When John Adams wrote that Philadelphia was "the pineal gland of the republic," he may well have had the American Philosophical Society in mind. The APS, the nation's first learned society, began as a selfconsciously colonial enterprise in 1743. It evolved into a place where scientific acumen met political power and where Enlightenment ideals of rational thought exerted influence over the body politic.
A suggestion from the botanist John Bartram that the colonies needed a place for men of curiosity to meet and exchange ideas triggered Benjamin Franklin to form the APS. In his prospectus for the Society, Franklin declared that the colonies had at last reached a level of maturity sufficient to support a leisured, thinking class. As a would-be savant still early in his own maturation, he announced an ambitious Enlightened mission of "promoting useful knowledge." Aspiring artisans, mechanics, and merchants, rather than gentlemen, supplied most of the "virtuosi or ingenious men" who comprised the Society in the colonial era, but its few ardent members soon discovered that too many of their peers were in fact too leisured to bother with serious learning. Within a few years, as Franklin later recalled, the Society went dormant.
The concept of a learned society, however, continued to appeal to Philadelphians interested in social advance or personal prestige, and even after Franklin left for a diplomatic assignment in Britain, others took up the project. By the mid-1760s there were two organizations in the city, aligned loosely with the major political factions, both claiming to be successors to Franklin's initiative. Energized by protonationalist sentiments, the emphatically named American Society appointed the absent Franklin to its presidency (without his knowledge) in 1768, while the more conservative, revived American Philosophical Society boasted members who had actually belonged to its namesake. After a brief but intense contest, the two set aside their differences and merged in January 1769,joined shortly by the Medical Society. In Europe, Franklin abetted the fledgling organization, using his rising reputation in learned circles to forge intellectual ties to themetropole and beyond. The reputation of the Society was further enhanced with the appearance in 1771 of its Transactions, the first scholarly journal printed in North America.
During the Revolution the Society shed most of its Loyalist and pacifist members. The APS reemerged in 1780 and dramatically recast itself in a republican mold. Over a two-year span, a pantheon of Revolutionary heroes were inducted into membership, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Friedrich von Steuben (a general and advisor to Washington), some of whom barely fit the bill as savants. In France, Franklin did his part to reinvigorate the Society, electing a host of major and minor savants (and one woman, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova [1743-1810] of Russia). When he finally returned to Philadelphia in 1785, he completed the bonding of the Society to the republican state by arranging for the new permanent home of the APS to be built on the State House Yard, adjacent to the nation's capitol and Supreme Court. At the crossroads of early national political power, aligned with republican principles and sharing membership liberally with the new government, the APS acted effectively as a national library, academy of sciences, and patent office.
Science came to be fully in service to the state under Thomas Jefferson, who was simultaneously third president of the APS (1797-1814) and the United States. During his tenure, APS members vigorously advocated the improvement of domestic manufactures, publicized and passed judgments on technological innovations, and debated political economy, and the Society offered "premiums" (prizes) to stimulate improvements in navigation, streetlights, stoves, public education, and the preservation of peach trees from rot. The Society also served as a center for discussion of national exploration and expansion. In 1793 Jefferson drew upon the APS to organize a transcontinental scientific expedition under the botanist André Michaux, and ten years later he dusted off these plans as a framework for Lewis and Clark, preserving the records of that expedition in Philosophical Hall. Finally, between 1794 and 1811 the Society was indelibly associated with its tenant, the Philadelphia Museum, the most popular venue in the early Republic. The museum, under the leadership of the portrait artist Charles Willson Peale, presented a unique blend of science, entertainment, and American self-image to a receptive public.
After the federal government relocated to Washington in 1800 and gradually assumed a more active role in promoting industry and internal improvements, the APS lost much of its advisory role. The Society remains an active scholarly organization, however, and still pursues its mission of promoting useful knowledge.