Franklin: Experiments and Politics: The Most Versatile Mind of the American Enlightenment

Franklin: Experiments and Politics. The Polymath of the American Enlightenment.

Benjamin Franklin is often remembered as a genial face on the hundred-dollar bill, famous for flying a kite into a thunderstorm and for pithy sayings about early rising and pennies saved. This book keeps that folklore but refuses to let it define him, following Franklin from a runaway Boston printer's apprentice with almost no formal schooling to a self-taught experimenter whose discoveries about electricity made him an international scientific celebrity years before most of his neighbors knew him as a statesman. Readers will see how the same practical, endlessly curious mind that built Philadelphia's first library, fire company, and hospital also drafted a plan for colonial union two decades before independence, then spent nearly three decades in London and Paris arguing America's case, first against its own proprietors and Parliament's taxes, and later for the military alliance that helped win the Revolutionary War. The book gives full weight to Franklin's contradictions: a tireless champion of civic improvement and useful knowledge who also owned enslaved people for much of his adult life before becoming, in his final years, president of Pennsylvania's abolition society and a petitioner to Congress against the slave trade. Rather than separating the kite-flying scientist from the wily negotiator of the French alliance, this account treats Franklin's printing shop, his laboratory, and his diplomacy as expressions of one restless, improving temperament, tracing how a tradesman's son became, by his death in 1790, the most internationally admired American of his age.