John Mitchinson - The Book of the Dead

Philadelphia was already an interesting place. Named after the Greek for “brotherly love,” unlike most of the Puritan enclaves (such as Boston) it embraced religious toleration. All the Protestant denominations were represented—Moravians, Lutherans, Quakers, Calvinists—and there was even a Jewish community. Franklin, though always a believer, was no sectarian. He approved of the idea that all faiths should be allowed to flourish side by side. In a letter justifying his views to his hard-line Puritan parents he explained: “I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture assures me that at the last day we shall not be examined by what we thought, but what we did.”

As Franklin’s business prospered, he was able to do an astonishing amount. In 1737, at the age of thirty, he was appointed as the city’s postmaster and swiftly transformed the postal service. Along with his colleagues in the Junto, he helped finance America’s first public library, started the first civic fire brigade and fire insurance scheme, opened the first public hospital, improved the city’s street lighting, built pavements, set up a police force, and founded the University of Pennsylvania. Some historians have argued that the close partnership between business, charities, and civic institutions that is still such a feature of American cities today was Franklin’s invention.

It was by no means the only thing he invented. As an eleven-year-old he devised a pair of wooden hand flippers to help him swim faster. They didn’t work particularly well, but he never looked back. He is credited with inventing the lightning conductor; the odometer; the domestic log-burning stove (known still as a Franklin stove today); an extension arm for removing books from high shelves; a twenty-four-hour clock; a phonetic alphabet that did without the letters c, j, q, w, x , and y ; a rocking chair with a built-in fan; the eerie-sounding glass armonica (Mozart and Beethoven both composed pieces for it); bifocal lenses (he asked his optician to saw his existing lenses in two, grind the top halves more thinly, and then set all four pieces back in the frame); and the notion of daylight saving time. He also produced the first flexible urinary catheter in America to help alleviate the agony of his brother John, who suffered from kidney stones. Nothing was beneath his curiosity: He once submitted a paper to the Royal Academy in Brussels recommending the search for a drug “that shall render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies as perfume,” believing this would do more for the common good than the works of Descartes, Aristotle, and Newton put together.

He also made important contributions to science—the most famous being his daringly hands-on demonstration that lightning was electrical. This occurred in 1752, when by flying a silken kite in a storm and touching a key tied to the string, he showed that electricity from the sky could be conducted through his body. Fortunately, the tingling sensation he experienced came from the latent charge in the thunderclouds rather than from a lightning strike on the kite. The latter would have resulted in not so much a tingling sensation as a 200-million-volt instant barbecue—as the Swedish physicist Georg Richmann found out less than a year later. In a fatal echo of Franklin’s experiment, Richmann ran a metal wire from the roof of his house in St. Petersburg. The wire ended with an iron bar hanging above a bowl of water filled with iron filings and a magnetic needle. The plan was to cause an electrical spark between the bar and the filings. According to his assistant, what happened to Richmann was much more dramatic. As he watched, he saw “a Globe of blue and whitish Fire, about four inches Diameter, dart from the Bar against M. Richmann’s Forehead, who fell backwards without the least Outcry. This was succeeded by an Explosion like that of a small Cannon.” Richmann was killed instantly (though the lightning left only a small red mark on his forehead); the assistant had his clothes singed and torn by pieces of burning wire; and the door to the room was ripped off its hinges.

Franklin had other, less perilous, insights. He was puzzled by the fact that mail boats leaving Falmouth in Cornwall took two weeks longer to reach New York than merchant ships leaving from London. To solve the mystery, he took the direct approach and invited his cousin Timothy, a Nantucket whaler captain, to supper. Learning about the fierce ocean current that the whalers and the merchants avoided, but that the mail boats regularly sailed into, Franklin commissioned a group of experienced sailors to map the current and gave it a name: the Gulf Stream. This was typical of Franklin: If he didn’t understand something, he studied it carefully and asked his friends for their advice—an approach Epicurus would have applauded. He wasn’t always right—he called the Gulf Stream a river, which it isn’t—but his instincts were sound. In 1756 his scientific achievements received the highest possible accolade when he became one of the very few Americans to be elected to the Royal Society in London.

When he wasn’t inventing things, making money, or pushing back the frontiers of scientific knowledge, Franklin worked as a diplomat, first in London and then Paris, skillfully negotiating America’s case and ultimately getting the newly independent United States recognized by the world’s two superpowers, France and Great Britain. He is the only one of the Founding Fathers to have signed all three of the key documents: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. His success as both diplomat and businessman was due to the fact that people enjoyed doing business with him. He was charming, witty, and a natural deal maker, always alert to the possibilities of compromise. Crucially, he could laugh at himself, which is one of the reasons his unfinished autobiography is so likable. Describing how, at the age of twenty, he started on “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,” he set about it with scientific rigor, drawing up a list of the thirteen virtues he wanted to acquire (with temperance at the top of the list), quickly deciding he couldn’t manage all at once and so deciding to take on one a week. The account of his struggles—particularly his failures (which, with a dry printer’s wit, he calls errata)—is both very funny and very inspiring: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with jokes.

Here’s a good story from the book. Franklin had been asked to publish a “scurrilous and defamatory” article in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette , but he strongly disagreed with both the tone and the content:

To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a twopenny loaf at the baker’s, and with the water from the pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great-coat, and laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption and abuse of this kind.

It was typical of the man: at once morally admirable, rigorously original, and faintly absurd. And in realizing that he could survive perfectly well living on bread and water and sleeping on the floor, he was a true Epicurean.

But there was to be no “hidden life” for Franklin. In his seventies, as U.S. ambassador to France, though he dressed like a simple backwoodsman in a fur hat and a plain brown suit, there was no escaping the fact he was one of the world’s most famous men. As he wrote to his daughter: