Benjamin Franklin
In 1728, a 22-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote his own epitaph. He pictured his body as the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and its lettering and gilding stripped away. It would lie in the earth as food for worms. The work itself, he insisted, would not be wholly lost. It would appear once more in a new and more perfect edition, "Corrected and Amended By the Author."
He took that promise seriously. Over the decades that followed, Franklin edited newspapers, tested electricity, charted an ocean current and argued before the British Parliament. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris with Britain, and the Constitution. He remains the only person to sign all three.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot summed him up in a line of Latin: "Eripuit fulmen cœlo, mox sceptra tyrannis." It means "He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants." What did Franklin actually do with that lightning? Why did France listen to him? And how do his tidy maxims square with the tangled, sometimes troubling facts of his own household?
Milk Street in Boston, on the 17th of January 1706, is where Benjamin Franklin was born. His father, Josiah, made candles and soap as a tallow chandler and had seventeen children by two wives. Benjamin was the fifteenth child and the tenth and last son. His mother, Abiah, came from Nantucket, where her father Peter Folger worked as a miller and schoolteacher.
Peter Folger had a rebellious streak of his own. As clerk of the court, he was arrested on the 10th of February 1676 and jailed on the 19th because he could not pay bail. He spent more than a year and a half behind bars. One account calls him "the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America."
Money, not talent, cut short Benjamin's schooling. His parents talked of a career in the church, but Josiah could afford only two years of school. Benjamin attended Boston Latin School without graduating, and by ten he was out of the classroom. Voracious reading did the rest. Looking back, he remembered himself as "generally the leader among the boys."
At 12, he became an apprentice to his brother James, a printer who taught him the trade. When Benjamin was 15, James founded The New-England Courant, the third newspaper in Boston. Denied the chance to contribute a letter, Benjamin invented a middle-aged widow named "Silence Dogood." Her letters were printed and became a subject of conversation around town. James was unhappy to learn that the popular correspondent was his younger brother.
In 1722, James spent three weeks in jail for publishing material that embarrassed the governor. Young Franklin took over the paper. He had Mrs. Dogood quote Cato's Letters: "Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom." Soon afterward he left the apprenticeship without his brother's permission, which made him a fugitive.
At 17, he ran away to Philadelphia and drifted through several printing shops without finding much promise. After a few months, Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith persuaded him to sail for London, supposedly to buy equipment for a new newspaper. Keith's promises of backing proved empty. Franklin found work as a typesetter in Smithfield. The shop stood in what is now the Lady Chapel of the Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, then deconsecrated.
In 1726, he returned to Philadelphia with help from Thomas Denham, an English merchant who hired him as a clerk, shopkeeper and bookkeeper. Denham's death would soon send Franklin back to printing.
In 1729, Franklin took over a Philadelphia paper called The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette. Its founder, Samuel Keimer, had filled it with weekly extracts from Chambers's Universal Dictionary. Franklin dropped that routine and renamed it The Pennsylvania Gazette. It became his personal instrument for satire, wit and sheer mischief. The year before, he had opened a printing house in partnership with Hugh Meredith.
The Gazette gave him a platform for local reforms. His essays and his careful image as an industrious, thoughtful young man earned him social respect. Even after he became famous as a scientist and statesman, he often signed his letters "B. Franklin, Printer."
That same year he wrote a series called "The Busy-Body" for his rival Andrew Bradford's American Weekly Mercury, following the Addisonian essay form. Among his invented voices was Cretico, the "sour Philosopher," a caricature of Keimer.
In 1732 came Poor Richard's Almanack, written under the name Richard Saunders. The first issue was for the year 1733. Its style was plain and practical, with a sly, self-deprecating tone. Everyone knew who wrote it, yet the character of Saunders kept denying it. Its adages, such as "A penny saved is twopence dear" and "Fish and visitors stink in three days," are still quoted. The almanac sold about ten thousand copies a year.
Also in 1732, Franklin published Die Philadelphische Zeitung, the first German-language newspaper in America. It folded after one year because four newly founded German papers quickly dominated the market. He kept printing German-language Moravian religious books, and he often stayed at the Moravian Sun Inn when he visited Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Franklin wanted a whole network of papers that would earn money and spread virtue. Starting in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1731, he sponsored two dozen printers in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York, Connecticut and the Caribbean. By 1753, he or his partners published eight of the fifteen English-language newspapers in the colonies. In effect, he had invented the newspaper chain.
