Printer, Runaway, Self-Publicist
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the fifteenth child of a candle maker, and left school at ten. Apprenticed to his brother James, a printer, he read voraciously, taught himself prose by imitating essayists, and smuggled his own pieces into his brother's newspaper under the name of a fictional widow, Silence Dogood. At seventeen he broke his indenture and fled to Philadelphia, an act that was illegal and that he described in his autobiography without much penitence. Print gave him everything: the Pennsylvania Gazette, Poor Richard's Almanack, and eventually independence from labor.
He retired from active business at forty-two, wealthy from printing contracts and partnerships, and spent the rest of his life on projects. He founded a subscription library, a fire company, an insurance scheme, a hospital, an academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Philosophical Society. As deputy postmaster general he reorganized colonial mail routes. None of these were solitary works. They came from the Junto, the club of tradesmen he assembled to argue about improvement, and much of Franklin's genius was for making other men's cooperation feel like their own idea.
Lightning and Its Uses
His electrical work was serious science, not tinkering. Working with the Leyden jar, he proposed that electricity was a single fluid that could be positive or negative, coined much of the vocabulary still used, and argued that lightning was the same phenomenon on an enormous scale. He suggested testing it with a pointed rod, and in 1752 the experiment succeeded in France before he described his own kite trial, an account published later by Joseph Priestley and never independently witnessed, which is why historians treat its details with caution.
The practical result was the lightning rod, which he declined to patent, as he declined to patent the efficient stove he designed. Some clergy objected that deflecting God's judgment was impious; Franklin's answer was that rain gutters were no different. The Royal Society gave him its Copley Medal, and European academies made him a member, so that when he arrived in Paris as a diplomat he came as a famous natural philosopher in a fur cap, a costume he chose knowing exactly how Parisians would read it.
Contradictions He Outlived
For most of his adult life Franklin owned enslaved people, printed advertisements for slave sales in his newspaper, and profited from that trade. His views shifted slowly, pushed by visits to schools for Black children and by his own reasoning about human capacity. In 1787 he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and in 1790 he signed a petition asking Congress to end slavery, which was angrily tabled. The record deserves both halves: a man who helped sustain an atrocity and then, late, used his fame against it.
His family life was similarly uneven. He spent years abroad while his wife Deborah managed his affairs in Philadelphia; she died in 1774 without seeing him again. His illegitimate son William became the royal governor of New Jersey, stayed loyal to the Crown, and was never forgiven. Yet in France between 1776 and 1785 Franklin achieved what no other American could, converting celebrity into the alliance and loans that decided the war. At eighty-one he sat in the Constitutional Convention and urged men to doubt their own certainty.
