Benjamin Franklin

American History, Vaccines & Electricity

Born in 1706 Boston to an English candle and soap maker and a Massachusetts woman. Benjamin, their eighth child, was Josiah Franklin's fifteenth child overall, and his tenth and final son. (His father was previously married.) 

Benjamin went to school for only 2 years. His parents wanted him to be a pastor. His father struggled to pay for his schooling causing him to drop out. At 12 he was sold into indentured servitude to pay off his parents’ debt. He was sent to be a servant for his older brother, James who at 21 ran a printing press. They printed newspapers, leaflets, and posters. Benjamin was supposed to work for his older brother for 9 years without any pay until his last year of service.

At 16 Benjamin asked his brother if he could write for the newspaper his brother said no. So, Benjamin adopted the pseudonym of "Silence Dogood", a middle-aged widow. James decided to publish Mrs. Dogood's letters and they became very popular and a subject of conversation around town. Neither James nor the readers were aware of the ruse, and James was unhappy with Ben when he discovered the popular correspondent was his younger brother. 

In 1723, Unhappy with his servitude and disliking his older brother, at 17, Benjamin ran away to Philadelphia and officially was a fugitive since he belonged to his brother and had 4 years of service remaining. He got a job in a printing press and worked his way up.

Deborah Read first laid eyes on Benjamin Franklin the day he arrived in Philadelphia, in October 1723, after running away from a printer’s apprenticeship with his brother in Boston. Fifteen-year-old Deborah, standing at the door of her family’s house on Market Street, laughed at the “awkward ridiculous Appearance” of the bedraggled 17-year-old stranger trudging down the street with a loaf of bread under each arm and his pockets bulging with socks and shirts. But a few weeks later, the stranger became a boarder in the Read home. After six months, he and the young woman were in love.

At age 17 in 1723, Franklin proposed to 15-year-old Deborah Read while a boarder in the Read home. At that time, Read's mother was wary of allowing her young daughter to marry Franklin because of his financial instability. Her own husband had recently died, and she declined Franklin's request to marry her daughter.

At 18, Benjamin’s boss asked him to go to London, England to buy equipment. Benjamin spent a year in London and became acquainted with Enlightenment thinking. While Benjamin was away Deborah married a man named John Rodgers. This proved to be a regrettable decision. Rodgers shortly avoided his debts and prosecution by fleeing to Barbados with her money leaving her behind.

When he came back to Philadelphia he started a club called “Junto” for "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community." The Junto was a discussion group for issues of the day. They pooled their books together into their meeting place and founded the Philadelphia library. Books were expensive back then and they pooled their money together in order to afford them. Eventually the collection became so big that they had to hire the first American librarian.

In 1728, at 22, Franklin set up a printing house; the following year he became the publisher of a newspaper called The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum for agitation about a variety of local reforms and initiatives through printed essays and observations. Over time, they became known as an industrious and intellectual young man, earned him a great deal of social respect.

He learned that a young woman of his acquaintance was pregnant with his child. Franklin agreed to take custody of the baby—a gesture as admirable as it was uncommon—but that decision made his need for a wife urgent and finding one problematic. (Who that woman was and why he couldn’t or wouldn’t marry her remain mysteries to this day.) No desirable young woman with a dowry would want to marry a man with a bastard infant son.

Franklin established a common-law marriage with Read on September 1, 1730. They took in Franklin's recently acknowledged young illegitimate son and raised him in their household. They had two children together. Their son, Francis Folger Franklin, was born in October 1732 and daughter, Sarah "Sally" Franklin, was born in 1743.

Nearly a year passed between his birth and his baptism. More substantive evidence suggests the delay was due to Franklin’s oft-expressed antipathy to organized religion. When Franky was finally baptized, his father just happened to be on an extended trip to New England. It appears that Deborah, tired of arguing with her husband over the need to baptize their son, had it done while he was out of town.

Vaccines

Smallpox was the most feared “distemper” in Colonial America. No one yet understood that it spread when people inhaled an invisible virus. The disease was fatal in more than 30 percent of all cases and even more deadly to children. Survivors were often blind, physically or mentally disabled and horribly disfigured.

In 1730, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette had reported extensively on an outbreak in Boston. But rather than focusing on the devastation caused by the disease, Franklin’s coverage dealt primarily with the success of smallpox inoculation.

