The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (12 page)

Franklin sent Collinson piecemeal reports of his ideas and his experiments. Because he could not know what European philosophers had already discovered and was never really sure of the significance of his findings, he presented them diffidently. He apologized for the crudity and hastiness of his thoughts and generously urged Collinson to share them with whomever he pleased.

But despite the fact that he was out of touch with the centers of European thought, his ideas were truly original. He concocted for the first time in history what he called an electrical battery for the storing of electrical charges; he created new English words for the new science— conductor, charge, discharge, condense, armature, electrify, and others; he replaced the traditional idea that electricity was of two kinds—vitreous and resinous—with the fact that it was a single “fluid” with positive and negative or plus and minus charges; and he came to understand that the plus and minus charges or states of electrification of bodies must occur in exactly equal amounts—a quantitative principle that is known today as the law of conservation of charge, a principle fundamental to all science.”
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Although he was excited by his findings, he was chagrined that he could not at first discover any practical use for them, and for Franklin, science or philosophy—indeed, every area of thought—had to be useful. Initially the best he could do was to suggest using an electric shock to kill hens and turkeys for eating: it made them unusually tender. The French eventually picked up this technique and, predictably, spent many years trying to use electricity to improve the cooking of food. They even wondered if electricity might not make large animals more tender for eating, but Franklin thought the electrical charge necessary to kill large animals might end up killing the cook instead.
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Many people had guessed that lightning was an electrical phenomenon, but no one had ever set out a method for proving it until Franklin did in 1749.
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Not only did Franklin explain how lightning was generated, he also suggested that points grounded with conducting wires might be attached to houses, ships, and churches in order to draw off the lightning. The Royal Society in London showed little interest in publishing Franklin’s letters in full; in fact, according to Franklin, some members even laughed at some of his findings, probably convinced that no colonist living on the outer edges of Christendom could produce anything worthwhile. Collinson turned them over to a publisher, who in 1751 brought them out in an eighty-six-page book entitled
Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America.
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During the eighteenth century Franklin’s book went through five English editions, three in French, one in Italian, and one in German. Although Franklin became known everywhere, it was the French who were most excited by his theories and who first successfully tested them. (Franklin’s own secret test of his ideas—his famous flying of a kite in a thunderstorm—came in the summer of 1752, after the successful French experiments but before news of them reached America.) Suddenly Franklin was an international celebrity. “All Europe is in Agitation on Verifying Electrical Experiments on points,” Collinson told Franklin in September 1752. “All commends the Thought of the Inventor. More I dare not Saye least I offend Chast Ears.”
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Collinson need not have worried about offending Franklin’s modesty, for Franklin, as he himself admitted, had his share of vanity. He had, of course, so much more ability than others to be vain about, but, knowing the effect on people, he wisely worked hard at restraining his vanity as much as possible. Although he was genuinely surprised by the acclaim he received for his experiments, he certainly welcomed it. He knew that people love to be praised, “tho’,” as he told a friend in 1751, “we are generally Hypocrites in that respect, and pretend to disregard Praise.”
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The praise was extraordinary, to say the least. Franklin began to emerge as a symbol of the primitive New World’s capacity to produce an untutored genius, a standing that he would use to great effectiveness when he later became the United States minister to France. Joseph Priestley declared that Franklin’s discoveries were “the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton.”
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Immanuel Kant went so far as to call Franklin the modern Prometheus who had stolen fire from the heavens.
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Many honors soon followed. In May 1753 Harvard College awarded him an honorary master of arts degree, the first M.A. granted to someone not a member of its faculty. In September 1753 Yale followed with another M.A. degree, and three years later the College of William and Mary did the same. “Thus without studying in any College I came to partake of their Honours.”
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In 1753 the Royal Society awarded him the Sir Godfrey Copley Medal for “his curious experiments and observations on electricity,” and three years later, much to Franklin’s delight, made him a member.
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Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale, wanted Franklin to be honored with a knighthood or some “hereditary Dignity.” Franklin, said Stiles, in one of his typical unctuous outbursts, “the Electrical Philosopher, the American Inventor of the pointed Rods will live for Ages to come.” Even the king of France sent his congratulations.
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He became the premier electrician in a world fascinated by electricians and electricity. He transformed what had been a curious wonder into a science, although he continued to think about science, as almost everyone in the eighteenth century did, in terms of its inventiveness and usefulness. For Franklin, all his discoveries would have meant little without the resultant lightning rod. And others agreed. Even those who did not read his writings or delve into his experiments could understand the significance of the lightning rod for the safety of their homes, churches, or ships.

His name spread widely throughout Europe and not just among the learned few. He became in fact the most famous American in the world.

Yet through all the applause and acclaim Franklin remained skeptical of the fickle world of science and invention. People, he told the South Carolinian physician and scientist John Lining in 1755, did not really admire inventors. Not having any inventive faculty themselves, they could not easily conceive that others may possess it. “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.” Perhaps he was thinking of the reaction of some of his genteel Philadelphia neighbors to his sudden fame—Franklin the printer (a printer!), married to Deborah Read, had become a world-renowned philosopher! Who would have guessed?

Franklin went on to describe the vanity, envy, and jealousy that afflicted the world of science and invention—passions that made it impossible for any inventor to claim much reputation for long. We can scarcely remember who invented spectacles or the compass, he said; even paper and printing, which record everything else, have not been able to preserve with certainty their inventors. Do not wish therefore, he told Lining, for a friend or child to possess any special faculty of invention. “For his attempts to benefit mankind in that way, however well 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.” There was no humor or irony here to deflect the bitterness: Franklin had felt all the envy and ridicule that he spoke of.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC SERVICE

As much as Franklin appreciated the importance of his scientific achievements, science was not what he came to value most. Given the skeptical reactions of some of his Philadelphia neighbors to his scientific experiments, it could never be what he would most prize. At first, he had exulted in the leisure that his retirement from business had given him, even discouraging his friends from promoting his election to the assembly. But he soon had second thoughts. He came to realize that science and philosophy could never take the place of service in government.

