The First American

by H. W. Brands

  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 useful and 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 qu
estion 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.