8
Thomas Penn read Franklin quite differently than James Logan did. “This Association is founded on a contempt to government,” the proprietor declared, “and cannot end in anything but anarchy and confusion.” Penn understood the implications of recent events, even if others did not. Franklin had shown the people they could act independently of government; Penn asked, “Why should they not act against it?” Franklin’s brainchild amounted to a “military commonwealth”; its creation was “little less than treason.” As to its instigator, “He is a dangerous man and I should be very glad he inhabited any other country, as I believe him of a very uneasy spirit.”
James Logan knew Franklin as a neighbor, a friend, a fellow philosopher, a political ally; Thomas Penn knew him solely by reputation. Yet, perhaps because he possessed keener intuition, perhaps because he had more to lose, Penn understood Franklin as Logan did not. Franklin was indeed dangerous—dangerous, that is, to the proprietary prerogatives Penn had inherited and was endeavoring to defend. And Franklin was indeed of an uneasy spirit, unwilling to leave well enough alone, insistent on asking whether well might be better, impatient to make it so.
In certain respects Penn knew Franklin better than Franklin knew himself. Franklin had not set out to undermine authority; he simply wanted to see his city defended. And he had chosen the same devices of voluntarism that had led to the creation of the Junto, the Library Company, the fire brigades, and the Philosophical Society. Yet as Penn recognized, even if Franklin did not, there was an obvious, almost inevitable, progression from acting independently of government to acting against government. Penn was the first defender of the imperial status quo to detect the danger in Franklin’s restless intelligence; he would not be the last.
If Franklin had wanted to challenge authority, he could readily have exploited the favorable notice the Association’s activities brought his way. He did not lack the time, for at the beginning of 1748 he retired from the printing business. David Hall continued to exceed Franklin’s expectations for a foreman, being no less adept at the business side of his work than at the craft of the printer per se. Isaiah Thomas, a fellow printer who knew both men (and who wrote a comprehensive history of printing in America), said of Hall, “Had he not been connected with Franklin he might have been a formidable rival to him.” Franklin thought so too, and determined to keep Hall from becoming a rival by making him a partner.
Besides, Franklin had enough money to allow him and Deborah to live quite comfortably. Wealth still failed to impress him; the purpose of money was to purchase one’s freedom to pursue that which was useful and interesting. Accordingly, he decided sometime about midsummer of 1747 to turn the operation of the shop over to Hall, and on the first of January 1748 the agreement was concluded. For eighteen years the two men would be partners, should they both live that long. Franklin would supply the capital equipment and the inventory on hand; Hall would furnish the talent and diligence necessary to direct day-to-day operations. The two men would share expenses and profits equally. The agreement was essentially exclusive, although somewhat more on Hall’s part than Franklin’s. During the eighteen years of the contract, Hall would not engage in the printing business outside the partnership; Franklin was precluded only from practicing it in Philadelphia without Hall’s leave. (This took account of the partnerships Franklin had planted elsewhere.) Hall was allowed to continue “occasional buying and selling in the stationery and bookselling way,” which he did. At the end of the term of agreement, Hall would have the option of purchasing the equipment at its 1748 value less depreciation for wear and tear.
The partnership started splendidly and thrived with the passing years. “Mr. Hall continues well, and goes on perfectly to my satisfaction,” Franklin wrote William Strahan, Hall’s old employer, two years into the arrangement. Through the mid-1750s Franklin realized more than £650 per year, on average, from what his investment and Hall’s efforts produced. At a time when a royal governor might earn £1,000 per year, this hardly made Franklin the richest man in America—or even Philadelphia, America’s richest city. But it filled all his and Deborah’s material desires. More to the point, it bought him time to pursue those other interests that always enticed him more than the getting of money.
Franklin celebrated retirement by moving his home from Market Street to the quieter environs of Sassafras Street (also called Race Street, according to Philadelphians’ confusing habit of naming certain streets twice). The neighborhood of the market had suited a diligent tradesman who wished, as any diligent tradesman should, to keep an eye on the business; but Franklin’s new condition as silent partner called for a modest distancing from the hurly-burly. He was entering a more contemplative existence; quiet was what he sought.
In the early autumn of the first year of his retirement, he reported his state to Cadwallader Colden. “I am settling my old accounts and hope soon to be quite a master of my own time, and no longer (as the song has it) at every one’s call but my own.” The future held only the pleasantest prospect. “I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give my self, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness, leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy men as are pleased to honour me with their friendship or acquaintance, on such points as may produce something for the common benefit of mankind, uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.”
