Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was a Philadelphia printer who became one of the most famous scientists of the 18th century and one of the founders of the United States. His experiments showed that lightning is electricity, and as a diplomat in France he secured the alliance that helped the colonies win independence. He was the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance with France, the peace treaty with Britain and the Constitution.

Franklin was born on 17 January 1706 in Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the fifteenth of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, a candle and soap maker who had emigrated from England, and his second wife, Abiah Folger. He had only about two years of school before he went to work, and educated himself by reading. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer who in 1721 started one of the first independent newspapers in the colonies. In 1722 the sixteen-year-old Franklin slipped essays under the door of the shop signed by an invented widow, "Silence Dogood", which James published without knowing who had written them.

In 1723 Franklin broke his apprenticeship and ran away, eventually reaching Philadelphia with almost no money. He found work as a printer, and in 1724 went to London, where he spent nearly two years working in printing houses. On his return he set up his own business.

From 1729 Franklin owned the Pennsylvania Gazette, and from 1732 he published Poor Richard's Almanack, whose proverbs about thrift and hard work sold in huge numbers for twenty-five years. He became Philadelphia's postmaster in 1737 and later joint deputy postmaster for all of Britain's North American colonies. In 1730 he entered a common-law marriage with Deborah Read, whose first husband had deserted her. They had a son, Francis, who died of smallpox at four, and a daughter, Sarah. Franklin also raised William, his son by an unknown woman, born around 1730.

In 1727 he founded the Junto, a club of tradesmen who met to discuss politics, science and self-improvement. It led to a series of civic projects: the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, a volunteer fire company, the American Philosophical Society in 1743, a hospital and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He was wealthy enough to retire from active printing in 1747, keeping a share of the profits.

Franklin also took part in slavery. He owned several enslaved people from at least the 1730s, two of whom worked in his household and shop, and his newspaper carried advertisements for slave sales. From the 1760s he increasingly criticised slavery, and late in life he became president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. In 1790 he signed its petition asking Congress to end the slave trade.

In the 1740s Franklin began experimenting with electricity, then a fashionable puzzle in the science of the Age of Enlightenment. He proposed that electricity was a single fluid, introduced the terms positive and negative charge, and described the principle now called conservation of charge. His Experiments and Observations on Electricity, published in London from 1751, was translated into several languages. He suggested that lightning was electrical and could be tested with a tall pointed rod; French experimenters did this successfully in May 1752. Franklin's own kite experiment, probably in June 1752, drew charge from a storm cloud into a key and a Leyden jar. It did not involve the kite being struck by lightning, which would probably have killed him. The practical result was the lightning rod, soon used on buildings across Europe and America. The Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal in 1753.

He invented an efficient wood-burning stove and bifocal spectacles, studied and charted the Gulf Stream, and wrote on population, weather and the spread of colds. He took out no patents, saying that people should share inventions freely.

Franklin proposed the Albany Plan in 1754, an early scheme for uniting the colonies under one council during the French and Indian War, which neither the colonies nor Britain accepted. From 1757 to 1762, and again from 1764 to 1775, he lived in London as an agent for Pennsylvania and later for other colonies. He was at first loyal to the British Empire, but his testimony to Parliament in 1766 helped bring about the repeal of the Stamp Act. In 1773 he passed to Boston private letters of the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, which caused uproar when published. In January 1774 he was publicly humiliated before the Privy Council and dismissed as deputy postmaster. He returned home in 1775 as the war began.

Back in Philadelphia, Franklin was elected to the Second Continental Congress, became the first postmaster general of the United Colonies, and sat on the committee that produced the Declaration of Independence, making small edits to the draft by Thomas Jefferson. His son William, the royal governor of New Jersey, stayed loyal to Britain, and the two were permanently estranged.

At the end of 1776 Congress sent Franklin, then seventy, to France. There he became a celebrity, his fur cap and plain clothes presenting him as a simple republican philosopher. After the American victory at Saratoga in 1777, he helped negotiate the 1778 treaties by which the Kingdom of France of Louis XVI recognised the United States and entered the war against Britain. French loans, troops and above all the French navy were decisive in the American Revolution. With John Adams and John Jay he negotiated the Treaty of Paris of 1783, in which Britain recognised American independence.

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1785 and was elected president of Pennsylvania's executive council. In 1787, at eighty-one, he was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention, where he generally urged compromise and, at the end, asked the delegates to sign despite their doubts. He died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790, aged 84, and around 20,000 people attended his funeral.

His unfinished Autobiography, published after his death, became a classic story of rise through hard work, although it leaves out much of his life. Franklin is remembered as a scientist, a satirist, an inventor and the most cosmopolitan of the founders, second only to George Washington in fame in his own time. His career is a large part of the History of the United States in the 18th century.