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:
Here’s a good story from the book. Franklin had been asked to publish a “scurrilous and defamatory” article in his newspaper, the
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:
My picture is everywhere, on the lids of snuff boxes, on rings, busts. The numbers sold are incredible. My portrait is a best seller, you have prints, and copies of prints and copies of copies spread everywhere. Your father’s face is now as well known as the man in the moon.
He was also—despite being old, bald, and fat—very popular with the ladies. Although, as a younger man, he did admit to at least one illegitimate child (his son William), he probably wasn’t as much of an old goat as some have painted him. He certainly liked women—and had an uncanny ability to write as though he were one (as his many female pseudonyms show)—though most of his amorous liaisons seem to have been intimate but not sexual friendships, usually with him in the role of mentor. Which isn’t to say he didn’t get up to mischief. At one of the endless parties the French threw for him, a young woman patted his portly belly and remarked, “Dr. Franklin, if this were on a woman, we’d know what to think.” To which he replied, “Half an hour ago, mademoiselle, it was on a woman and now what do you think?” In this vein, when asked by a young male friend for advice in choosing a mistress, Franklin wrote back extolling the virtues of older women. He listed eight good reasons, including:
5. Because… The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.
His final reason was even more to the point: “They are so
Benjamin Franklin—scientist, diplomat, philosopher, inventor, businessman, civic leader, patriot, humorist, revolutionary, and ladies’ man—died in 1790, aged eighty-four. Sixty years earlier he’d written his own immortal epitaph:
The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author.
Half the population of Philadelphia—twenty thousand people—attended his funeral, and his pallbearers included representatives of all the main religious denominations. (Ever the pragmatist, Franklin had been careful to contribute to each of their building funds, including one for a new synagogue.) Few men can honestly say they have left the world a better place. Through the warmth and courage of his character and the deep originality of his mind, Citizen Ben Franklin, the first self-taught American genius, was certainly one of them.
The career of the English doctor Edward Jenner (1749–1823) can’t possibly match Franklin’s for excitement. He spent most of his life working quietly in his home village of Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, but he, too, changed the world beyond all recognition. The two men shared the same sunny outlook and the same voracious enthusiasm for learning and experiment. In Jenner’s case, this led to a discovery that has probably saved more human lives than any other.
The eighth of nine children, he lost both his parents before he was six, but his elder siblings looked after him