For a time, events—both those within his control and those beyond—followed Franklin’s script. The most important of either category was the war with France and Spain, which drew to a close in 1748. If Franklin’s efforts in forming the Association had proven more critical to the security of Pennsylvania, perhaps Thomas Penn would have taken less umbrage; but as things happened, the battery below Philadelphia was barely completed, and the militia had hardly started drilling seriously, before hints of peace began wafting across the Atlantic. The hints gained substance during the summer of 1748, and in October the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle officially concluded nearly a decade of conflict.
Franklin later would say that there was never a good war or a bad peace, but in the aftermath of King George’s War he would have had an argument, certainly in New England. Most disappointing—indeed infuriating—was the British restoration of Louisbourg to France. The Americans who captured the fortress, and the much larger number that fought vicariously, could hardly be expected to appreciate that in exchange for Cape Breton Island the British regained Madras in India, lost to the French at an earlier point of this global struggle. Nor did the Americans value the subtle shifts in European power the war produced. As they saw it, they had proved their superiority at arms to British regulars, only to be played fools by the British Crown. If someone had set a spark to this mixture of British arrogance and American resentment, it would have exploded.
Franklin was busy making sparks, but literally rather than figuratively. The return of peace, following his retirement from business, allowed him to indulge his interests, of which the most interesting—to himself and presently to others—was electricity.
It was a stroke of either luck or genius that Franklin latched on to electricity when he did. Arguing for luck was his chance encounter with the subject; for genius, that he quickly appreciated that here was a field where an amateur from the provinces could do work rivaling the bestequipped institutions of Europe. At the mid-mark of the eighteenth century, the science of electricity was in its infancy; indeed, “science” was scarcely the name. Electrical phenomena were still encountered as often in the parlor and on stage as in the laboratory. Traveling “electricians” amazed audiences with demonstrations of this mysterious force. A standard trick involved suspending a boy from the ceiling with numerous silken cords, rubbing his feet with a glass tube, and drawing “electric fire”—that is, sparks—from his face and hands. The court electrician to Louis XV, the Abbé Nollet, once delighted an audience by arranging an electrical discharge through 180 soldiers of the guard who jerked to attention with an alacrity and a simultaneity unachievable by the most demanding drill sergeant. The French king, perhaps indulging an anticlericalism he could not own in public, laughed even louder when Nollet talked seven hundred monks into joining hands along short lengths of iron wire; Nollet connected the clerics to a condenser, which sent them leaping toward their Maker with a shriek.
But no one knew what accounted for such effects, and even the factual basis on which a theory of electricity might be erected was confused and contradictory. The field cried out for an investigator with the time and curiosity to pursue assorted leads down dead ends and live, with the manual dexterity and financial resources to fabricate or purchase necessary apparatus, with the personal connections to keep abreast of others’ work, and with the literary facility to disseminate his own results in a timely and persuasive manner.
When Franklin encountered his first electrical demonstration, he had no idea he fit the job description as well as anyone alive. By his own recollection, in 1746 in Boston he met a “Dr. Spence,” who put on an electric show Franklin found fascinating, if somewhat bumbling. In fact this Spence was probably Archibald Spencer, a native of Scotland who was between jobs as a male midwife and an Anglican clergyman, and the year was 1743. During the next few years Franklin queried Peter Collinson, the Library Company’s agent in London and a man with wide scientific interests and acquaintances, regarding this intriguing subject. Collinson obliged by sending over a glass tube of the sort the electricians employed to create their effects, along with assorted remarks on the current state of the electrical art. “I eagerly seized the opportunity of repeating what I had seen at Boston,” Franklin recalled, “and by much practice acquired great readiness in performing those also which we had an account of from England, adding a number of new ones.”
Soon electricity became his passion. “I was never before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done,” he told Collinson in March 1747. “For what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have, during some months past, had little leisure for any thing else.” It was just at this time that Franklin began negotiating with David Hall about taking over operation of the printing business; if a single influence can be said to have persuaded Franklin to doff his printer’s apron, it was his desire to don the cloak of the electrician.
From this point forward, Franklin reported regularly to Collinson on the progress of experiments conducted by himself and his friends. In one of his first letters he supplied a novel terminology that became standard in analyzing electrical phenomena. Describing a particular apparatus, consisting of bodies labeled A and B, he wrote: “We say B (and other bodies alike circumstanced) are electrised positively; A negatively. Or rather B is electrised plus and A minus.” He also recounted certain improvements in apparatus, for example the substitution of lead granules for water inside the glass vials used to generate electricity (“We find granulated lead better to fill the vial with than water, being easily warmed, and keeping the vial warm and dry in damp air”). He described an electric spider: a mannequin of cork and linen made to jump realistically when charged—“appearing perfectly alive to persons unacquainted.” At a time when other electricians spoke of two different kinds of electricity—vitreous and resinous—Franklin unified the field by positing a single sort and explaining the opposite properties in terms of a surfeit or a deficit (that is, positive condition or negative) of this single electricity, with uncharged objects being in balance.
