The First Scientific American Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - GENIUS

  Chapter 2 - HEAD AND HANDS

  Chapter 3 - MAN OF LETTERS

  Chapter 4 - EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS

  Chapter 5 - THE FRANKLIN PARADOX

  Chapter 6 - DISTANCE

  Chapter 7 - WRECKED

  Chapter 8 - THE SCIENCE OF WAR

  Chapter 9 - FINAL ACCOUNTS

  Chapter 10 - AFTERLIFE

  NOTES

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Praise for The First Scientific American

  “For those with only vague notions about [Franklin’s] role as a founding father and particularly his importance as a scientist, her emphasis can be eye-opening.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In describing Franklin’s scientific path, Chaplin . . . captures the impact of Franklin’s gifts on the development of his country’s intellectual infrastructure . . . This is a well-written, extensively footnoted, and finely illustrated biography. Because of the focus on Franklin’s scientific life, it will add a new perspective to the body of myths that surrounds the great man in this tercentennial year of his birth.”

  —Library Journal

  “Chaplin describes in detail Franklin’s other achievements, including charting the Gulf Stream and describing the aurora borealis, and argues that if not for his foray into U.S. politics, Franklin might have a body of scientific discoveries the likes of that accomplished by Isaac Newton.”

  —Science News

  “[W]onderfully fresh look at this truly remarkable man. . . . Chaplin’s book is exhaustively researched and superbly narrated. Her vivid descriptions of the intricacies of life as a colonial tradesman in the 1750s paint a world that the reader can almost step into.”

  —New Scientist

  “The key to understanding the genius of Franklin is through his science, and Joyce Chaplin provides a brilliant and thoroughly-researched account. She shows his mind at work, and it’s fascinating to behold.”

  —WALTER ISAACSON

  “Joyce Chaplin’s book is as electrifying as her subject. For those alarmed by the current rift between scientists and our political leaders, Franklin’s life reminds us that a much more enlightened relationship is possible.”

  —CHRIS MOONEY, author of The Republican War on Science

  “In this admirably researched and crafted book, Joyce Chaplin explores the incredible variety and scope of Franklin’s scientific pursuits. With engaging verve, insight, and wit, she shows why Franklin was among the most esteemed scientists of his time and why that greatly enhanced his diplomatic efforts, so vital to success of the American Revolution.”

  —DUDLEY HERSCHBACH, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science, Harvard University and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemisty

  “Benjamin Franklin—printer, scientist, revolutionary, statesman, by turns charming, ruthless, intellectually curious, and self-promotionally ambitious. Chaplin convincingly integrates all the facets of the multiply talented man into a compelling portrait, restoring the man behind the icon to full vitality. Her book is a tour de force, captivating in content and a delight to read.”

  —DANIEL J. KEVLES, Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and co-author of Inventing America

  “This is a brilliant and compelling book that restores science to its rightful centrality in Benjamin Franklin’s thought and career, and that makes us think anew about the changing nature of scientific genius.”

  —LINDA COLLEY, Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University

  “The First Scientific American shows how Benjamin Franklin became a statesman because of his science and offers a fresh perspective on one of America’s founding fathers in a brilliant analysis of the seesaw between science and politics two centuries ago. Joyce Chaplin takes us back to an era when science was in society’s mainstream, when there were no specialists. She has written an engaging, literate portrait of Franklin that changes traditional perceptions of this remarkable genius. This is an important, ground-breaking work which places the history of early American science on a new footing.”

  —BRIAN FAGAN, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of California, and author of Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World

  “This delightful portrait of Benjamin Franklin is unlike any recent study of the original American ‘genius.’ In contrast to other biographers, the historian Joyce Chaplin rightfully portrays Franklin first and foremost as a man of science, curious not only about electricity but about ocean currents, winds, and maps—indeed, about virtually all the phenomena of heaven and earth. In convincing detail, she demonstrates how the ambitious printer and natural philosopher from Philadelphia parlayed his scientific fame into an internationally acclaimed career as a gentleman and statesman.”

  —RONALD L. NUMBERS, Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  FOR CLINT

  “A Brother’s a Treasure”

  —Poor Richard

  Chapter 1

  GENIUS

  FAMOUS, fascinating Benjamin Franklin—he would be neither without his accomplishments in natural science. Yet science, his life’s central feature, is also its most mysterious aspect, the one least understood now and a part of a world we have lost. In his lifetime, science illuminated him with a brilliant electrical flash. We seem to have been blinded by that light. Not so Franklin’s contemporaries, who saw at its burning center something, and someone: a unique and remarkable man—the first scientific American.