The Charleston venture owed its success to a woman. After his second editor died, the widow Elizabeth Timothy took over and made the paper pay, becoming one of the colonial era's first woman printers. Franklin worked closely with her for three decades and then with her son Peter, who took over the South Carolina Gazette in 1746. His Connecticut Gazette, which ran from 1755 to 1768, failed. As the Revolution approached, political strife slowly pulled the network apart.
In 1747, already very wealthy, Franklin stepped back from the shop. His foreman, David Hall, agreed to pay him half the shop's profits for 18 years.
In 1727, at 21, Franklin formed the Junto, a club of artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves and their city. He modeled it on the English coffeehouses that had become centers of Enlightenment talk. Books were rare and expensive, so the members first pooled their own volumes. Franklin then proposed something bolder, a subscription library funded by all of them. He wrote the charter of the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731.
In 1736, he created the Union Fire Company, one of the first volunteer fire brigades in America. That year he also printed new currency for New Jersey, using anti-counterfeiting techniques he had devised. He had argued for paper money since 1729, in A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency. He served as Chief Clerk of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly until 1751. In 1766, he made the case for paper money to the House of Commons.
In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society so that scientific men could share discoveries and theories. That year he also sketched a plan for an academy, but the man he wanted to run it, Rev. Richard Peters, refused. Franklin shelved the idea until 1749, when he printed Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. He was appointed president of the Academy on the 13th of November 1749, and the academy and its charity school opened in 1751.
Franklin, Samuel Johnson of Stratford, Connecticut, and the schoolteacher William Smith then refined the plan into what one contemporary called a "new-model" college. At a meeting in Stratford in June 1753, they settled the principles. The college would train students for the professions and teach in English instead of Latin. It would use subject experts as professors, not a single tutor, and impose no religious test for admission. Johnson founded King's College in New York in 1754, now Columbia University. Franklin hired Smith as provost of the College of Philadelphia, which opened in 1755. Seven men graduated at its first commencement on the 17th of May 1757. It later merged into the University of Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, in 1751, Franklin and Thomas Bond won a charter for Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital in the colonies. In 1752, he organized the Philadelphia Contributionship, the colonies' first homeowner's insurance company.
Defense also fell to him. During King George's War, the city's legislators refused to fortify Philadelphia, so Franklin raised a militia called the Association for General Defense. It raised money for earthworks and artillery, including the 50-gun "Grand Battery." In 1756, he organized the Pennsylvania Militia and used Tun Tavern as a place to recruit soldiers against the Native American uprisings.
In 1754, he led the Pennsylvania delegation to the Albany Congress. The Board of Trade in England had called it to improve relations with the Indians and defense against the French. Franklin proposed a broad Plan of Union for the colonies. It was not adopted, but parts of it later turned up in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
Archibald Spencer, an itinerant lecturer who used static electricity in his shows, set Franklin on the path to electrical research in the 1740s. Franklin proposed that the "vitreous" and "resinous" kinds of electrical fluid were really one fluid under different pressures. William Watson made the same proposal independently that year. Franklin was the first to call the two kinds positive and negative, and the first to discover the conservation of charge. In 1748, he built a multiple plate capacitor from eleven panes of glass sandwiched between lead plates, which he called an "electrical battery."
In the spring of 1749, he felt "chagrin'd a little" that his experiments had produced "Nothing in this Way of Use to Mankind." So he planned a dinner party. A turkey would be killed by electric shock and roasted on an electrical spit. After preparing several birds, he noted that "the birds kill'd in this manner eat uncommonly tender." In one such experiment, two Leyden jars shocked him and left his arms numb for an evening. He wrote, "I am Ashamed to have been Guilty of so Notorious a Blunder." The Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal in 1753 and made him a fellow in 1756. One franklin, the unit of electric charge, equals one statcoulomb.
On the 10th of May 1752, Thomas-François Dalibard in France carried out Franklin's proposed test of whether lightning is electrical. He used a 40-foot iron rod and drew sparks from a cloud. Franklin may have flown his kite in Philadelphia on the 15th of June 1752. His account in The Pennsylvania Gazette on the 19th of October 1752 never says he did it himself. He stood on an insulator and kept dry under a roof. Georg Wilhelm Richmann in Russia was electrocuted during similar experiments within months. The popular picture of a kite waiting to be struck is wrong, because that would have been dangerous. The kite only collected charge from a storm cloud.
The same research led to the lightning rod. Franklin believed sharp points could drain a cloud's charge silently. He proposed iron rods "made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting," with a wire running down the building into the ground. Rods went up on the Academy of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania State House in 1752. He never patented his inventions. In his autobiography he wrote that since we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should freely serve others with ours.
