Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (60 page)

The farewells at Passy were dramatic and tearful. “Every day of my life I shall remember that a great man, a sage, has wanted to be my friend,” Madame Brillon wrote after their final meeting. “If it ever pleases you to remember the woman who loved you the most, think of me.”

Madame Helvétius was not to be outdone. “Come back, my dear friend, come back to us,” she wrote in a letter dispatched to catch up with him as he boarded his boat. To each of his friends went a gift that was to become a relic: Cabanis got the hollow cane that magically stilled the waves, the Abbé Morellet a tool chest and armchair, and his landlord Chaumont a table that could be ingeniously raised and lowered. (He also gave Chaumont a bill for the improvements he had made to his apartments, including installing a lightning rod and fixing the chimney “to cure it of its intolerable malady of smoke.”)

To ease his travel to the port of Le Havre, Queen Marie-Antoinette sent her personal enclosed litter borne by surefooted Spanish mules. Her husband, King Louis XVI, sent a miniature portrait of himself surrounded by 408 small diamonds. Franklin also exchanged gifts with Vergennes, who noted to an aide that “the United States will never have a more zealous and more useful servant than M. Franklin.”
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On the day he left Passy, July 12, Benny recorded in his diary, “A mournful silence reigned around him, broken only by a few sobs.” Jefferson had come to see him off, and he later recalled: “The ladies smothered him with embraces, and on his introducing me as his successor, I told him I wished he would transfer these privileges to me, but he answered, ‘You are too young a man.’ ”
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Franklin’s plan was to cross the English Channel and then determine whether he felt he could endure an ocean crossing. If not, he would ferry back to Le Havre, and the Queen’s litter, which waited there for word, would carry him back to Passy.

As usual, however, travel was a tonic rather than travail for Franklin, and he turned out to be the only passenger not to get sick during the rough channel crossing. When they arrived in Southampton, he and his party went to visit a hot saltwater spa where, he noted in his journal, he bathed in the springs “and, floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by my watch, without sinking or turning!”
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There was one last dramatic scene to be played out, one last emotional moment, before he could set sail on his eighth and final crossing of the Atlantic. For four days he stayed at the Star Inn in Southampton, so that he could receive some of his old English friends and bid them a final farewell. Bishop Shipley came, along with his daughter Kitty. So did Benjamin Vaughan, his back-channel missions for Jay and Temple forgiven, who was preparing to publish a new edition of his friend’s writings. There were grand dinners and celebrations, which he described in his journal as “very affectionate.”

But the main person who had come to see him at the Star Inn got only a brusque mention in his journal. “Met my son, who arrived from London the evening before,” Franklin noted. There was no reconciliation, no recorded tears or affection, just a cold negotiation over debts and property.

Franklin had regained full control over Temple by then, and he drove a hard bargain on his grandson’s behalf. He insisted that William sell his New Jersey farm to Temple for less than he had paid, and he applied against the purchase price the decades of debts, carefully recorded, that William still owed him. He also took title to all of William’s land claims in New York. Having taken William’s son from him, he was now extracting his wealth and his connections to America.

This final reunion of three generations of Franklin men, so fraught with father-son tensions, ended so coldly that none of them ever saw fit to discuss it. Franklin’s journal offers not a word of detail, nor is there any record of his ever writing or telling about it. He and his son never corresponded again. William wrote a letter to his half-sister, Sally, four days later, but amazingly, he rambled on about her children and a portrait he was trying to send her without ever describing the climactic scene. The closest he came, at the end of the long letter, was to lament, in discussing how everyone would soon be in Philadelphia, that “my fate has thrown me on a different side of the globe.” Even decades later, after his father and grandfather had both died and he finally got around to producing a collection of his grandfather’s life and works, Temple provided only a desultory and unrevealing phrase noting that at Southampton, Franklin “had the satisfaction of seeing his son, the former Governor of New Jersey.”
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William was not invited to the farewell party aboard his father’s vessel on the evening of July 27. Fully revitalized by travel and showing no remorse over the cool parting with his son, Franklin stayed up with his friends until 4
A.M.
When he awoke late that morning, his friends were gone, his two grandsons were with him, and his ship was already under sail for home.