In his early enthusiasm Franklin occasionally conjectured more than he could prove. After additional experimentation caused him to question one of the assertions of his letters, he wrote Collinson expressing his new reservations. “I have observed a phenomenon or two that I cannot at present account for on the principles laid down in those letters, and am therefore become a little diffident of my hypothesis, and ashamed that I have expressed myself in so positive a manner.” He proceeded to muse on the scientific enterprise. “In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy! If there is no other use discovered of electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain man humble.” He went on to request that Collinson not show his letters to others, or if he must, that he conceal the author’s name.
Collinson had no intention of keeping Franklin’s results confidential. Although a natural historian of some note—he debunked the common notion that swallows hibernated in the mud of streambeds—he in fact served science better as a communicator of other people’s findings. He corresponded fruitfully with John Bartram, Franklin’s botanist friend, and it was Collinson who brought Franklin to the attention of Britain’s electrical experts. In April 1748 he wrote Franklin, regarding his earlier letters, “I have imparted them to the Royal Society, to whom they are very acceptable.”
Franklin found Collinson’s response encouraging. “I am pleased to hear that my electrical experiments were acceptable to the Society,” he declared. Franklin hardly lacked confidence in fields he knew well, but he was the first to acknowledge his novice standing in electricity. Moreover, as one who had been attempting to establish a network of scientific communication in America, he appreciated the importance of word of mouth (or word of post) in keeping up with the latest discoveries. Philadelphia might be the hub of British North America, but it remained an ocean away from the scientific mainstream. Franklin could not help worrying that his best experiments were simply recapitulating work done in Europe, work he had not heard of yet.
But the approbation of the Royal Society, the most distinguished scientific body of its day (rivaled only by the French Academy of Sciences), gave Franklin every reason to carry on. In April 1749 he reported the creation of “what we called an Electrical Battery,” a lead-and-glass arrangement that, once charged, could store electricity for use at will, as well as a “self-moving wheel,” a primitive electric motor. In this and subsequent letters to Collinson, which he now knew were being read by an audience of experts, Franklin adopted a more formal tone than in his previous communications, numbering his paragraphs and leaving out most personal intelligence. But in his final sentences here he could not resist reporting how the electricians of Philadelphia proposed to conclude their current round of experiments:
Chagrinned a little that we have hitherto been able to discover nothing in this way of use to mankind, and the hot weather coming on, when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, ’tis proposed to put an end to them for this season somewhat humourously in a party of pleasure on the banks of the Schuylkill (where spirits are at the same time to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river). A turkey is to be killed for our dinners by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle, when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, France and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery. [A note explained that “an electrified bumper is a small thin glass tumbler, near filled with water and electrified. This when brought to the lips gives a shock, if the party be close shaved and does not breathe on the liquor.”]
Collinson duly delivered this letter to the Royal Society, where it was read aloud at the end of 1749 and assigned for critique to William Watson, a distinguished member and a recent winner of the society’s Copley Medal for his electrical work. Joseph Priestley, who would become a renowned scientist in his own right, and a historian of electricity, characterized Watson as “the most interested and active person in the kingdom in every thing relating to electricity.” When Watson reported back to the society, he described Franklin’s work as “new and very curious” and conceded that he felt himself “not quite master of part of this gentleman’s reasoning.” He did question certain of Franklin’s conclusions and made a few recommendations regarding how such questions might be resolved, yet he was particularly intrigued to know the outcome of one experiment projected in Franklin’s letter but not completed at the time of writing. In the indirect reportage of the society’s secretary, “Mr. Watson would further recommend to our worthy brother Mr. Collinson, in writing to his correspondent Mr. Franklin, to desire to know his success in attempting to kill a turkey by the electrical strokes.”
Franklin’s triumphs in electricity marked the latest installment in a career of self-education that ran back to his eleventh year, when Josiah had pulled him out of school and into the candle shop. In light of the success he had achieved, and was still achieving, Franklin might have been thought an advocate of this method of schooling—or nonschooling. Teach children to read, provide them access to books (as through a library), and thereafter let them teach themselves.
In fact, Franklin’s efforts to educate himself made him an enthusiast of formal education. Like many self-educated people, he was aware of the gaps in his education. He had filled most of them, better than they would have been filled in school. But it had required a great deal of work, more than ought to have been necessary. And it required a sense of discipline, a devotion to learning, and a knack for absorbing information that were not given equally to all. Though he deliberately downplayed it, Franklin understood his own exceptionality; unlike many self-made men, he did not set his own experience as a standard for others.