  By the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was one of the most recognized people in the Western Hemisphere. The youngest son of a Boston candle- and soap-maker, Franklin won fame through printing, writing, politics, and especially the sciences. Once he was famous, his likeness proliferated in nearly every medium imaginable. Franklin could admire himself printed on paper, carved in marble, transferred onto china, modeled in wax, fired in clay, painted onto canvas, cast in metal, and, perhaps most appropriately, electrically burned into silk. In 1779, he chuckled to his daughter that his face had become “as well known as that of the moon.”1

  He had become an international “pop” icon in his own lifetime. Only one other individual who worked in the sciences has ever achieved this status: Albert Einstein. So here they are, the pair of celebrities in modern science, the Founding Father who invented the lightning rod and the Swiss physicist who claimed that E = mc2. Indeed, each man’s array of icons is uncannily like the other’s, showing just how extensively they entered homes, lives, and consciousnesses. Choose your poison: take snuff from a box topped with Franklin’s face or drink coffee from a mug bearing Einstein’s image. Decorate your interior with a mezzotint of the “Master Electrician” or a thumbtacked poster of the master of relativity. Wear your hero with a cameo brooch of the eighteenth-century American or a T-shirt of the twentieth-century European.

  Why have only Franklin and Einstein attained this status? Other people who labored at science enjoyed celebrity (Marie Curie adorns posters, too), though none to the same degree, not even the man who started it all, Isaac Newton. Newton was the first modern figure in the sciences who had a cult following. His acolytes claimed that in his ability to divine the secrets of the cosmos, he seemed second only to God. Newton cultivated his image by making sure that his work was printed and reprinted and that he himself was painted and commemorated. And he exercised political power through a position at the Royal Mint. But he largely avoided public life.


  Franklin was not so shy. He recognized Newton’s achievements in the sciences and followed suit, if on a smaller scale. But he then parlayed his fame in natural science into a reputation for political influence, until he managed to shoot past his role model and become as recognized as the moon. A lull would follow before Einstein would occupy a similar cultural position; he would become internationally celebrated for an uncanny gift in science and was therefore believed to have extraordinary wisdom that might help to solve the problems of the day.

  A commonplace explanation for Franklin’s fame and Einstein’s eminence is that each man was a genius. A genius is above the norm, whatever his or her field, so much so that he or she appears to have been born, not made—possessed of an innate gift. Such is the genius’s intelligence that, though perhaps strongest in one area, it cannot be contained and instead spills over into others. By these standards, Franklin was a genius, and so was Einstein, hence the huge presence of each man in his own day and in ours. Geniuses transcend geography and time—their brilliance illuminates all. Of course Franklin and Einstein became icons.

  But there is no “of course” in this story. The word genius itself has a history and a recent one. Before the eighteenth century, no one used the term in the way we do now. In earlier eras, it implied a specific disposition or aptitude, not an inherent and universal quality of mind. No one was a genius, though one might possess a particular genius or be ingenious in a given field. But during the eighteenth century, the old idea of genius as an aptitude faded. Genius became a noun applied to humans. It emerged just in time to describe Franklin, an early example. In fact, the shifting meanings of the word revealed themselves over the course of his career. In 1729, Franklin himself used genius in its older sense—“different Men have Genius’s adapted to Variety of different Arts and Manufactures”; by 1771, he was described as “the distinguish’d genius of America.”2

  So Franklin and Einstein were categorized as geniuses, but why were they iconic geniuses? In this regard, historical context matters. Both men worked in areas of physics that were, for their times, astonishingly new. Each man redefined the very fabric of material reality, Franklin by using electricity to reexamine the nature of matter and Einstein by using mathematics to redefine time and space. Each man worked, moreover, during a period of tremendous transformation in the human order. Franklin lived during the rise and fall of the first British empire, Einstein during the collapse of Europe into war and genocide. In consequence, each man would be strongly associated with a conflict that had global dimensions—Franklin with the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath, the American Revolution, and Einstein with World War II. At each historical moment—the end of the eighteenth century, the beginning of the twentieth—onlookers wanted and needed to see someone wise enough to make sense of all that was happening in their world.

  Franklin was celebrated for another reason as well. Science, too, has a history, and Franklin was born at a critical moment in that history. People have always struggled to understand the natural world. But only at the end of the seventeenth century did some Europeans begin to think that their ways of explaining nature were uniquely truthful. Men of science, including Newton, argued that their means of comprehending nature, particularly their experiments, were definitive. Much contested at the time (and since), this idea of science nevertheless stuck.

  Franklin had an important place in this story, but it is now a surprisingly misunderstood one. Consider the following illustration. It is probably what most people think of when they see or hear the words “Benjamin Franklin” and “science”: a stout colonial character flies a kite in a Philadelphia thunderstorm. This image, which Nathaniel Currier and James Ives produced in 1876, even has a caption to explain that “Franklin’s Experiment” demonstrated “the identity of Lightning and Electricity,” from which “he invented the Lightning Rod.”