The procedure was a precursor to modern-day vaccination. A doctor used a scalpel and a quill to take fluid from smallpox vesicles on the skin of a person in the throes of the disease. He deposited this material in a vial and brought it to the home of the person to be inoculated. There he made a shallow incision in the patient’s arm and deposited material from the vial. Usually, inoculated patients became slightly ill, broke out in a few, smallish pox, and recovered quickly, immune to the disease for the rest of their lives. Occasionally, however, they developed full-blown smallpox or other complications and died.

Franklin’s enthusiasm for smallpox inoculation dated to 1721, when he was a printer’s apprentice to James in Boston. An outbreak in the city that year led to the first widespread inoculation trial in Western medicine—and bitter controversy. Supporters claimed that inoculation was a blessing from God, opponents that it was a curse—reckless, impious and tantamount to attempted murder. Franklin had been obliged to help print attacks against it in his brother’s newspaper, but the procedure’s success won him over. In 1730, when Boston had another outbreak, he used his own newspaper to promote inoculation in Philadelphia because he suspected the disease would spread south.

The Gazette reported that of the “Several Hundreds” of people inoculated in the Boston area that year, “about four” had died. Even with those deaths—which doctors attributed to smallpox contracted before inoculation—the inoculation death rate was negligible compared with the fatality rate from naturally acquired smallpox. 

And when, in February 1731, Philadelphians began coming down with smallpox, Franklin’s backing became even more urgent. “The Practice of Inoculation for the Small-Pox, begins to grow among us,” he wrote the next month, adding that “the first Patient of Note,” a man named “J. Growdon, Esq,” had been inoculated without incident. He was reporting this, he said, “to show how groundless all those extravagant Reports are, that have been spread through the Province to the contrary.” In the next week’s Gazette he plugged inoculation again, excerpting a prominent English scientific journal. he emerged as one of the most outspoken inoculation advocates in the Colonies. 

However, Benjamin and Deborah disagreed over inoculation for their son. If “one parent or near relation is against it,” he noted in 1759, “the other does not chuse to inoculate a child without free consent of all parties, lest in case of a disastrous event, perpetual blame should follow.” Whether he blamed Deborah, or blamed himself for listening to her, the hard feelings relating to the death of their beloved son—“the DELIGHT of all that knew him,” according to the epitaph on his gravestone—appear to have ravaged their relationship. “I long regretted bitterly & still regret that I had not given it [smallpox] to him by Inoculation.” If he regretted not being able to give his son smallpox by inoculation, he would have said so. Clearly Franklin believed he had had a choice and had chosen wrong. A recurring theme was Benjamin’s belief that Deborah was irresponsible. In August 1737, less than a year after Franky’s death, he lashed out at her for mishandling a sale in their store.

At some point in the year after Franky died, Benjamin commissioned a portrait of the boy. Was it an attempt to lift Deborah out of debilitating grief? Given Franklin’s notorious frugality, the commission was an extraordinary indulgence—most tradesmen didn’t have portraits made of themselves, let alone their children. In a sense, though, this was Franklin’s portrait, too: With no likeness of Franky to work from, the artist had Benjamin sit for it.

The final product—which shows Franklin’s adult face atop a boy’s body—is disconcerting, but also moving. Deborah appears to have embraced it. However, Franklin spent only 2 of the next 17 years living with Deborah.

William Franklin

A Loyalist to the king, William Franklin and his father Benjamin eventually broke relations over their differences about the American Revolutionary War, as Benjamin Franklin could never accept William's position. Deposed in 1776 by the revolutionary government of New Jersey, William was placed under house arrest at his home in Perth Amboy for six months. After the Declaration of Independence, William was formally taken into custody by order of the Provincial Congress of New Jersey, an entity which he refused to recognize, regarding it as an "illegal assembly."^[49] He was incarcerated in Connecticut for two years, in Wallingford and Middletown, and after being caught surreptitiously engaging Americans into supporting the Loyalist cause, was held in solitary confinement at Litchfield for eight months. When finally released in a prisoner exchange in 1778, he moved to New York City, which was occupied by the British at the time.^[50]

While in New York City, he became leader of the Board of Associated Loyalists, a quasi-military organization chartered by King George III and headquartered in New York City. They initiated guerrilla forays into New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and New York counties north of the city.^[51] When British troops evacuated from New York, William Franklin left with them and sailed to England. He settled in London, never to return to North America.

 

 

In 1743, Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society to help scientific men discuss their discoveries and theories. He began the electrical research that, along with other scientific inquiries, would occupy him for the rest of his life, in between bouts of politics and moneymaking.

Franklin started exploring the phenomenon of electricity in 1746 when he saw some lectures using static electricity. Franklin proposed that electricity were not different types of "electrical fluid" (as electricity was called then), but the same "fluid" under different pressures. Franklin was the first to label them as positive and negative. In 1748, he constructed a multiple plate capacitor, that he called an "electrical battery".