His curiosity ranged far beyond electricity. In 1768 in London, a complaint from the Colonial Board of Customs puzzled him. Mail packets from Falmouth took weeks longer to reach New York than merchant ships took to reach Newport. His cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaler captain, explained that merchant ships avoided a strong eastbound current. The mail packets sailed straight into it and fought an adverse flow of 3 mph. Franklin charted it and named it the Gulf Stream. His chart, published in England in 1770, was ignored. Everyone assumed the original was lost until the oceanographer Phil Richardson found it in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1980. Once British captains heeded the advice, they trimmed two weeks from their crossings. Matthew Fontaine Maury noted in 1853 that the current itself had been known in the 16th century.
Franklin's Maritime Observations, published in 1786, offered ideas for sea anchors, catamaran hulls, watertight compartments and a soup bowl that stayed steady in rough weather. He also noticed that a ship's wake calmed when cooks dumped greasy water overboard. At Clapham Common, he dropped a teaspoon of oil on a pond and saw an instant calm across several square yards. Later he carried oil in the hollow joint of his cane.
In 1758, he and John Hadley kept wetting the bulb of a mercury thermometer with ether in Cambridge, England, and fanned it with bellows. The reading sank to 7 F while the room stayed at 65 F. Franklin wrote that "One may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer's day." In 1761, he described to Mary Stevenson how dark cloth laid on snow sank deepest, because it absorbed more heat.
He also studied people in bulk. In 1751, he drafted Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, which was printed anonymously in Boston four years later. He calculated that America's population was doubling every 20 years and would pass England's within a century. The work influenced Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It also alarmed British leaders, who grew readier to restrain the colonial economy.
In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, he gave the earliest known description of the pro and con list. He divided a sheet of paper into two columns, added hints over three or four days, and struck out reasons that balanced each other. After the Icelandic volcano Laki erupted in 1783, he linked it to the harsh European winter of 1784. By then he was living in France.
On the 10th of August 1753, Franklin was named deputy postmaster-general of British North America, alongside William Hunter. He reorganized the accounting and sped up delivery between Philadelphia, New York and Boston. On the 9th of December 1755, he opened the first post office in Halifax to offer regular monthly mail. By 1761, the colonial post office was turning its first profits. After Britain took New France in 1763, he expanded service between Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Quebec City and New York.
He oversaw all this largely from England. In 1757, the Pennsylvania Assembly sent him to London to challenge the Penn family, the colony's proprietors. They could overturn the Assembly's laws and avoided taxes on their land. He stayed five years and failed, lacking influential allies in Whitehall. Back home, he was elected Speaker in May 1764. Then he called for royal government in place of proprietors, a rare misjudgment, and lost his seat in October 1764.
The Assembly sent him back to England, where the Stamp Act of 1765 changed his mission. He could not stop it, and he recommended his friend John Hughes as stamp distributor for Pennsylvania. Furious Pennsylvanians, thinking he had backed the law, threatened to destroy his house. After learning how fierce colonial resistance was, he testified before the House of Commons in 1766. He said local governments had raised, outfitted and paid 25,000 soldiers against France, as many as Britain sent. The Act was repealed, and Franklin became the leading American voice in England. Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts also named him their agent.
Between 1757 and 1775, his London home was a house on Craven Street, just off the Strand. His landlady, Margaret Stevenson, became a close friend, as did her daughter Mary, known as Polly. The house is now the Benjamin Franklin House museum. He also joined a club of radical Whigs, whom he called "the honest Whigs," including the minister Richard Price.
From London he traveled widely. In 1771, he visited Joseph Priestley at Leeds, Thomas Percival at Manchester and Erasmus Darwin at Lichfield. In Scotland, he stayed three weeks with David Hume in Edinburgh. Of his earlier 1759 visit, he wrote of "six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life." In Dublin, the Irish Parliament invited him to sit among its members, an honor no American had received before. The poverty he saw in Ireland frightened him, because the same trade laws governed the colonies.
In 1772, he obtained private letters from Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, the governor and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Bay. The letters showed they had urged the Crown to crack down on Bostonians. He sent them across the Atlantic, and the Boston Gazette published them in mid-June 1773. Britain began to see Franklin as a troublemaker. In 1773, he also published two satires. One was "Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One." The other was "An Edict by the King of Prussia." On the 29th of January 1774, Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn ridiculed and humiliated him before the Privy Council. Two days later, on the 31st, he was removed from his postal post.