For some time Franklin pondered how to improve the educational opportunities available to the youth of Philadelphia. In 1743 he went so far as to draft a proposal for an academy, to be headed by Richard Peters, a scholar and Anglican clergyman who at the time happened to be underemployed. Peters approved the idea in principle but had higher ambitions for himself—as it turned out, in the service of the Penn family—and declined Franklin’s offer.
The excitements of the war delayed further consideration of the academy, but in August 1749 Franklin announced he would soon offer a plan to educate the youth of Philadelphia, “free from the extraordinary expence and hazard in sending them abroad for that purpose.” To whet the public appetite for his plan, he reprinted a letter by the younger Pliny extolling education rooted in one’s homeland, received under the watchful and loving gaze of one’s parents. In this letter Pliny proposed a subscription to establish an academy. “You can undertake nothing that will be more advantageous to your children, nor more acceptable to your country,” the great Roman asserted. “They will, by this means, receive their education where they receive their birth, and be accustomed, from their infancy, to inhabit and affect their native soil.”
Having enlisted Pliny on his side, Franklin proceeded to line up several other outstanding men of letters. In October he produced a pamphlet citing Milton, Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Obadiah Walker, and the current chaplain to the Prince of Wales on the benefits accruing to both individuals and society upon the appropriate education of youth and on the optimal method of that education. Franklin noted the common complaint that the present generation did not measure up to the generations that had gone before. He did not deny it, but rather explained it: “The best capacities require cultivation, it being truly with them, as with the best ground, which unless well tilled and sowed with profitable seed, produces only ranker weeds.”
Franklin proposed the establishment of an “Academy for the education of youth.” The academy would be situated in a house in or near the town (“if not in the town, not many miles from it; the situation high and dry, and if it may be, nor far from a river, having a garden, orchard, meadow, and a field or two”). A rector, “a man of good understanding, good morals, diligent and patient, learned in the languages and sciences, and a correct pure speaker and writer of the English tongue,” would oversee the students, who would be taught a wide variety of subjects. “It would be well if they could be taught every thing that is useful, and every thing that is ornamental. But art is long, and their time is short. It is therefore proposed that they learn those things that are likely to be most usefuland most ornamental.”
Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, grammar, literature, history, drawing, handwriting, accounting, geography, morality, logic, natural history, mechanics, and gardening would be suitable subjects for study. Nor should the body be forgotten. “To keep them in health, and to strengthen and render active their bodies,” the young scholars should be “frequently exercised in running, leaping, wrestling, and swimming.” (On his favorite subject of swimming, Franklin quoted Locke quoting the Romans: “Nec literas didicit nec natare,” which, applied to some good-for-nothing soul, meant that he had learned neither to read nor to swim. In an age when surprisingly few persons learned to swim, Franklin added that swimmers freed themselves from the “slavish terrors many of those feel who cannot swim, when they are obliged to be on the water even in crossing a ferry.”) In the same vein, the young scholars at the academy should dine together, “plainly, temperately, and frugally.”
Franklin’s proposal met with general approval, as measured by the nearly £2,000 in subscriptions it elicited within the first two months. A constitution for “the Public Academy in the City of Philadelphia” was drawn up by Franklin and Tench Francis, the attorney general of Pennsylvania. The subscribers selected a board of trustees, with Franklin as board president. In that position he oversaw negotiations leading to the acquisition and conversion of the great hall that had been built for George Whitefield a decade earlier but which had fallen into disrepair with the subsequent decline of religious fervor. Renovating the building required a year; the academy opened at the beginning of 1751.
“Our Academy flourishes beyond expectation,” Franklin wrote a friend that fall. “We have now above 100 scholars, and the number daily increasing. We have excellent masters at present; and as we give pretty good salaries, I hope we shall always be able to procure such.”
At the outset of his planning for the academy Franklin hoped his own son would benefit from it. But the delay in establishing the school, and Billy’s insistence on leaving home, rendered his attendance impossible. At some point, however, he would have to resume his education.
Franklin had blessed Billy’s enlistment as a soldier, but only in preference to his shipping out on a privateer. One campaign might be good for the lad: get him out of the house, let him see something of the world. But as a career option it had serious drawbacks. Colonials in the army were disdained by the socially connected Englishmen who decided promotions. And, of course, a young man might get killed. Franklin had lost one son; he did not want to lose his only other.
Consequently, it was with some dismay that Franklin saw his son take to soldiering with gusto. Six months under military discipline only increased its attractions. “Billy is so fond of military life that he will by no means hear of leaving the army,” Franklin wrote his brother John. The winter of 1746–47 had been such as to discourage most would-be heroes; the projected invasion of Canada never took place, mired in bureaucratic bungling that stranded the soldiers in Albany, where they suffered from bitter weather, wretched rations, and miserable quarters. The ranks dwindled with each passing week as the part-timers deserted and went home.