  The illustration is charming, but it is wrong in many ways. Indeed, its very caption is inaccurate. Franklin’s kite experiment did not identify lighting with electricity. An earlier experiment of his had already done so—the kite verified the finding. And Franklin was trying to gauge whether clouds were electrified and, if so, whether with a positive or a negative charge. He wanted to determine the presence of a particular kind of matter, electricity, within nature and to use it to investigate the characteristics of other kinds of matter. He was doing far more than playing with a kite, and it reduces his efforts considerably to describe them as resulting only in a clever device, the lightning rod.

  American science—Child’s play. Engraving by Currier and Ives, Franklin’s Experiment, June 1752 (1876). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

  The characters in the illustration, moreover, are not quite right. In this and many of the kite pictures that include Franklin’s son, William, the younger Franklin is depicted as a child, even though he was in his twenties at the time of the kite experiment. That he was often portrayed as a child may reflect a post-eighteenth-century suspicion that the only thing more ridiculous than a grown man flying a kite in the rain is two grown men doing so. Nor is it very helpful to think of Franklin as firmly planted in America, let alone as quintessentially American. That notion gives too local a view of him. Certainly, he was born, lived, and did his important electrical experiments in America. But he lived almost a third of his life abroad, in Europe. He published his account of his experiments in London, and the first important verification of the experiments came from Paris. Franklin was not situated in one place—he ended up everywhere, on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout his life, he looked to Europe (or went to Europe) for his education, books, ideas, and friends. Franklin deliberately chose to work in natural science—a decision intended to make himself part of a cosmopolitan, enlightened culture, one that impressed him at an early age as encompassing everything America did not.

  Yet we still retain an image of Franklin that is suspiciously like the Currier and Ives illustration. He is currently celebrated as an American statesman or a Founder, a politician who happened to do a little science on the side. But that description puts the cart before the horse. Franklin was not a statesman who did science. He became a statesman because he had done science. And he was able to do so because, in the eighteenth century, science became part of public culture. That was how someone who excelled in the sciences could become a public figure or even a celebrity. Franklin’s contemporaries recognized that this had been his route to prominence. A famous tag proposed that Franklin had snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from the tyrants—in that order.

  At some point, each of these two accomplishments—the study of electricity and the defiance of tyrants—attracted the attention of distinct sets of historians. That division of labor may explain why we now misunderstand Franklin. A very small group of specialists has seriously examined Franklin’s work in science. But most people who are interested in eighteenth-century science tend to look at Europe and therefore miss Franklin; most people who are interested in Benjamin Franklin tend to look at America and therefore miss the science. The fuller biographies of Franklin, which offer catalogs of his life, do list all his accomplishments, but they do not make sense of the connections between the public life and the life in science. Moreover, most biographies of Franklin stress his American qualities, even though his devotion to science made it clear that he identified with a cosmopolitan culture that stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and united the hemispheres.3

  So rather astonishingly, there has never been a biography that examines Franklin’s scientific pursuits as an intrinsic part of his life’s story—as an important guide to his early education, his career as a printer, his entry into political life, his triumphs and failures, his celebrity throughout Europe, and his later fame as an American Revolutionary. Science did indeed become part of public knowledge in the eighteenth century, and Benjamin Franklin is the ultimate proof of that. His life had the shape and texture that it did because of his abiding curiosity about nature and his interest in science.<
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  And what a vast, unsettling, breathtaking enterprise science was in the eighteenth century—no wonder Franklin found it irresistible. Eighteenth-century science was enormous in scope. In Franklin’s era, the term science meant simply “wisdom.” Only at the end of the century would it begin to specify knowledge about nature, and only at that point, toward the end of Franklin’s life, would people begin to use the term scientific in the way we do now. The best way to describe Franklin’s pursuits is in the plural, as the sciences. These pursuits were not specialized practices cut off from other aspects of learning or indeed everyday life. They took up all manner of questions, including topics we would now assign to medicine, engineering, travel writing, or even ethnography.4

  Science was welcoming. Everyone who could do so read about the sciences. Experiments and demonstrations were public events. Members of the clergy preached the new philosophy of nature. Newspapers, even provincial ones, regularly published accounts of experiments, new technologies, and medical news. Much more of science was in the mainstream. Someone like Franklin, who pursued science, did not even think of himself as particularly different from anyone else. The word scientist would not be coined until well into the nineteenth century, when a few people finally did earn a living through specialized scientific work. The eighteenth century’s so-called men of science did not specialize in this way. They had other occupations or careers. They were clergymen, members of Parliament, farmers, tax administrators, ships’ captains, noblewomen, and even printers.5