On the 26th of July 1775, the Second Continental Congress created the United States Post Office and named him the first postmaster general. His former apprentice, William Goddard, felt the job should have been his own, but he gracefully conceded it to Franklin, 36 years his senior. Franklin made him Surveyor of the Posts.
In 1723-17-year-old Franklin proposed to 15-year-old Deborah Read while boarding in her family's home. Her widowed mother refused, wary of his shaky finances and his trip to London. When his letters stopped, the family took his silence as a broken promise. On the 5th of August 1725, Deborah married a potter named John Rogers, who soon fled to Barbados with her dowry. Because his fate was unknown, bigamy laws kept her from marrying again. Franklin and Deborah established a common-law marriage on the 1st of September 1730.
They had two children. Francis Folger Franklin was born in October 1732 and died of smallpox in 1736. One possible reason for the couple's distance is that Franklin may have blamed her for the boy missing inoculation. Their daughter Sarah, called Sally, was born in 1743 and later married Richard Bache. Deborah's fear of the sea meant she never joined his long trips to Europe. In November 1769, she wrote that she was ill from "dissatisfied distress" over his absence. Franklin stayed until his business was done. She died of a stroke on the 14th of December 1774, while he was still in Britain.
The household also held a son born before the marriage. In 1730, Franklin publicly acknowledged William, born on the 22nd of February that year to a mother whose identity is unknown. William grew up in Philadelphia and studied law in London in the early 1760s. He fathered his own illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, born on the same day and month in 1760. In 1763, William became the last royal governor of New Jersey.
The Revolution split father and son. William remained loyal to the king, and Benjamin could never accept that. The New Jersey revolutionary government deposed William in 1776. He spent six months under house arrest in Perth Amboy, then two years in prison in Connecticut. After he was caught secretly recruiting support for the Loyalists, he spent eight months in solitary confinement at Litchfield. Released in a prisoner exchange in 1778, he moved to occupied New York City. There he led the Board of Associated Loyalists, a quasi-military body chartered by King George III. It raided New Jersey, southern Connecticut and the counties north of the city. When the British evacuated, William sailed to England and never returned. In the 1782 peace talks, Benjamin insisted that Loyalists who had borne arms be excluded from any general pardon. He was undoubtedly thinking of his son.
Slavery marks the starkest contradiction. From at least 1735, Franklin owned at least seven slaves and ran advertisements for slave sales in his newspaper. By the late 1750s, he had begun arguing against slavery. After returning from France in 1785, he freed his two slaves and eventually became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. His views on race and ethnicity were also uneven. In 1763, after the Paxton Boys murdered peaceful Susquehannock Indians and marched on Philadelphia, he helped organize a militia and persuaded their leaders to disperse. He then wrote a scathing attack on their prejudice. "If an Indian injures me," he asked, "does it follow that I may revenge that injury on all Indians?" Yet his 1751 population pamphlet had called Pennsylvania Germans "Palatine Boors" and spoken of "Blacks and Tawneys" as weakening colonial society. He dropped those phrases from later printings, though they may have contributed to his political defeat in 1764.
Freemasonry brought him another lapse. Franklin joined the Masonic lodge in 1730 or 1731 and became a grand master in 1734. In January 1738, he appeared as a witness in a manslaughter trial. The dead man was an apprentice named Daniel Rees, burned during a fake initiation. Franklin had known of the hazing and did nothing to stop it. Bradford's paper criticized him, and he defended himself in the Gazette. He remained a Mason for life, and in Paris he would serve as venerable master of the lodge Les Neuf Sœurs from 1779 to 1781.
Franklin reached Philadelphia on the 5th of May 1775, after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The Pennsylvania Assembly unanimously chose him as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In June 1776, he joined the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Gout kept him from most meetings, yet he made several "small but important" changes to Jefferson's draft. The line that they must all hang together or hang separately is probably apocryphal. Carl Van Doren thought it more likely came from Richard Penn.
On the 26th of October 1776, Congress dispatched Franklin to France as commissioner. He took his 16-year-old grandson, William Temple Franklin, as secretary. They lived at Passy, a Parisian suburb, in a house donated by Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont. Franklin stayed until 1785. He secured a military alliance in 1778 and signed the 1783 Treaty of Paris. He also helped direct secret operations against Britain, including the privateering of John Paul Jones. He negotiated a treaty with Sweden, signed in April 1783, without ever visiting that country. In 1785, he co-authored the first treaty of friendship between Prussia and America.