William Franklin went home, too, in May 1747, but not as a deserter. Instead he was now a captain, charged with tracking down and capturing deserters thought to be in Philadelphia. He carried out his duty with an ardor that astonished his father—and dismayed him the more. When he learned that William was heading back to Albany, Franklin sent Cadwallader Colden a letter: “My son, who will wait upon you with this, is returning to the army, his military inclinations (which I hoped would have been cooled with the last winter) continuing as warm as ever.” For the moment Franklin resigned himself to William’s wishes and sought to help him make his way. He sent to London for some maps that would have military use and asked Colden to do what he could for the boy in Albany, should the forces be stationed there again.
The end of the war terminated, for the time at least, William’s martial ambitions. Franklin wrote to London to cancel the map order; he explained to William Strahan, “It was intended for my son, who was then in the army, and seemed bent on a military life; but as peace cuts off his prospect of advancement in that way, he will apply himself to other business.” The nature of that other business remained to be determined. William joined an expedition to the Ohio Valley to negotiate with the Indians there; upon the journey he kept a log and noted the bright prospects for the region and for those who would claim its lush lands.
William had never shown any more interest in his father’s trade than Franklin had shown in his father’s; this apparently inherited filial aversion was part of what prompted Franklin to turn the printing shop over to David Hall. William manifested somewhat more inclination toward a legal career. Despite Richard Saunders’s repeated jabs at lawyers, Franklin considered the law an honorable enough calling—far preferable to the military. He arranged for William to read law in Philadelphia and asked Strahan to put William’s name down for study at one of the Inns of Court in London.
In February 1750 Franklin responded to William Watson’s query about killing turkeys. “Please to acquaint him that we made several experiments on fowls this winter,” Franklin wrote Collinson. Recounting the details of charging the apparatus, he reported that a full charge sufficed to kill chickens outright. “But the turkeys, though thrown into violent convulsions, and then lying as dead for some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of an hour.” Not to be denied, Franklin linked several electrical jars together, which jointly succeeded. “We killed a turkey with them of about 10 lb. wt. and suppose they would have killed a much larger. I conceit that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.”
In the process of electrocuting birds, Franklin nearly electrocuted himself. The experience was enlightening, if jolting.
I found that a man can without great detriment bear a much greater electrical shock than I imagined. For I inadvertently took the stroke of two of those jars through my arms and body, when they were very near full charged. It seemed an universal blow from head to foot throughout the body, and was followed by a violent quick trembling in the trunk, which gradually wore off in a few seconds. It was some moments before I could collect my thoughts so as to know what was the matter; for I did not see the flash though my eye was on the spot of the prime conductor from whence it struck the back of my hand, nor did I hear the crack though the by-standers say it was a loud one; nor did I particularly feel the stroke on my hand, though I afterwards found it had raised a swelling there the bigness of half a swan shot or pistol bullet. My arms and back of my neck felt somewhat numb the remainder of the evening, and my breastbone was sore for a week after, as if it had been bruised. What the consequence would be, if such a shock were taken through the head, I know not.
Yet he could guess. From time immemorial humans had speculated on the nature and cause of lightning. That it was a form of fire—indeed, the first fire, the fulmen fulminis, as it came to be called—had seemed clear at least since the Greeks sang of Prometheus stealing fire from the heavens. The sulfurous smell that often accompanied lightning reinforced this view. As to the cause of lightning and the accompanying thunder, for long centuries most mortals were willing to account it supernatural. The gods were angry and in their anger hurled thunderbolts at each other or at the earth. The elder Pliny, one of the few ancients to look for a natural explanation, called thunder an “earthquake of the air”—which did not advance the discussion very far, since no one knew what caused earthquakes. The sulfurous smell of lightning reinforced this—spurious—connection, in that sulfurous flames were associated with Hades and the nether regions of the earth.
Not until the early eighteenth century, apparently, did anyone draw a connection between lightning and electrical phenomena. In 1716 Newton described an experiment in which a needle was brought close to a piece of amber that had been rubbed with silk. “The flame putteth me in mind of sheet lightning on a small—how very small—scale,” he wrote. As electrical investigators learned to generate larger charges, and larger sparks, the similarity between the discharges in the heavens and the discharges in the laboratory grew more compelling. By the time Franklin took up the study of electricity, the notion that lightning was electric was commonplace among the cognoscenti.
But plenty of history’s commonplace ideas—from the flatness of the earth to the faster falling of heavy objects—had proven, on closer examination, to be wrong; what remained in the puzzle of the lightning was for the electrical conjecture to be tested. This was precisely what Franklin proposed to do.