In pursuit of more pragmatic uses for electricity, remarking that his experiments had heretofore resulted in "Nothing in this Way of Use to Mankind," Franklin planned a practical demonstration. He proposed a dinner party where a turkey was to be killed with electric shock and roasted on an electrical spit. After having prepared several turkeys this way, Franklin noted that "the birds kill'd in this manner eat uncommonly tender." 

To most of Franklin’s contemporaries, electricity was mainly useful for parlor games. Few people at the time anticipated any practical use for electricity. Franklin was among the first to study the phenomenon scientifically.

To be sure, Franklin had a great sense of humor and clearly enjoyed the parlor tricks, and he liked having an audience for his electrical amusements. For instance, in the early summer of 1749, somewhat disappointed at not yet having produced anything of great use to mankind with electricity, Franklin hosted an elaborate electrical barbecue. He killed a turkey by electrical shock, then roasted it using the electrical jack, an electric device he invented that would rotate the turkey as it roasted before a fire, which was kindled by an electrified bottle. Guests drank from electrified glasses that gave them a small shock as they sipped their wine, and were entertained as sparks were sent across the river. Franklin also devised a game called “treason,” which involved an electrified portrait of the king, with a removable gilt crown. The picture was rigged so that anyone who tried to remove the crown while holding the gilt edge of the picture would be shocked.

Franklin recounted that in the process of one of these experiments, he was shocked, resulting in numbness in his arms that persisted for one evening, noting "I am Ashamed to have been Guilty of so Notorious a Blunder."

Franklin briefly investigated electrotherapy, including the use of the electric bath. 1752 he carried out the kite lightning experiment.

Air baths

https://youtu.be/f0oc4gUCOQI

Franklin became involved in Philadelphia politics and rapidly progressed.

On August 10, 1753, Franklin was appointed deputy postmaster-general of British North America. 

In 1751, Franklin and Thomas Bond obtained a charter from the Pennsylvania legislature to establish a hospital. Pennsylvania Hospital was the first hospital in the colonies.^[61] In 1752, Franklin organized the Philadelphia Contributionship, the Colonies' first homeowner's insurance company.

Between 1750 and 1753, Benjamin Franklin and prominent educators created a "new-model" plan or style of American college. They decided the new-model college would focus on the professions, with classes taught in English instead of Latin, have subject matter experts as professors instead of one tutor leading a class for four years, and there would be no religious test for admission. At its first commencement, seven men graduated; six with a Bachelor of Arts and one as Master of Arts. It was later merged with the University of the State of Pennsylvania to become the University of Pennsylvania. The college was to become influential in guiding the founding documents of the United States: in the Continental Congress, for example, over one-third of the college-affiliated men who contributed the Declaration of Independence were affiliated with the college.

In 1753, both Harvard and Yale awarded him honorary master of arts degrees. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University in 1762.

In 1763, soon after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania from England for the first time, the western frontier was engulfed in a bitter war known as Pontiac's Rebellion. The Paxton Boys, a group of settlers convinced that the Pennsylvania government was not doing enough to protect them from American Indian raids, murdered a group of peaceful Susquehannock Indians and marched on Philadelphia. Franklin helped to organize a local militia to defend the capital against the mob. He met with the Paxton leaders and persuaded them to disperse. Franklin wrote a scathing attack against the racial prejudice of the Paxton Boys. "If an Indian injures me", he asked, "does it follow that I may revenge that Injury on all Indians?"

From the mid-1750s to the mid-1770s, Franklin spent much of his time in London. In 1757, he was sent to England by the Pennsylvania Assembly as a colonial agent to protest against the political influence of the Penn family, the proprietors of the colony. While there he stayed for three weeks with David Hume in Edinburgh. Franklin spent two months in German lands in 1766. In 1767, Franklin visited Paris. News of his electrical discoveries was widespread in France. His reputation meant that he was introduced to many influential scientists and politicians, and also to King Louis XV.

While he was in London, he developed a much-improved version of the glass harmonica, in which the glasses rotate on a shaft, with the player's fingers held steady, instead of the other way around. He worked with the London glassblower Charles James to create it, and instruments based on his mechanical version soon found their way to other parts of Europe.  Mozart composed for Franklin's glass harmonica, as did Beethoven.