*This is the rough equivalent of $130 million in purchasing power in 2002 U.S. dollars. In 1780, there were about 23.5 livres to the British pound, and £1 in 1780 had the same purchasing power as £83 in 2002. Although the American Congress had begun issuing paper currency denominated in dollars by 1780, the states continued to issue their own currencies, often in pounds. Rapid changes in the value of all American currencies during the Revolution made them difficult to compare to European currencies. By 1786, an ounce of gold cost $19 or £4.2, making £1 worth $4.52, which became the semiofficial exchange rate in 1790. See page 507 for more currency conversion data.
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Philadelphia, 1785–1790

On this, his final voyage across the ocean, Franklin felt no need to study, or even to mention, the calming effect of oil on troubled waters. Nor, despite his many promises to friends, did he bring himself to work on his memoirs, which he had begun as a letter to the “dear son” he had just forsaken.

Instead, he indulged the passion that both relaxed and invigorated his mind: scientific inquiries awash with experimental details and practical consequences. The result was a forty-page gusher of observations and theories on a wide variety of maritime topics, replete with charts and drawings and data tables. At one point he paused, admitted that “the garrulity of an old man has got hold of me,” and then sailed forth. “I think I might as well now, once and for all, empty my nautical budget.”

That budget was a full one: theories, illustrated with diagrams, on how to design hulls to minimize their resistance to wind as well as water; descriptions of his old experiments, along with proposals for new ones, on the effects of air currents on objects of various shapes; how to rig up sliced playing cards to gauge the effects of wind; how to translate that experiment into one using sails and booms; ways to use pulleys to prevent anchor cables from breaking; an analysis of how ships fill with water after a leak; proposals for compartmentalizing hulls the way the Chinese did; tales from history about endangered ships that sank and those that survived, with speculations as to why; learned comparisons of Eskimo kayaks, Chinese rowboats, Indian canoes, Bermuda sloops, and Pacific island proas; proposals for building water propellers and air propellers; and more, much more, for page after page, diagram after diagram.

He also turned his attention to the Gulf Stream again, this time devising an experiment to test whether it extended to the depths or was more like a warm river flowing near the surface of the ocean. An empty bottle with a cork in its mouth was lowered to thirty-five fathoms, at which point the water pressure pushed the cork in and allowed the bottle to fill. The water gathered from that depth was six degrees cooler than that on the surface. A similar experiment using a keg with two valves found the water on the bottom, even at only eighteen fathoms, to be twelve degrees cooler than the water at the surface. He provided temperature charts and maps, along with the suggestion that a “thermometer may be a useful instrument to a navigator,” that could help captains catch a ride on the Gulf Stream going eastbound and avoid it westbound, thus potentially saving a week or more of travel.
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In addition, Franklin wrote papers, equally long and filled with experimental findings, on how to cure smoky chimneys and how to build better stoves. From a modern vantage these treatises might seem obsessive in their immersion into details, but it must be remembered that they addressed one of the most serious issues of the time: the choking soot that plagued most homes and cities. It was, altogether, his most prodigious scientific outpouring since his electricity experiments of1752. And like those previous studies, the ones he produced during his ocean crossing of 1785 showed his unique appreciation—that of an ingenious man if not a genius—for combining scientific theory, technical invention, clever experiments, and practical utility.
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When Franklin and his two grandchildren arrived at Philadelphia’s Market Street wharf in September 1785, sixty-two years after he had first straggled ashore there as a 17-year-old runaway, “we were received by a crowd of people with huzzas and accompanied with acclamations quite to my door.” Cannons boomed, bells rang, Sally embraced him, and tears ran down Temple’s cheeks. Long worried about the damage the Lees and Adamses may have done to his reputation, Franklin was much relieved. “The affectionate welcome I meet with from my fellow citizens is far beyond my expectation,” he proudly wrote John Jay.
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Gathered around him now at his Market Street home, even more than at Passy, would be that glorious assembly of family both real and adopted he always relished. There was his ever-dutiful daughter, Sally, who would play the role of his housekeeper, and her husband, Richard Bache, never successful but always accommodating. In addition to Benny and Willy, there were now four new Bache children—“four little prattlers who cling about the knees of their grandpapa and afford me great pleasure”—with another soon on the way. And within a year, Polly Stevenson would make good on her promise to come over, along with her three children. “As to my domestic circumstances,” Franklin wrote Bishop Shipley, “they are at present as happy as I could wish them. I am surrounded by my offspring, a dutiful and affectionate daughter in my house, with six grandchildren.”
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Benny enrolled at the Philadelphia Academy his grandfather had founded (by then renamed the University of the State of Pennsylvania), and on his graduation in 1787 became a full-time printer. Franklin was delighted, almost too much so. He built Benny a shop, helped him choose and cast fonts, and suggested books for him to publish. His knack for creating bestsellers like Poor Richard’s almanacs, however, had given way to a desire for more edifying and educational tomes, and Benny eventually began to squirm, just a bit, at his hovering presence. Yet he loyally served as Franklin’s secretary and scrivener.