Paris also drew him into stranger work. In 1784, Louis XVI appointed a commission to examine Franz Mesmer's theory of "animal magnetism." Its members included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly and Franklin. Blind trials showed that mesmerism worked only when subjects expected it to. The commission thus produced the first major demonstration of the placebo effect, then called "imagination."
On the 27th of August 1783, Franklin watched the world's first hydrogen balloon, Le Globe, rise from the Champ de Mars before a vast crowd. He was so thrilled that he subscribed money toward the next project, a manned hydrogen balloon. On the 1st of December 1783, he sat in the enclosure for honored guests as it lifted off from the Jardin des Tuileries. Walter Isaacson recounts a chess game in which Franklin captured the king of the Duchess of Bourbon after she exposed it. When she protested, "we do not take Kings so," he replied, "We do in America."
In November 1787, Louis XVI signed the Edict of Versailles, which effectively nullified the Edict of Fontainebleau and its denial of civil status to non-Catholics. Franklin's advocacy for religious tolerance in France had contributed to the arguments that led to it.
When Franklin returned home in 1785, only George Washington stood higher as a champion of American independence. On the 18th of October 1785, a special ballot unanimously elected him sixth president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. The office was much like a governor's. He held it for slightly over three years, longer than anyone else, and served the constitutional limit of three full terms. As president, he hosted the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia and attended as a delegate, though he seldom spoke in debate. According to James McHenry, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked what sort of government the delegates had created. Franklin replied, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Obesity and gout wore down his health, and after the signing of the Constitution he was rarely seen in public. He died of a pleuritic attack at home in Philadelphia on the 17th of April 1790, aged 84. His last reported words came after his daughter suggested he lie on his side to breathe more easily. He answered, "a dying man can do nothing easy." About 20,000 people attended his funeral, and the Constitutional Assembly in France declared three days of mourning. He was buried in Christ Church Burial Ground. His grave, as his will specified, bears only the words "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin."
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Common questions
Who was Benjamin Franklin?
Benjamin Franklin was an American printer, writer, scientist, inventor and diplomat who was born in Boston on the 17th of January 1706. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and the Constitution, and he was the first United States postmaster general.
What did Benjamin Franklin invent?
Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and the flexible urinary catheter. He never patented his inventions and wrote that people should freely serve others with theirs.
Did Benjamin Franklin really fly a kite in a storm?
Benjamin Franklin may have flown his kite in Philadelphia on the 15th of June 1752, but his own newspaper account never says he did it. He used the kite to collect charge from a storm cloud, not to wait for a direct lightning strike.
What was Benjamin Franklin's role in France?
Benjamin Franklin served as commissioner to France from 1776 to 1785, living at Passy near Paris. He secured a military alliance in 1778 and signed the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
How did Benjamin Franklin discover the Gulf Stream?
Benjamin Franklin charted and named the Gulf Stream in 1768 after learning from his cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaler captain, that merchant ships avoided a strong eastbound current. His 1770 chart was ignored in England, and the original was rediscovered in Paris in 1980.
When and how did Benjamin Franklin die?
Benjamin Franklin died of a pleuritic attack at his home in Philadelphia on the 17th of April 1790, aged 84. About 20,000 people attended his funeral, and he was buried in Christ Church Burial Ground.
What did Benjamin Franklin do about slavery?
Benjamin Franklin owned at least seven slaves from 1735 and ran slave sale advertisements in his newspaper. By the late 1750s he argued against slavery, and after 1785 he freed his two slaves and became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
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293 references cited across the entry
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- 17Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin. (1945). pages 252–253
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- 87Peter Charles Hoffer, Benjamin Franklin Explains the Stamp Act Protests to Parliament, 1766 (2015)
- 89Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt (1737–1820), the Priestley Circle, and "The Theological Repository:" A Brief Survey and Bibliography, The Review of English Studies New Series, Vol. 56, No. 227 (Nov. 2005),
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- 94Encyclopædia Britannica, Wood, 2021
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- 106Sheila L. Skemp, The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit (Oxford University Press; 2012)
- 107reprinted on The History CarperBenjamin Franklin
- 108City of Blood, Cities of the Underworld – History Channel 2 (H2), 2008
- 109Ashe, Geoffrey. The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality. Great Britain: Sutton Publishing, 2005, p. 121.