One line of argument in Parliament was that Americans should pay a share of the costs of the French and Indian War and therefore taxes should be levied on them. Franklin became the American spokesman in highly publicized testimony in Parliament in 1766. He stated that Americans already contributed heavily to the defense of the Empire. He said local governments had raised, outfitted and paid 25,000 soldiers to fight France—as many as Britain itself sent—and spent many millions from American treasuries doing so in the French and Indian War alone.

Deborah Read Franklin died of a stroke on December 14, 1774, while Franklin was on an extended mission to Great Britain; he returned in 1775.^[46]

 In London

Franklin lived in London from 1757 to 1775. He only spent eighteen months back in Philadelphia during that time. In London he spent his time with the fellow intellectuals of the day, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin and others.

Franklin was happily settled in England. As late as the summer of 1768, he wrote in strictest confidence to his son William that “having lived long in England and contracted a friendship and affection for many persons here, it could not but be agreeable to me to remain among them some time longer, if not for the rest of my life.” Yet Franklin was now also troubled by fears for the future relationship of Britain and America. 

In Paris

When 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin boarded the Continental sloop-of-war Reprisal in Philadelphia on October 26, 1776, for a month-long voyage to France, Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army was losing the American Revolutionary War.

The hope and excitement spawned by the Declaration of Independence, announced just four months earlier, with Franklin among the signers, had been replaced by the dread of impending defeat in the face of the overwhelming military power of the British army.

On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Post Office and named Franklin as the first United States Postmaster General. Franklin had been a postmaster for decades and was a natural choice for the position.

At the signing, he is quoted as having replied to a comment by John Hancock that they must all hang together: "Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

In December 1776, Franklin was dispatched to France as commissioner for the United States.  Franklin remained in France until 1785.

Franklin knew his mission was straightforward, if not simple. He would use his intellect, charm, wit, and experience to convince France to join the war on the side of the fledgling United States of America. Franklin’s popularity, persuasive powers, and a key American battlefield victory were crucial factors that led France to join the war in 1778.

Franklin became an abolitionist and freed his two slaves. He eventually became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. O Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their prosperity!

 March 23, 1790, Benjamin Franklin, under the pseudonym of Historicus, responds to a speech given by Georgia Representative James Jackson. This speech mirrored one spoken 100 years prior by the Islamic leader of Algiers Sidi Mehmet Ibrahim. Quoting Ibrahim’s speech showed that Jackson’s views on slavery were immensely similar to that of the Islamic leader. The speech shines light on what are considered to be “positive” aspects of slavery thus including what a slave is supposed to do after they are set free and what they believe the point of slavery is- to convert those in captivity to their preferred religion.

The goal of Franklin in responding to this speech was to mock Ibrahim and Jackson in the ideal that slavery could be considered a “good” thing. Being the President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Franklin was obligied to go against slavery and make others aware that the abolition of it could be possible. His reasoning for not blatantly coming out and saying “slavery is wrong” was to  not dictate anyones ways of thinking  and allow all those who followed to form their own opinions.

It is important to note that this was the last piece of work written by Benjamin Franklin due to his death just three weeks later.

 ^Death

He was aged 84 at the time of his death. His last words were reportedly, "a dying man can do nothing easy", to his daughter after she suggested that he change position in bed and lie on his side so he could breathe more easily. Approximately 20,000 people attended his funeral.

Upon learning of his death, the Constitutional Assembly in Revolutionary France entered into a state of mourning for a period of three days, and memorial services were conducted in honor of Franklin throughout the country.

Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time, or about $125,000 in 2021 dollars^[273]) each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, who admired Franklin greatly, wrote a friendly parody of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack called Fortunate Richard. The main character leaves a smallish amount of money in his will, five lots of 100 livres, to collect interest over one, two, three, four or five full centuries, with the resulting astronomical sums to be spent on impossibly elaborate utopian projects.^[274] Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia.

When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin's Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time; at the end of its first 100 years a portion was allocated to help establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston, and the entire fund was later dedicated to supporting this institute.

A signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, the U.S. Constitution, and the only person to sign all three documents,

 Serial killer?

In London, his house at 36 Craven Street, which is the only surviving former residence of Franklin, was first marked with a blue plaque and has since been opened to the public as the Benjamin Franklin House.^[283] In 1998, workmen restoring the building dug up the remains of six children and four adults hidden below the home. A total of 15 bodies have been recovered.^[284] The Friends of Benjamin Franklin House (the organization responsible for the restoration) note that the bones were likely placed there by William Hewson, who lived in the house for two years and who had built a small anatomy school at the back of the house. They note that while Franklin likely knew what Hewson was doing, he probably did not participate in any dissections because he was much more of a physicist than a medical man.