Temple tried to turn himself into a gentleman farmer on the New Jersey estate that had just been wrested from his father, but he was temperamentally unsuited to caring much about crops and herds. In an ill-conceived attempt to create a showcase chateau, he pestered his French friends to send him specimen deer (American venison he declared tasteless), hunting dogs, and costumes for his workers. After the deer kept dying en route, Temple reverted to his urban dandy ways and spent most of his time on the party circuit in Philadelphia, while his grandfather, the only person to dote on him, continued his futile efforts to win him a ministerial appointment.

Though less mobile than before, Franklin was as clubbable as he had been as a young tradesman, and the few surviving members of his old associations resumed their gatherings, often at his house. There were only four left of the volunteer fire company he founded in 1736, but Franklin dug out his bucket and convened a meeting. The American Philosophical Society, which sometimes held sessions in his dining room, elected Temple a new member in 1786, along with most of the intellectual friends Franklin had made in Europe over the years: le Veillard, la Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, Ingenhousz, and Cabanis. To apply the same earnest curiosity to “the arduous and complicated science of government” that the philosophical society applied to the science of nature, Franklin organized a companion group, the Society for Political Inquiries, whose members included his young activist friends such as Thomas Paine.

Franklin had reached an age when he no longer fretted about squandering his time. For hours on end, he would play cribbage or cards with friends, which caused him, he wrote Polly, to have brief twinges of guilt. “But another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering: ‘You know the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?’ So being easily convinced and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason when it is in favor of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.”
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Finding the well-stocked farmers’ market, which now extended to the third block of Market Street where he lived, an easier source of produce than growing his own, he turned his vegetable patch into a pocket Passy garden with gravel paths, shrubs, and a shady mulberry tree. As one visitor recorded the new domestic scene, “We found him in his garden, sitting up a grassplot, under a very large mulberry tree, with several other gentlemen and two or three ladies…The tea table was spread under the tree, and Mrs. Bache, who is the only daughter of the Doctor, and lives with him, served it out to the company. She had three of her children about her. They seemed to be excessively fond of their grandpapa.”
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It was a lifestyle that kept the gout at bay and, for the time being, his kidney stones from worsening. He suffered pain only when he was walking or “making water,” he wrote Veillard. “As I live temperately, drink no wine, and use daily the exercise of the dumb-bell, I flatter myself that the stone is kept from augmenting so much as it might otherwise do, and that I may still continue to find it tolerable. People who live long, who will drink the cup of life to the very bottom, must expect to meet with some of the usual dregs.”

Twenty-two years earlier, he had personally overseen each detail of the construction of his new house on Market Street, and he even instructed Deborah from afar about the specifics of its decoration and furnishing. But he had lived in it for only brief intervals, and now he found it far too cramped for his extended family, club meetings, and entertaining. It was time, he decided, to embark on a new building spree.

