The Society for Useful Knowledge (25 page)

A separate public notice in the press explained the group's aims: “The Object of their Hopes is to direct the Attention of their Countrymen to the Study of Nature, with a View to multiplying the Advantages that may result from this Source of Improvement.” Such study promised to unlock the colony's untapped potential. “Virginia furnishes a Field both spacious and almost untrodden,” said the anonymous author. “Who can tell what may accrue the Inhabitants from an Acquaintance with the Nature and Effects of the Climates and Soils?”
⁵⁹

A “Friend in Virginia,” meanwhile, pointed out to readers of the
Gazette
that New York, Rhode Island, and other colonies to the north were all flourishing, despite their lack of the natural riches enjoyed by Virginia, on account of the more advanced state of their transportation links, commercial infrastructure, and diversified economies. “Pennsylvania, that is much nearer to us, abounds in towns, villages and a city—indeed, a city (though but of yesterday as to us) that may vie with many in Europe.”
⁶⁰

One month later, the essayist “Academicus” repeated the notion that Virginia offered untold natural riches that needed to be explored and studied.
^c
The writer suggested that by bringing together the colony's resident “Geniuses for their Investigation,” the new Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge might provide “that Intercourse and Association which is necessary to the
Perfection of every Power of Man” and that had been so far sorely lacking in sparsely populated Virginia.
⁶¹
This same lack of anything resembling an urban center in the colony also dictated that the Society's regular meetings be held to coincide with the scheduled sessions of the legislature in the capital Williamsburg—the only sure way to gather Virginia's best-educated and most influential figures in the same place.

As befitted his pen name, Academicus was clearly steeped in the ideas of Francis Bacon, intellectual patron saint of the Royal Society, and he provided his readers with a brief tour of contemporary Western learning to show how the basic sciences supported the more accessible public arts and benefited society as a whole. He was almost certainly familiar with Franklin's original proposal for the American Philosophical Society, by now experiencing its rebirth in Philadelphia, for he repeated many of its arguments in favor of useful knowledge.

And, like the theoreticians of the Royal Society, Academicus touted the valuable contributions to the sciences that may be made by the nonspecialist. “Here then is a Line of Business which private Gentlemen can have no Excuse to decline; for though many may not be Proficients in Natural Philosophy and Mathematics, yet all may make Experiments in Agriculture, without Detriment to the usual Course of their Business.”
⁶²

Over the next several years, the Virginia Society held regular meetings, collected meteorological data and medical accounts of the treatment of victims of lightning strikes, and awarded a gold medal to John Hobday for his revolutionary and economical new threshing machine—the first such American prize for invention. It also forged links with the American Philosophical Society and inducted several of Philadelphia's virtuosi, including Franklin, as members.

But like most of the other local knowledge associations that sprouted up in the late 1760s and early 1770s, it could not weather the approaching conflict with the British, which disrupted all aspects of colonial life. An announcement in the
Virginia Gazette
in May 1777 marked the Society's formal demise after a hiatus of two years, although it suggested, optimistically as it turned out, that a committee of nine members would from time to time collect scientific papers for future publication.
⁶³

The brief tenure of associations such as the Virginia Society and the acute teething problems of the more successful American Philosophical Society belie their broader importance to the colonial movement for useful knowledge. Born
of a combination of scientific curiosity and mounting economic and political necessity, these early societies brought together many of the figures who would play such decisive parts in the independence campaign, the Revolutionary War, and the subsequent creation of the United States.

At the same time, the early societies demonstrated the importance and power of the new colonial knowledge networks that increasingly linked what had once been thirteen disparate settlements into a recognizable whole. Two decades after the defeat of Franklin's proposed Albany Plan of Union, which sought to give concrete expression to the need for collective action, the American colonies were now far more aware of their common interests. But just in case, or so legend tells us, the author of the Albany Plan reminded the other signatories to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 just how much things had changed since then: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”
^d

a
The most recent pair of transits took place in June 2004 and June 2012, with the next cycle due in December 2117 and December 2125.

b
Today's astronomers, armed with telemetry data from space probes, have calculated the mean distance between the earth and the sun, known as the Astronomical Unit, at 92.955 million miles.

c
Guessing the identity—or identities—of the pseudonymous author has become something of an academic parlor game. Among those proposed as the source of at least one of these contributions to the
Virginia Gazette
is Thomas Jefferson. It is likely that multiple authors adopted the popular literary persona of Academicus.

d
This quotation and its attribution to Franklin remain uncertain. Similar words were expressed in a range of eighteenth-century texts, under quite different circumstances. Yet the notion that it issued from Franklin's mouth at the signing of the Declaration refuses to die. This version can be found in Jared Sparks, ed.,
The Works of Benjamin Franklin
(Chicago: Townsend MacCoun, 1882 1: 408.)

By establishing manufactories among us, we erect an additional barrier against the encroachments of tyranny. A people who are entirely dependent upon foreigners for food or clothes, must always be subject to them.
—Benjamin Rush

By the mid-eighteenth century, most of Europe's virtuosi no longer had the inclination or the technical skills to construct the increasingly sophisticated instruments that their investigations demanded, and the fabrication of bespoke apparatus emerged as a distinct, and somewhat less prestigious, vocation.
¹
Such was decidedly not the case in colonial-era America, which lacked the industrial and intellectual base, as well as the Old World class rigidities, to abet such a division of labor.

