been getting saltier.
  ¹⁸
  
• The Armonica:
  Among the most amusing of his inventions was a musical instrument he called the armonica. It was based on the common practice of bored dinner guests, and some musicians, of producing a resonant tone by moving a wet finger around the rim of a glass. Franklin attended a concert in England of music performed on wineglasses, and in 1761 he perfected the idea by taking thirty-seven glass bowls of different sizes and attaching them to a spindle. He rigged up a foot pedal and flywheel to spin the contraption, which allowed him to produce various tones by pressing on the glass pieces with his wet fingers. In a letter to an Italian electrician, Franklin described the new instrument in minute detail. “It is an instrument,” he said, “that seems peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind.” Franklin’s armonica was quite a rage for a while. Marie Antoinette took lessons on it, Mozart and Beethoven wrote pieces for it, and its haunting tones became popular at weddings. But it tended to produce melancholia, perhaps from lead poisoning, and it eventually went out of fashion.
  ¹⁹