- 110Famous British Historian claims Benjamin Franklin Was A British SpyRichard Deacon
- 111BookHayek: A Collaborative BiographyRichard B. Spence — Palgrave Macmillan — January 15, 2015
- 113BookThe Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North AmericaC. G. Calloway — Oxford University Press — 2006
- 114JournalSpies and Scouts, Secret Writing, and Sympathetic CitizensEd Crews — Summer 2004
- 119BookThe Life of Benjamin Franklin: Containing the Autobiography, with Notes and a ContinuationJared Sparks — Whittemore, Niles and Hall — 1856
- 120Benjamin Franklin sets sail for FranceNovember 13, 2009
- 121British-American Diplomacy: The Paris Peace Treaty of September 30, 1783The Avalon Project at Yale Law School
- 124BookConsidérations sur l'Ordre de Cincinnatus ou Imitation d'un pamphlet anglo-américain microformeGabriel-Honoré de Riquetti Mirabeau — A Londres: Chez J. Johnson ... — 1784
- 125Van Doren, Carl. Benjamin Franklin (The Viking Press: New York). 1938. pp. 709–710.
- 126Franklin's Forgotten Triumph: Scientific TestingStephan A. Schwartz — October 2004
- 127The phony health craze that inspired hypnotismVox — January 27, 2021
- 128Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter FAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 131BookEccentric France: Bradt Guide to mad, magical and marvellous FrancePiers Letcher – Jacques Charles — Bradt Travel Guides — 2003
- 132Science and Society, Medal commemorating Charles and Robert's balloon ascent, Paris, 1783Scienceandsociety.co.uk
- 133Fiddlers Green, History of Ballooning, Jacques CharlesFiddlersgreen.net
- 135BookGeorge Washington: American SymbolRaymond H. Robinson — Hudson Hills — 1999
- 137Brands, The First American, pp. 654–55, 694.
- 138Benjamin Franklin 1764 - 1764Pennsylvania House of Representatives
- 139Later Years and DeathBenjamin Franklin Historical Society
- 14064 People and Their Famous Last WordsFebruary 1, 2016
- 142Sparks, pp. 529–30.
- 143NewsChrist Church Burial Grounds
- 145BookCompanion to the French RevolutionJohn Paxton — Facts on File — 1988
- 146Transcript of Benjamin Franklin, Epitaph – Benjamin Franklin: In His Own Words Exhibitions (Library of Congress)Benjamin Franklin — Library of Congress — 2010-08-16
- 148BookThe Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin
- 149Jogn Gribbin, "In search of Schrödinger's cat", Black Swan, p. 12.
- 150H. W. Brands, The First American, 2002 p.192
- 151JournalLetter to Peter CollinsonBenjamin Franklin — May 25, 1747
- 152BookEric Weisstein's World of Scientific BiographyEric Weisstein
- 154JournalFurther Experiments and Observations in ElectricityBenjamin Franklin — April 29, 1749
- 155H. W. Brands, The First American, 2002 p.198
- 156JournalLetter to Peter CollinsonBenjamin Franklin — February 4, 1751
- 157JournalLetter to John FranklinBenjamin Franklin — December 25, 1750
- 158News'A How-To Guide' explores Ben Franklin's 'can-do' legacyJennifer Tomase — June 1, 2006
- 161Steven Johnson (2008) The Invention of Air, p. 39 . Retrieved February 6, 2017.
- 163BookBenjamin Franklin, A BiographyRonald W. Clarke — Random House — 1983
- 164Franklin's KiteMuseum of Science (Boston)
- 165BookHistory of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the Eighteenth CenturyAbraham Wolf — Macmillan — 1939
- 166NewsLightning Rods: Franklin Had It WrongJune 1, 1983
- 167JournalBenjamin Franklin and Lightning RodsPhilip Krider — January 2006
- 168BookThe True Benjamin FranklinSydney George Fisher — J.B. Lippincott Company — 1903
- 169BookA Treatise on The Aeropleustic Art, or Navigation in the Air, by means of Kites, or Buoyant SailsGeorge Pocock — Longmans, Brown, and Co. — 1851
- 170The Writings of Benjamin Franklin: London, 1757–1775Historycarper.com
- 173BookExperimental researches in electricityMichael Faraday — R. & J.E. Taylor — 1839
- 174BookJournal of the Franklin Institute of the State of PennsylvaniaThomas P. Jones — Pergamon Press — 1836
- 175BookThe First SaluteBarbara Wertheim Tuchman — Knopf Publishing Group — 1988
- 1761785: Benjamin Franklin's 'Sundry Maritime Observations'Anon — NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research
- 177JournalBenjamin Franklin and Timothy Folger's First Printed Chart of the Gulf StreamPhilip L. Richardson — February 8, 1980
- 178How Franklin's chart resurfacedAnthony R. Wood — March 29, 2007
- 179NewsPrints of Franklin's Chart of Gulf Stream FoundJohn Noble Wilford — February 6, 1980
- 1801785: Benjamin Franklin's "Sundry Maritime Observations", The Academy of Natural Sciences, April 1939 m
- 182Source: Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts, 1853, p. 53, by Matthew Fontaine Maury.