Unlike their transatlantic brethren, the Americans built their own instruments, trudged through uncharted wilds in search of their own specimens, designed their own fireplaces, and tended their own fields and vineyards, gathering what information they required as they went along. Even Jefferson, one of the great theoreticians of the American republic, preferred to direct his genius toward practical problems: he applied his love for Newton's mathematical innovations to the improvement of the common plow and rigged his own calendrical clock in the foyer of his stately home at Monticello, cutting a hole in the floorboards to allow the apparatus enough range of motion to display all seven days of the week.

Praise from abroad for the recent work surrounding the transit of Venus by Rittenhouse and his colleagues in the Philosophical Society celebrated the Americans as both artisans and scientists, as both practitioners and theoreticians. “There is not another Society in the world,” wrote Rev. William Ludlam, an astronomer at Cambridge University, “that can boast of a member such as
Mr. RITTENHOUSE: theorist enough to encounter the problems of determining (from a few Observations) the Orbit of a Comet; and also mechanic enough to make, with his own hands, an Equal-Altitude Instrument, a Transit-Telescope, and a Timepiece. I wish I was near enough to see his mechanical apparatus. I find he is engaged in making a curious Orrery.”
²

In the wake of the colonists' break with Europe, sealed by the War of Independence, this unity of theory and practice evolved into something of a national principle, one that emphasized the practical demands of the workshop, the powder mill, the battlefield, and the naval yard over the disciplined requirements of the classroom, or the unbending demands of scientific theory. Underpinning this shift was an approach to useful knowledge grounded in the immediate needs of nation building; it prized expediency, utilitarian value, common sense, and human experience over formalized book learning. This new outlook secured for Franklin and the instrument maker Rittenhouse, along with botanist John Bartram, hallowed places in what one intellectual historian has called “an American triumvirate of natural genius.”
³

In their time of extreme peril, the rebellious colonists turned to the mechanic, the artisan, and the skilled professional—in short, to the leather aprons—for practical solutions to pressing military, financial, and political challenges that must surely have seemed overwhelming.
^a
Franklin, that autodidact supreme, now saw his own star rise precipitously. He had recovered much of his reputation among the Americans by deftly reversing himself on the Stamp Act, campaigning against it in the British press and before Parliament, and even winning considerable credit for its eventual repeal. Yet, he had found that he was not wholly welcome on his return to Philadelphia. He remained, it seems, “too much an Englishman.”

Many of his old political allies and intellectual associates were dead, and a new generation of civic and business leaders were in the ascendant. Franklin, radicalized by his experiences in London, found himself out of step with the generally conciliatory opinion that initially prevailed in the province. John Dickinson, the chairman of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Continental Congress, of which Franklin was a member, was an antagonist of long
standing—one who refused to affix one of his rival's protective lightning rods to his house purely out of spite.
⁴

The crisis that followed the opening of outright hostilities suddenly made Franklin, eager as ever to make his mark on events, invaluable. Familiar with the ways of the European courts and a darling of the overseas virtuosi, he was dispatched to France in October 1776 as the closest thing America had to an old diplomatic hand. Once there, he carefully banked on his image as Dr. Franklin, the simple homespun scholar. He adopted as his sartorial trademarks a rough fur hat and bifocals, an invention of his own that the French lovingly mistook for a pair of cracked spectacles that the famously frugal American was loath to replace.
⁵
Franklin's public diplomacy proved highly effective. He first won the backing of the French political and social elite and then that of the more cautious King Louis XVI.

John Adams, newly arrived in Paris to join the diplomatic mission and already fearful that his own contributions to American independence would be overlooked by posterity, later whined to an old friend: “The History of our Revolution will be one continued Lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be
that Dr. Franklin's electrical Rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thenceforward these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislatures, and War
.”
⁶

The frenetic Adams was particularly miffed that his fellow diplomat seemed to do little more than attend long lunches and elaborate soirees with the leading lights of Parisian society. What he had failed to apprehend was the extent to which European adulation for Franklin's scientific reputation, in particular his “taming” of the frightful danger of lightning strikes, made his entreaties for French financial assistance and political support hard to resist. Franklin the colonial scientist made Franklin the colonial diplomat a formidable and successful figure. He was welcomed warmly by the Parisian intellectuals, capped with the great Enlightenment icon Voltaire personally blessing the American's grandson.

Franklin's every move was fawned over by the French press and his likeness was re-created in marble and captured on canvas, silk, and porcelain. He understood instinctively that it was enough to serve as a living representation of the French ideal of republican America—plainspoken, practical, and modest—and then wait for the court to catch up with the general public's enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause.

Whenever possible, Franklin used his years in Paris, amid the press of diplomatic duties and the temptations of the city's social whirl, to limit damage from the war to the cooperative, global pursuit of useful knowledge. Throughout his time in France, from 1776 to 1785, he scrupulously maintained his correspondence with an impressive roster of British and other European scientific figures. Parties on both sides of the conflict generally sought to keep political differences out of their exchanges, but passions at times ran high and old relationships frayed. He even took the extraordinary step of renouncing one of his dearest British colleagues in public only to keep up a friendly, if at times bland, correspondence in private.

Early on, Franklin offered to route the botanist John Bartram's regular shipments of seeds and plants to England, now interdicted by war, through his own hands in Paris.
⁷
And in a grand gesture that did not go unnoticed in the halls of the Royal Society of London, he used his ministerial powers in March 1779 to call on American warships and privateers to grant safe passage to “that most celebrated Navigator and Discoverer Captain [James] Cook,” now due back in England from his third voyage to the Pacific aboard HMS
Resolution
.
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