In April 1749 Franklin wrote a long letter to John Mitchell, a colleague of Peter Collinson and likewise a fellow of the Royal Society. In this letter he put forward a complex theory of lightning with a fairly simple essence: that particles of water in thunderclouds became electrically charged by their wind-borne jostling, and that lightning was nothing more than the discharge of the pent-up electrical force. This theory supported certain recommendations, which in turn comported with observation. For instance, a person caught out in a thunderstorm ought not to seek shelter beneath a lone tree, for the tree would tend to channel the electrical discharge to the ground—and to whoever happened to be at the base of the tree. “It has been fatal to many,” Franklin noted. The unlucky person caught by the storm should remain in the open for a second reason. “When clothes are wet, if a flash, in its way to the ground, should strike your head, it will run in the water over the surface of your body; whereas if your clothes were dry, it would go through the body. Hence a wet rat can not be killed by the exploding electrical bottle, when a dry rat may.”
Upon their arrival in London, these results won Franklin further praise from the Royal Society. “Your very curious pieces relating to electricity and thundergusts have been read before the Society,” Peter Collinson reported back, “and have been deservedly admired not only for the clear intelligent style but also for the novelty of the subjects.”
Franklin was delighted to hear this, as the piece was his most ambitious venture into the theory of electricity. The encouragement prompted him, during the next few weeks, to offer an exceedingly practical recommendation that followed from his theory. One aspect of the theory involved “points”: sharp metal objects that could draw off electrical charges before they reached alarming levels. “The doctrine of points is very curious,” Franklin told the Royal Society, through Collinson, “and the effects of them are truly wonderful; and from what I have observed on experiments, I am of opinion that houses, ships, and even towns and churches may be effectually secured from the stroke of lightning by their means.” Customarily church spires and weathercocks were topped by round balls of brass or wood; these allowed the charge to build excessively. Let them be replaced by “a rod of iron, 8 or 10 feet in length, sharpened gradually to a point like a needle, and gilt to prevent rusting, or divided into a number of points, which would be better—the electrical fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike…. This may seem whimsical, but let it pass for the present, until I send the experiments at large.”
The experiments were designed to test aspects of Franklin’s theory; the one that proved most important dealt directly with the fundamental question of whether lightning and electricity were the same. “To determine the question, whether the clouds that contain lightning are electrified or not, I would propose an experiment to be tried where it might be done conveniently.” That is:
On the top of some high tower or steeple, place a kind of sentry box big enough to contain a man and an electrical stand. From the middle of the stand let an iron rod rise, and pass bending out of the door, and then upright 20 or 30 feet, pointed very sharp at the end. If the electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a man standing on it when such clouds are passing low, might be electrified, and afford sparks, the rod drawing fire to him from the cloud.
Franklin saw little danger in this test, but for apprehensive persons he suggested that the observer in the box hold a grounded wire by insulated handles; from time to time he could bring the wire close to the iron rod, drawing off any sparks without endangering himself.
By now Franklin was well known among the small community of English electricians; when Collinson published this paper and Franklin’s letters on electricity in 1751, Franklin’s circle of scientific admirers expanded swiftly. The circle encompassed King Louis of France, whose curiosity had progressed beyond dancing guardsmen and leaping monks. The monarch’s interest inspired two intrepid French experimenters, Messieurs d’Alibard and de Lor, to put Franklin’s conjecture to his test. In May 1752 d’Alibard reported just such sparks as Franklin had predicted; a week later de Lor recapitulated the test, with similar results.
Apparently both men eschewed the precautions Franklin prescribed for the faint of heart; by their good luck the storms they encountered were quite mild. At least three English experimenters were similarly fortunate, as, evidently, was an electrician in Berlin. In 1753, however, a Swedish scientist in St. Petersburg, Georg Wilhelm Richmann, suffered a fatal shock while conducting Franklin’s experiment in a more severe storm.
Perhaps ironically, perhaps understandably, Richmann’s death simply enhanced Franklin’s growing fame. It demonstrated, if demonstration were necessary, that electricity was no mere plaything. It underscored the utility, indeed necessity, of Franklin’s lightning rods. And it made Franklin out to be braver, in the pursuit of science, than he actually was.
Yet he was no coward. In June 1752, after the French trials were successfully performed but before the news of them reached America, Franklin himself conducted a variant of his experiment. He would have done so earlier had he not believed that the tower or steeple he spoke of needed to be quite tall—taller than anything in Philadelphia. As it happened, the vestrymen of Christ Church had decided to erect a new steeple; Franklin was waiting for the construction to be completed. (Perhaps with an eye toward asking permission to tempt heaven from the steeple, nonmember Franklin was one of the first contributors to the construction fund. He subsequently managed a lottery to complete the fund-raising.)