Being a public official—that was what counted, that was how the community was best served, that was where true greatness and lasting fame could be best achieved. In 1750 he warned his fellow scientist Cadwallader Colden not to “let your Love of Philosophical Amusements have more than its due Weight with you. Had Newton been Pilot but of a single common Ship, the finest of his discoveries would scarce have excus’d, or atton’d for his abandoning the Helm one Hour in Time of Danger; how much less if she had carried the Fate of the Commonwealth.”
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In other words, the greatest scientist of the age would have had no excuse for not serving the government if the state had needed him.

Franklin thought that the province of Pennsylvania needed him. Pennsylvania, founded in 1681 by William Penn as a refuge for his fellow Quakers, was a fast-growing colony continually beset by factionalism and conflict between its legislature and its Penn family-controlled executive. Its population in 1750 numbered over 120,000, making it the fourth-largest colony after Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland; by 1770 it would be the second largest. The lack of any established church and the Quaker reputation for religious toleration had attracted the most varied mixture of religious groups in all of North America. By midcentury the Quakers had become a minority in their own colony, dipping to just a quarter of the population. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians made up another quarter and the Germans, composed of a wide assortment of religious sects, totaled nearly 40 percent. Favoring the Quaker policies of pacifism, no militia, and low taxes, the Germans tacitly agreed to let a Quaker oligarchy run the assembly. But Indian problems on the frontier, where most of the Scotch-Irish were settled, and the fact that the Penn family, which had converted to Anglicanism, refused to pay what many thought was its fair share of taxes, meant that politics in the colony remained contentious and turbulent.

This was the faction-ridden political mixture that Franklin entered. Following his retirement from business, as he recalled in his
Autobiography,
“the Publick, now considering me as a Man of Leisure, laid hold of me for their Purposes.” Indeed, he said, “Every Part of our Civil Government, and almost at the same time, impos[ed] some Duty on me.”
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As a gentleman, that is, as a man of leisure, he was brought into government. He became a member of the Philadelphia City Council in 1748; he was appointed a justice of the peace in 1749; and in 1751 he became a city alderman and was elected from Philadelphia to be one of the twenty-six members of the very clubby eastern- and Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Assembly.

His “Ambition,” he admitted, was “flatter’d by all these Promotions ... for considering my low Beginnings they were great Things to me. And they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous Testimonies of the public’s good Opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited.” Indeed, Franklin was very proud of his aristocratic sense of obligation to serve the public and of his genteel disdain for electioneering. Like any good eighteenth-century gentleman, he stood, not ran, for office. Campaigning for public office was regarded as vulgar and contemptible. No self-respecting gentleman would engage in it, and certainly not Franklin, whose status as a gentleman was still suspect in the eyes of some. His election to the assembly, he recalled with pride, “was repeated every Year of Ten Years, without my ever asking any Elector for his Vote, or signifying either directly or indirectly any Desire of being chosen.”
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In the legislature he immediately became influential and was at once able to get his son William appointed to succeed him as its clerk. During all those years he had been clerk he had become bored stiff listening to tedious legislative debates in which he could take no part, and he had amused himself by inventing arithmetical games. Now it was different. He was at the center of assembly affairs, and very much in demand. No responsibility was too great or too small for his involvement, and he served on every kind of committee, dealing with both the most prestigious and the most minor matters. His committees drafted messages and responses to the governor, reviewed the history of and need for paper money, investigated the share of expenses borne by the province and the proprietors for Indian expenses, studied official fees, regulated the number of dogs in the city of Philadelphia, and recommended where a bridge across the Schuylkill should be built. Franklin seldom spoke in the assembly, for public speaking was never his strong point. Instead, he worked quietly behind the scenes, bringing people together, shaping opinions, and writing reports. By 1753 he had become the leader of the dominant Quaker party in the assembly, much opposed to the Penn family and the proprietary government.
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Pennsylvania was an unusual colony. Because Charles II had granted William Penn a proprietary charter, the Penn family more or less owned the colony in a quasi-feudal manner. Maryland was also a proprietary colony held by the Baltimore family. These two provinces, together with Connecticut and Rhode Island, which were corporate colonies with separate charters, were the only colonies in British North America not controlled directly by the Crown and whose governors were not royally appointed. The fact that Pennsylvania was not a royal colony eventually became something of an obsession with Franklin.

Well before he became a member of the assembly, Franklin had been concerned with the way the Pennsylvania government had neglected the defense of the colony against America’s French and Indian enemies, largely because of the Quakers’ pacifist principles and their sympathy for the Indians. When the legislature didn’t act to defend the colony in 1747, Franklin almost single-handedly had privately raised 10,000 armed men in the Militia Association and had organized lotteries to raise funds to purchase cannons and to build batteries on the Delaware River.

Obviously these private efforts at raising an army posed a threat to the legitimate government; as soon as the most prominent of the proprietors, Thomas Penn, now living in England, learned of them, he became alarmed. Penn saw Franklin’s formation of the Association as “acting a part little less than Treason.” If the people of Pennsylvania could act “independent of this Government, why should they not Act against it.” The man behind these actions, said Penn, was “a dangerous Man and I should be very Glad he inhabited any other country, as I believe him of a very uneasy Spirit.” But Penn realized that Franklin was “a sort of Tribune of the People,” and as such, at least for the time being, “he must be treated with regard.”
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Thus, even before Franklin had become a member of the assembly, the lifelong enmity between him and Thomas Penn had taken root.