- 183BookThe Correspondence of Richard Price: February 1786 – February 1791Richard Price et al. — Duke University Press — 1994
- 184W. Gratzer, Eurekas and Euphorias, pp. 80–81.
- 187BookThe Triumph Of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern LifeI. Bernard Cohen — W.W. Norton — 2005
- 188JournalFranklin as DemographerAlfred Owen Aldridge — 1949
- 189BookThe Nation's Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of AmericaJames David Drake — U. of Virginia Press — 2011
- 190BookPeople of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American CivilizationMichael G. Kammen — Cornell U.P. — 1990
- 191BookA Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American RepublicGeorge William Van Cleve — U. of Chicago Press — 2010
- 193BookThe papers of Benjamin Franklin: January 1 through December 31, 1772Benjamin Franklin — Yale University Press — 1975
- 194Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay, p. 65.
- 195Isaacson, 2003, p. 15Oldsouth.org
- 196Articles of Belief and Acts of ReligionBenjamin Franklin — franklinpapers.org — November 20, 1728
- 197BookAutobiography and other writingsBenjamin Franklin — Riverside — 1771
- 198BookThe Mosaic of Christian Belief: Twenty Centuries of Unity and DiversityRoger Olson — InterVarsity Press — 2009
- 200Rossiter, Clinton. 1787. The Grand Convention (1966), pp. 184–85.
- 201BookMemoirs of the Rev. John Rodgers, D. D.,Samuel Miller — Whiting and Watson, theological and classical booksellers. J. Seymour, printer — 1813
- 203Benjamin FranklinHistory.hanover.edu
- 204Kidd (2017) p. 4.
- 205Bailyn, 1992, pp. 273–74, 299–300.
- 206Bailyn, 1992, p. 303.
- 207BookThe Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit of Capitalism"Max Weber — Penguin Books — 2002
- 208Bailyn, 1992, p. 249.
- 209BookThe Political Thought of Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin — Hackett — 2003
- 212A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and PainHistorycarper.com
- 213BookBenjamin Franklin's Printing Network: Disseminating Virtue in Early AmericaRalph Frasca — University of Missouri Press — 2009
- 214Thomas S. Kidd, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale UP, 2017) p. 6.
- 215Morgan, David T. "Benjamin Franklin: Champion of Generic Religion". The Historian. 62#4 2000. pp. 722 ff.
- 216Kidd, (2017) p. 36.
- 217Benjamin Franklin to Richard Price, October 9, 1780 Writings 8:153–54
- 218The Geneva Bible: The First English Study Bible Houston Christian Universitydseverance — October 15, 2019
- 220"1782: Original Design of the Great Seal of the United States", Our Documents: 100 Milestone Documents from the National Archives. National Archives (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 18–19.
- 225Nash, 2006, pp. 623–624.
- 226Nash, 2006, pp. 619–620.
- 227BookEighty-eight Years – The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865University of Georgia Press — 2015
- 228BookThe History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of SlaveryIsaac N. Arnold — Clarke & Company — 1866
- 229JournalBenjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the Founders: On the dangers of reading backwardsDavid Waldstreicher — July 2004
- 232Benjamin Franklin for The Pennsylvania Abolition Society to the United States Congress, The memorial of the Pennsylvania Society for promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the relief of free Negroes unla
- 233BookThe English Literatures of America, 1500–1800Psychology Press — 1997
- 234What Benjamin Franklin Really Said About VegetarianismLarry Kaiser
- 235BookThe Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin
- 236Benjamin Franklin said "Eating Flesh is Unprovoked Murder"Jennie Richards — January 20, 2016
- 237Ben Franklin Practiced VegetarianismCamille Lamb — April 9, 2012
- 239BookHistory of Tofu and Tofu Products (965 CE to 2013)William Shurtleff et al. — Soyinfo Center — 2013
- 240"Homespun": Second Reply to "Vindex Patriae"National Archives: National Historical Publications and Records Commission
- 241Benjamin Franklin's fight against a deadly virus: Colonial America was divided over smallpox inoculation, but he championed science to skepticsChristian Chauret et al. — January 1, 2021
- 242One article posited that "epidemeal distempers (such as smallpox) come as Judgments from an angry and displeased God."