Meanwhile, however, he conceived another route to the heart of the storm. Likely recalling the kite he had employed to pull himself across the Mill Pond in Boston, he proposed to fly another, this mounted with a miniature lightning rod. The kite would be made of silk rather than paper. “Silk is fitter to bear the wet and wind of a thunder gust without tearing,” he explained. Hemp twine would run from the kite to the ground. Dry, hemp conducted electricity moderately well; wet, it would “conduct the electric fire freely.” At the ground a large key was to be tied to the twine; this would absorb the electric charge that ran down the string. Lest the kite-flyer—Franklin himself—be jolted, a silk ribbon should be attached to the string at the bottom. This must be kept dry (the kite-flyer would stand in a doorway); if it was, it would insulate the flyer’s hand from the wet twine and key.
Although Franklin could discern no flaws in the design of the experiment, he was insufficiently sure of himself to risk a public demonstration. So he surreptitiously enlisted William as his aide and found a lonely field, with a shed and the requisite doorway, where the two of them might hazard their lives but not their reputations.
Summer brought thunderstorms and the opportunity to test both his theory and his experimental design. A promising storm blew up one afternoon, with thunderheads rising high. Franklin and son launched their kite; it soared toward the base of the cloud. But nothing happened. The key gave no indication of absorbing an electrical charge. Franklin could not understand where he had miscalculated. Joseph Priestley, to whom Franklin related the afternoon’s events, described what happened next:
At length, just as he was beginning to despair of his contrivance, he observed some loose threads of the hempen string to stand erect, and to avoid one another, just as if they had been suspended on a common conductor. Struck with this promising appearance, he immediately presented his knuckle to the key, and (let the reader judge of the exquisite pleasure he must have felt at that moment) the discovery was complete. He perceived a very evident electric spark. Others succeeded, even before the string was wet, so as to put the matter past all dispute, and when the rain had wet the string, he collected electric fire very copiously.
Franklin appreciated the recognition that came with his growing scientific reputation, but there were times when he preferred anonymity. This preference had given birth to Silence Dogood; so also to Martha Careful and Caelia Shortface. None of these worthy women, however, became as famous as Polly Baker, who in the late 1740s embarked on a transatlantic career that for a time outshone Franklin’s own.
Fame came late to Polly Baker. Her early life was obscure and hard—and made harder by what she (and Franklin) judged the unfair and counterproductive laws to which she was compelled to submit. Polly resided in Connecticut, where five times she was haled into court on charges of producing illegitimate offspring. She did not deny the charges but rather clung the evidence, quite literally, to her bosom. Yet having twice paid fines for her transgressions and twice been punished corporally for inability to pay, on the fifth occasion she stood her ground and denounced her accusers and the regime they had sworn to uphold. “Abstracted from the law,” she declared, “I cannot conceive (may it please your Honours) what the nature of my offense is. I have brought five fine children into the world, at the risk of my life; I have maintained them well by my own industry, without burdening the township, and would have done it better if it had not been for the heavy charges and fines I have paid.” Could there truly be any crime in adding to the king’s subjects, in a country that sorely needed new inhabitants? “I should think it praise-worthy, rather than a punishable action.” Polly was neither a home-wrecker nor a despoiler of youth; her liaisons were solely with unmarried men of mature judgment—if less than mature honor. The only complaint the magistrate might have against her was that by failing to marry, she deprived some justice or minister of his wedding fee.
Polly did not condemn marriage; indeed, quite the contrary. “You are pleased to allow I don’t want sense; but I must be stupefied to the last degree not to prefer the honourable state of wedlock to the condition I have lived in. I always was, and still am willing to enter into it; and doubt not my behaving well in it, having all the industry, frugality, fertility [this went without saying] and skill in economy, appertaining to a good wife’s character.” She would have been married these many years had a faithless fiancé not got her—who trusted too readily in his promises—with child, only to abandon her as her belly swelled. Adding inequity to injury, this same fellow went on to a career at law, his reputation none the worse for the wear on hers. Even as Polly spoke, he sat as a distinguished magistrate, a man well known to every member of the present court. “I had hopes he would have appeared this day on the bench, and have endeavoured to moderate the Court in my favour; then I should have scorned to have mentioned it; but I must now complain of it as unjust and unequal.” Yet even so, she forbore to mention his name.
He could walk away from his complicity in what the court insisted on calling her crime; she had to salvage what she could from a ruined reputation and lost hopes of honest matrimony. And still the court insisted on punishing her more. Some argued that she had flouted religion. If true, was not religion able to defend itself? Already she had been excluded from communion. If Heaven were offended, she would suffer eternal fire. “Will not that be sufficient?”