Despite his age, he found the prospect enticing. He took joy in the details of design and craftsmanship, he had a passion for modern improvements and contrivances, and he relished the thrill of construction. As he wrote Veillard, he derived pleasure from overseeing the “bricklayers, carpenters, stone-cutters, painters, glaziers,” whose craft he had first admired as a child in Boston. Plus, he knew that real estate was a good investment; housing values were rising fast, as were rents.
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His plan was to demolish three older houses he owned on Market Street and replace them with two larger ones. He had wooed Deborah in one of them and worked as a fledgling printer in another, but nostalgia was not among his stronger sentiments. He was forced to change his plans, however, by a challenge to their property lines. “My neighbor disputing my bounds, I have been obliged to postpone until that dispute is settled by law,” he wrote his sister Jane in Boston. “In the meantime, the workmen and materials being ready, I have ordered an addition to the house I live in, it being too small for our growing family.”

The new three-story wing, designed to meld seamlessly with the existing house, was thirty-three feet long and sixteen feet wide, which enlarged his space by a third. On the ground floor was a long dining room able to seat twenty-four, and on the third floor were new bedrooms. The finest feature, which connected by a passage to “my best old bedchamber,” was a library that took up the entire second floor. With shelves from floor to ceiling, it accommodated 4,276 volumes, making it what one visitor claimed (with some exaggeration) “the largest and by far the best private library in America.” As he confessed to Jane, “I hardly know how to justify building a library at an age that will soon oblige me to quit it, but we are apt to forget that we are grown old, and building is an amusement.”
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Eventually he was able to build the two new houses as well, one of which became Benny’s printing shop, and he designed an arched passageway between them into the courtyard in front of his own renovated home, which was set back from Market Street. All the new construction allowed him to put into practice the various fire safety ideas he had advocated over the years. None of the wooden beams in one room connected directly to those in another, the floors and stairs were tightly plastered, and a trapdoor opened to the roof so “one may go out and wet the shingles in case of a neighboring fire.” He was satisfied to discover, during the renovation of his main house, that a bolt had melted the tip of its old lightning rod while he was in France, but the house had remained unscathed, “so that at length the invention has been of some use to the inventor.”
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Besides all his books, his new library boasted a variety of scientific paraphernalia, including his electricity equipment and a glass machine that exhibited the flow of blood through the body. For his reading comfort, Franklin built a great armchair set on rockers with an overhead fan that was powered by a foot pedal. Among his musical instruments were an armonica, a harpsichord, a “glassichord” similar to his armonica, a viola, and bells.

From James Watt, the famed Birmingham steam engine maker, he imported, and made some improvements on, the first rudimentary copying machine. Documents would be written with a slow-drying ink made of gum arabic and then pressed on sheets of moist tissue paper to make copies for as long as the ink was still wet, usually a full day. Franklin, who had first used the machine in Passy, liked it so much that he ordered another that he gave to Jefferson.
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Franklin took special pride in one particularly handy invention, a mechanical arm that could retrieve and replace books from upper shelves. He wrote a description of it, filled with drawings and diagrams and instructive tips, that was as detailed as the scientific treatises he had written on his ocean crossing. It was typical of Franklin. Throughout his life, he loved immersing himself in minutiae and trivia in a manner so obsessive that it might today be described as geeky. He was meticulous in describing every technical detail of his inventions, be it the library arm, stove, or lightning rod. In his essays, ranging from his arguments against hereditary honors to his discussions of trade, he provided reams of detailed calculations and historical footnotes. Even in his most humorous parodies, such as his proposal for the study of farts, the cleverness was enhanced by his inclusion of mock-serious facts, trivia, calculations, and learned precedents.
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This penchant was on display in its most charming manner in a long letter he wrote to his young friend Kitty Shipley, daughter of the bishop, on the art of procuring pleasant dreams. It contained all of his theories, some more sound than others, on nutrition, exercise, fresh air, and health. Exercise should precede meals, he advised, not follow them. There should be a constant supply of fresh air in the bedroom; Methuselah, he reminded, always slept outdoors. He propounded a thorough, though not scientifically valid, theory of how air in a stifled room gets saturated and thus prevents people’s pores from expelling “putrid particles.” After a full discourse on the science and pseudo-science, he provided three important ways to avoid unpleasant dreams: