PHILADELPHIA REFLECTIONS
The musings of a Philadelphia Physician who has served the community for nearly six decades

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All kinds of people were patriots in 1776, and many of them were all mixed up about what was going on and how they stood. Hotheads in the London Coffee House stirred up about an inoffensive Tea Act, Scotch-Irish come here to escape the British Crown, the local artisan class and the local smuggler class, unexpectedly prospering under non-importation, and the local gentry -- offended to be denied seats in Parliament like other Englishmen. Pennsylvania wavered until Ben Franklin stepped forward with a plan.

Franklin Inn Club
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Benjamin Franklin
A collection of Benjamin Franklin tidbits that relate Philadelphia's revolutionary prelate to his moving around the city, the colonies, and the world.

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B. Franklin, Scientist

FROM time to time, the Franklin Institute has a display of its own and other museums' collections of the scientific instruments of Benjamin Franklin. It's well worth anybody's visit when it is available, because the beauty and craftsmanship of these instruments alone make them remarkable works of art. Franklin was financially able to retire at the age of 42, and it tells you something of 18th century culture that Franklin took up scientific experiments in order to be like other independently wealthy gentlemen. Science, or natural philosphy, thus seems to have been in a class with getting a coat of arms and having your portrait painted, all of which tends to cheapen our view of Franklin as a scientist.

In fact, Franklin was conducting an active correspondence with other scientists interested in electricity for many years, in particular one Peter Collinson, F.R.S. in London. Collinson collected thirteen of Franklin's letters about his experiments, the earliest dated 1747, and printed them in 1751 as an 86-page book called Experiments and Observations about Electricity . By 1769, several more letters expanded the book to 150 pages, almost all of them describing reproducible experiments in great detail. The kite and key episode is described, but soberly and sparingly. Without making the point too graphically, an appendix was added describing how lightning had been used to kill some turkeys, so a somewhat increased power would probably be enough to kill a person. Franklin recognized that something was moving from here to there, that it had positive and negative charges, and that it was possible to store it up in a storage battery. He recognized the difference between substances that would conduct electricity, and other substances that would act as insulators. Later on, he would discover that the torpedo fish stores and transmits electricity, suggesting that somehow animals made and used electricity as part of life. And of course he put the discoveries to practical use as lightning rods, which he refused to patent.

By the time he went to England and France as a negotiator, his wide acquaintance in the scientific world was happy to introduce him to other famous people, like kings, Voltaire and Mozart, and Madame Helvetius the wife of the Swiss philosopher. When someone mentioned standing before a king, he replied he had stood before five of them. It is not easy to think of any other scientist who was able to use his scientific fame to change the course of international history but then, he was witty as well as smart. And his career is a warning to those who now devote their whole lives to getting admitted to a prestige college and coasting on its reputation. Franklin dropped out of school after the second grade.

(1661)

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