The First American

by H. W. Brands

  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 o
f 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.

  9

  A Taste of Politics

  1751–54

  In the late 1730s, while clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin had often found the proceedings of that body so wearisome that he filled his time with a minor form of arithmetical amusement known as “magic squares.” These arrays of integers, invented in antiquity, contain an equal number of rows and columns, with the property that the sum of the numbers in each row equals the sum for every other row, and also equals the sum for each column and each diagonal. Franklin had encountered magic squares as a boy; now, between his own cleverness and the dullness of the legislative proceedings, he elaborated extensively upon the basic idea. One square of his devising had eight rows

  and eight columns with the defining properties but several others besides. Where the full rows and columns each totaled to 260, the half rows and half columns totaled to half of 260, or 130. Straight and bent diagonals summed to 260, as did truncated bent diagonals of six numbers, conjoined to the numbers in the closest corners. The four corner numbers, added to the four centermost numbers, summed to 260 as well.

  James Logan, learning of Franklin’s interest in magic squares, showed him an old book, written by one Michael Stifelius and published two centuries earlier in Nuremburg, containing a magic square of sixteen rows and sixteen columns. Logan, no mathematician himself, offered that this large magic square must have required enormous effort and time to construct. Franklin—“not wishing to be out-done by Mr. Stifelius,” he later confessed—went home and that very night constructed a square of the same size but considerably greater complexity. Logan was amazed and told Franklin so. Franklin was proud of his work. After Logan wrote Peter Collinson about this unsuspected aspect of Franklin’s genius, and Collinson inquired of Franklin for a sample, Franklin sent along his big square, with the partly jesting but partly serious comment, “I make no question but you will readily allow this square of 16 to be the most magically magical of any magic square ever made by any magician.”

  At the age of thirty, Franklin had found his numbers more compelling than the proceedings of the Assembly; at forty-five his priorities were shifting. Then he had been merely clerk, kept recorder of the sayings and doings of his betters. Now he was one of the most distinguished citizens of Philadelphia—an estimate confirmed by his selection to public office. In 1748 he was elected to the Philadelphia Common Council, in 1749 appointed justice of the peace for the city, in 1751 named city alderman. The first and last posts did not stretch him; in light of his civic activities of twenty years, he hardly noticed he was doing anything new. The post of justice of the peace was another matter, and for one of the few times in his life, he felt himself unequal to a task put before him. “More knowledge of the common law than I possessed was necessary to act in that station with credit,” he related. Consequently he withdrew from the service of the court.

  In the summer of 1751 Franklin was nominated for a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, and elected. He candidly described his feelings at this latest mark of recognition:

  I conceived my becoming a member would enlarge my power of doing good. I would not however insinuate that my ambition was not flattered by all these promotions. It certainly was. For considering my low beginning they were great things to me. And they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous testimonies of
the public’s good opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited.

  No grand design motivated Franklin’s entry into provincial politics; yet it did reflect important aspects of his character and circumstances. Starting with the success of Silence Dogood, Franklin had gradually come to see himself as the most capable individual he knew. The accuracy of this perception was confirmed by his assorted subsequent successes and the honors that came his way. He could look around Philadelphia—at the Junto, the Library Company, the fire companies, the Philosophical Society, the Association, the academy—and recognize his hand in making the city a more civilized place. Current projects included raising money for a hospital (he devised a scheme for what later would be called matching grants) and organizing a fire insurance company. Who had done more—who was doing more—for his adopted home than he?

  Election to the Assembly allowed him to expand the scope of his activities. Though he represented Philadelphia in the legislature, he would be making laws for the whole province. At successive moments of his career, Franklin entered successively larger arenas. Mather’s Boston became too small for him at seventeen; Philadelphia grew too small by forty-five. Pennsylvania was the obvious next venue.

  There was another reason for the timing of his entry into provincial politics. As long as he had been in active business, Franklin felt obliged to observe the first rule of business relations: avoid gratuitous offense to potential customers. Ben Franklin, printer, was a man who generally kept his politics to himself, lest politics interfere with the printing business. With exceptions—his advocacy of paper currency, his defense of Samuel Hemphill—few enough merely to prove the rule, Franklin left political questions to the politicians.

  But as the failure of the politicians to provide for defense during the late war demonstrated, the politicians could not be trusted to accomplish what needed to be done. Franklin knew he could do better; he had shown as much with the Association. His decision to leave the printing business to David Hall and his decision to enter Pennsylvania politics were closely linked. The former made the latter possible; the latter made the former desirable.