- 243A Founding Father's Vaccine RegretJeff Jacoby — September 27, 2021
- 246In the Words of America's Science WritersJune 28, 2016
- 247Would you pay £40,000 to be woken up in the future?April 8, 2008
- 248MagazineCryonics and the Pursuit of Freedom from MortalityTom Morton — November 11, 2002
- 249Benjamin Franklin, the ComposerMichael Korn — September 28, 2015
- 250The GlassharmonicaThomas Bloch — G Finkenbeiner Inc.
- 251BookHidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis: The Story of HypnosisRobin Watefield — Routledge — August 1, 2003
- 252BookHarvard Dictionary of MusicWilli Apel — Harvard — 1969
- 253News'Armonicists' Debate Source of Beethoven's MaladiesRichard Benke — February 25, 2001
- 254Franklin invented it, Mozart wrote for it: the 'armonica' returnsJeffrey J. Carmel — November 22, 1983
- 255BookThe bel canto operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and BelliniCharles Osborne — Amadeus Press — April 1, 1994
- 256Rise and Fall of Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Armonica - New York AlmanackJaap Harskamp — 2021-09-07
- 257Chess and Benjamin Franklin-His Pioneering ContributionsJohn McCrary
- 258David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess, Oxford University Press (2nd ed. 1992), p. 145. .
- 259The essay appears in Marcello Truzzi (ed.), Chess in Literature, Avon Books, 1974, pp. 14–15. .
- 260The essay appears in a book by the felicitously named Norman Knight, "Chess Pieces", Chess Magazine, Sutton Coldfield, England (2nd ed. 1968), pp. 5–6. .
- 262William Temple Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, reprinted in Knight, Chess Pieces, pp. 136–37.
- 263BookThe History of Chess in Fifty MovesBill Price — Firefly Books (U.S.) Inc. — 2015
- 264NewsHow the Country's Second Oldest Chess Club is Surviving in a Center City BasementDavid Murrell — April 21, 2017
- 266Richard Price. Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World. To which is added, a Letter from M. Turgot, late Comptroller-General of the
- 267Excerpt from Philadelphia Inquirer article by Clark De LeonMathsci.appstate.edu — February 7, 1993
- 270Firesign Theater quote, meant humorously but poignantly.
- 271BookWalter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial CoinsWalter Breen — Doubleday — 1988
- 272BookStandard Catalog of United States Paper Money (17th ed)Robert Wilhite — Krause Pubns Inc — 1998
- 274NewsMemorial dedicatedApril 13, 1976
- 275JournalBenjamin Franklin House1947
- 276NewsWhy Was Benjamin Franklin's Basement Filled with Skeletons?Colin Schultz — October 23, 2013
- 277Skeletons in the ClosetThe Friends of Benjamin Franklin House — August 1998
- 278Scotts Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps
- 279BookThe First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin FranklinH. W. Brands — Knopf Doubleday Publishing — 2000
- 280BookBenjamin Franklin and a Rising PeopleVernon W. Crane — Little, Brown and Company — 1954
- 281BookThe Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin — Garden City Publishing Company — 1916
- 282BookBenjamin FranklinEdwin S. Gaustad — Oxford University Press — 2006
- 283BookBenjamin Franklin: An American LifeWalter Isaacson — Simon & Schuster — 2003
- 284BookBenjamin FranklinRalph L. Ketcham — Washington Square Press — 1966
- 285BookThe Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1: Journalist, 17061739Lemay, J.A. Leo — University of Pennsylvania — 2005
- 286BookThe Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 2: Printer and Publisher, 17301747Lemay, J.A. Leo — University of Pennsylvania Press — 2005a
- 287BookThe Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 3: Soldier, scientist, and politician, 17481757Lemay, J.A. Leo — University of Pennsylvania Press — 2008
- 288BookBenjamin FranklinMorgan, Edmund S. — Yale University Press — 2002
- 289BookA Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of AmericaSchiff, Stacy — Henry Holt — 2005
- 290BookFranklin, The Essential Founding FatherSrodes, James — Regnery History — 2002
- 291BookBenjamin FranklinCarl Van Doren — Viking — 1945
- 292BookThe Americanization of Benjamin FranklinWood, Gordon — Penguin — 2004
- 293BookFranklin of PhiladelphiaWright, Esmond — Belknap Press — 1988
- 294JournalReport of The Commissioners charged by the King with the Examination of Animal MagnetismB. Franklin et al. — 2002
- 295BookExperiments and observations on electricity, made at Philadelphia in AmericaBenjamin Franklin — Printed for David Henry; and sold by Francis Newberry — 1769