Yet she could not believe Heaven was truly offended. “How can it be believed that Heaven is angry at my having children, when to the little done by me towards it, God has been pleased to add his divine skill and admirable workmanship in the formation of their bodies, and crowned it by furnishing them with rational and immortal souls?” No, she had committed no crime; and if the court insisted on finding crime, let it look to those bachelors who refused to marry, and “by their manner of living leave unproduced (which is little better than murder) hundreds of their posterity to the thousandth generation.” Was this not a greater offense against the public good than hers? “Compel them, then, by law, either to marriage, or to pay double the fine of fornication every year.”
What must poor young women do, who were forbidden by custom to solicit men? The law made no provision to get them husbands yet punished them severely when they attempted to do their duty—“the duty of the first and great command of nature, and of nature’s God: increase and multiply.” Polly Baker, without denying her faults, was not embarrassed to own that she had done her duty in this regard. “For its sake, I have hazarded the loss of the public esteem, and have frequently endured public disgrace and punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble opinion, instead of a whipping, to have a statue erected to my memory.”
Polly Baker had no statues erected to her memory, although her moving plea induced one of the judges in her case to marry her on the morrow of the trial. Instead it was Franklin who received, if not yet statues, other marks of public approbation. Perhaps Franklin felt that acknowledging his hoax—by explaining that Polly Baker was entirely the creation of his mind, a vehicle for complaining about certain of life’s unfairnesses to women—would not go well with the sober mien of science he wished to convey to the Royal Society. Perhaps he simply wished to see how far Polly could travel. In either case he kept his secret, not revealing his authorship of the Polly Baker story till three decades later.
The same English journals—Gentleman’s and London magazines—that carried Polly’s story picked up the French reports of d’Alibard’s and de Lors’s confirmation of Franklin’s design for the electrical experiment. Not long thereafter, the Royal Society read Franklin’s own account of his kite experiment. Shortly after that, the society bestowed on Franklin its Copley Gold Medal for scientific achievement. “Though some others might have begun to entertain suspicions of an analogy between the effects of lightning and electricity,” declared the society’s president in announcing the award, “yet I take Mr. Franklin to be the first who, among other curious discoveries, undertook to shew from experiments, that the former owed its origin entirely to the latter, and who pointed out an easy method, whereby any one might satisfy himself of the truth of the fact which he had so advanced.”
Others in England registered similar sentiments. Even before the lightning experiments succeeded, William Watson described Franklin as “a very able and ingenious man” blessed with “a head to conceive and a hand to carry into execution whatever he thinks may conduce to enlighten the subject matter of which he is treating.” None knew more of electricity than Franklin, Watson told the Royal Society. Joseph Priestley was gathering information for his history of electricity; regarding Franklin’s demonstration of the electrical nature of lightning, he wrote, “Every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure to all my readers.”
The French joined the chorus of praise to the brilliance of the American philosopher. The secretary to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, Abbé Guillaume Mazéas, wrote to the Royal Society describing how “universally admired” the “Philadelphian experiments” were in France. The king himself had expressed a desire to see them performed and had registered “great satisfaction” when they were. Speaking for the French Academy, and evidently for the French Crown, Mazéas declared that Franklin deserved the “esteem of our nation.”
Franklin hardly knew what to make of his international fame. He could not help being impressed with himself; at the same time he tried not to be. He described his ambivalence to Jared Eliot, a friend and fellow philosopher, who had sent him congratulations on the honors coming his way.
The Tatler tells us of a girl who was observed to grow suddenly proud, and none could guess the reason, till it came to be known that she had got on a pair of new silk garters. Lest you should be puzzled to guess the cause when you observe any thing of the kind in me, I think I will not hide my new garters under my petticoats, but take the freedom to show them to you in a paragraph of our friend Collinson’s last letter viz.—but I ought to mortify, and not indulge, this vanity; I will not transcribe the paragraph.—Yet I cannot forbear.
“If any of thy friends (says Peter) should take notice that thy head is held a little higher up than formerly, let them know: when the Grand Monarch of France strictly commands the Abbé Mazéas to write a letter in the politest terms to the Royal Society, to return the King’s thanks and compliments in an express manner to Mr. Franklin of Pennsylvania, for the useful discoveries in Electricity, and application of the pointed rods to prevent the terrible effects of thunderstorms; I say, after all this, is not some allowance to be made if the crest is a little elevated? … I think now I have stuck a feather on thy cap, I may be allowed to conclude in wishing thee long to wear it.”
Franklin closed this letter to Eliot with typical self-deprecation, adding a touch that flattered the recipient as much as the sender:
On reconsidering this paragraph, I fear I have not so much reason to be proud as the girl had, for a feather in the cap is not so useful a thing, or so serviceable to the wearer, as a pair of good silk garters. The pride of man is very differently gratified, and had his Majesty sent me a Marshal’s staff, I think I should scarce have been so proud of it as I am of your esteem.