Benjamin Franklin

January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790

Printer, scientist, inventor, and diplomat, and the only person to sign all four documents that created the United States. Perhaps the most versatile of the Founding Fathers.

founding fatherdiplomatinventorscientist

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the tenth and youngest son in a family of seventeen children. His father, a candle and soap maker, could afford only a year or two of schooling, so Franklin educated himself by reading everything he could find. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer, and soon began secretly writing witty letters to James's newspaper under the name of a made-up widow, 'Silence Dogood.' When James discovered his little brother was the author, the two quarreled, and at seventeen Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, arriving in 1723 as a penniless runaway who would one day become the city's most famous citizen. Franklin made his first fortune as a printer. He built the most successful newspaper in the colonies, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and every year from 1732 he published Poor Richard's Almanack, filled with weather predictions, jokes, and pithy sayings like 'early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise' (a proverb he popularized rather than invented). By his early forties, around 1748, he had made enough money to retire from the daily work of printing and spend the rest of his life on science and public service. Even before he was famous, Franklin was quietly rebuilding his city. He organized America's first lending library, its first volunteer fire company, a hospital, and an academy that grew into the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1743 he founded the American Philosophical Society, the country's first learned society. He also improved the colonial postal system and later became the first Postmaster General of the United States. His guiding idea was simple: knowledge and effort should be shared for the common good. It was science that made Franklin world-famous. Fascinated by the mysterious force of electricity, he set out to prove that lightning and the sparks in his laboratory were the same thing. In June 1752 he is said to have flown a kite in a thunderstorm and drawn electric charge from the clouds to a key, though the popular story is exaggerated: the kite was not struck by lightning (which would likely have killed him), and he did not 'discover electricity,' but showed that lightning is electrical. He gave us words we still use, like positive and negative charge, battery, and conductor, and he invented the lightning rod to protect buildings, along with bifocal glasses and an efficient heating stove. Believing his inventions should help everyone, he refused to patent them for profit. Universities gave him honorary degrees, which is why the man with almost no schooling became known as 'Dr. Franklin.' For many years Franklin lived in London representing the colonies, and he considered himself a loyal British subject. In 1766 his calm, brilliant testimony before Parliament helped persuade it to repeal the hated Stamp Act. But in 1774 he was dragged before the king's council and publicly humiliated for an hour while officials jeered, the great insult of his life, and he sailed home a changed man, now convinced America must break free. Back in Philadelphia, Franklin joined the Second Continental Congress and served on the Committee of Five that produced the Declaration of Independence. He is credited with one of its most memorable edits, changing Thomas Jefferson's phrase 'sacred and undeniable' to the ringing 'self-evident.' As the story goes, he warned his fellow signers that 'we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,' though whether he really said it is doubtful. Franklin's greatest service to the Revolution came in France. Sent to win French support, the plain-dressed, fur-capped American became a sensation in glittering Paris, celebrated as the sage who had tamed the lightning. He negotiated the crucial Treaty of Alliance in 1778, which brought French troops, ships, and money that helped win the war, and in 1783 he helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris that ended it and recognized American independence. At 81 he returned to serve as the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where he used his humor and prestige to calm tempers and urge the delegates to compromise; watching the sun carved on Washington's chair as the members signed, he said he was now sure it was 'a rising and not a setting sun.' Franklin's views on slavery changed profoundly over his life. As a young man he enslaved a few people and printed slave-sale advertisements in his newspaper, but in his final years he became president of an antislavery society, and his very last public act was to sign a petition asking Congress to abolish slavery. He died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at age 84, and about 20,000 people, an enormous crowd for the time, turned out for his funeral. Printer, scientist, inventor, and diplomat, Franklin remains the only person to sign all four of the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution.