The First Scientific American Read online

  Science was demanding and even dangerous. People were not flocking to the sciences because they were easily pursued. Experiments involved complex equipment, terminology, and logic: “Take two Vials,” Franklin instructed in 1753, “charge one of them with Lightning from the Iron Rod, and give the other an equal Charge by the electric Glass Globe thro’ the prime Conductor.” Does this sound easy—or safe? In fact, the pursuit of science had a casualty rate. Some of the pioneers of ballooning died quite horribly. Seafaring explorers also died; others returned in such poor health that they nearly succumbed, which happened to Franklin twice. Electrical and chemical experimenters were stunned, burned, blinded, or killed.6

  But science was exciting. It explored the world and opened up hidden worlds. In the forty years before the American Revolution, the number of North American plants introduced to Britain doubled—in large part due to the handiwork of one of Franklin’s friends, John Bartram. Franklin witnessed the introduction of inoculation against smallpox, the first meaningful calculations of the distance between earth and sun, the early definitions of oxygen, and the first manned aerial flight. He himself made a signal contribution when he defined electricity, for the first time, as a particular form of matter.

  This science was, however, different. In fact, we would not recognize a great deal of its practices or central assumptions. Franklin believed that nude air baths hastened bodily circulation. He thought that water would pile up on one side of the Atlantic and then seek its level by flowing back across to the other side. He argued that a human body should be heated evenly, lest ill health result, particularly colds. He maintained that overeating slowed mental functioning. Many histories of early America try to make us feel as if “we are there.” Meet eighteenth-century Americans, we are told—hear their racking coughs, see their ships tossed by Atlantic tempests, feel the warmth from their roaring fires, and smell their sizzling fried fish or their hot apple pie. But this approach gives a false sense of identification. Clearly, Franklin’s ideas about health, weather, heat, and nutrition—about matter itself—were not like ours. We understand Franklin best when we comprehend what he thought he was sensing, not when we pretend we can sense what he did. Nor should we compare his sciences to our science. True, some of his beliefs and practices seem uncannily familiar, but others seem bizarre. To Franklin, however, they all made sense in relation to each other.

  Science was argumentative. Nothing was settled—things were being decided—and that is what made it so exciting. The fruitful indecision pertained, above all, to knowledge. What was knowledge? Could it be distinguished from mere opinion or supported by facts or numbers? What kind of knowledge could be established about the natural world? What knowledge did the mind have? What knowledge might sensuously flow into and through the body? And who possessed knowledge? Which parts of it should have been public? Which parts should have been secret, open only to a few? Who had the power to define knowledge—the elite or ordinary working people?

  Finally, science was powerful. People used it to argue for universal truths. They based their decisions about religion and law on science. They created important naturalistic metaphors. Franklin adopted one of these in the form of the concept of circulation, which he used to explore natural phenomena (weather, heat, electricity, ocean currents) but which he then also deployed to explain social phenomena—the circulation of money, news, letters, people, and ideas.

  Science is knowledge of things; politics is power over people. During the eighteenth century, the two enterprises overlapped in fascinating ways. Franklin entered both realms but flourished especially in the territory they held in common. A man of science, he became a political leader—indeed, the personification of a nation with an unprecedented history. A single book could not do justice to either one of these enormous topics, either Franklin’s science or his political career. Instead, this book examines the most important ways in which Franklin made his pursuits in the sciences and in public affairs inform and support each other.

  Benjamin Franklin was the first scientific American. He was the first person born in the Americas who became internationally celebrated (not just known and respected) for work in physical science. Put it another way. Franklin, an American, was the first person to be internationally celebrated for work in the physical sciences. A mere colonial of ordinary birth managed to achieve this stature. Several stories are embedded here, about America, about science, and about Benjamin Franklin. And ultimately, they are—conveniently, marvelously—all the same story.

  Chapter 2

  HEAD AND HANDS

  WHERE TO BEGIN? The question stumped even Franklin. In 1771, when he set out to write his autobiography, he considered two beginnings. The outline for his memoir began with “My writing.” But the narrative itself began with “my Ancestors,” the humble working folk whose “Poverty and Obscurity” Franklin had escaped precisely because of his writing. And just as the story of his life had two possible beginnings, so did the life itself. The first two things Franklin ever wanted to do were to go to sea or to go to college, to become either a sailor or a learned divine. Head or hands—mental exertion or manual labor—these were his options. In the end, he combined them, which was possible during his lifetime because old boundaries between the unwritten knowledge of manual trades and the knowledge contained in books had begun to blur.1

  Even the two starts that Franklin proposed for his life simplify the story. Though highly self-disciplined as an adult, he meandered during his youth. At various points, Franklin contemplated careers as a puritan minister, a Boston chandler, a sea captain, a philosopher of metaphysics, a swimming master to the London gentry, and a Philadelphia merchant. Then he chose to become a printer.

  Printing proved to be the activity—and the medium—that connected all the options Franklin had considered in his youth. Printing united head with hands. It required both manual labor and careful thought about words and their meanings. It allowed Franklin to write for an audience under his own name and under many pseudonyms. He would become one character by becoming a printer, but he inhabited many more characters precisely because print could represent them. (At that time, character meant one of the lead letters or other symbols used to set type, but it also signified a certain kind of person or personality.) To see all the people Franklin might have become is to understand the one person that he did become, as a printer, a published author, and a philosopher of nature.

  WORK, BOOKS, AND THE SEA—Boston would be known for many things, but these were the three aspects of that puritan port city that strongly marked Franklin’s start in life.

  As far as most people in Europe were concerned, Boston was on the edge of nowhere. The original puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had wanted it that way. They had fled to a New England where they could practice their faith far from English authorities. Franklin’s maternal grandfather was one of the earliest colonists of Massachusetts; his father emigrated slightly later, in 1683. In remembering his pious ancestors in his autobiography, Franklin noted their early conversion to Protestantism and their consequent persecution during the Catholic reign of Queen Mary. They hid their banned English Bible “under and within the Frame of a Joint Stool” so that if the authorities approached while they read the scriptures cradled in the upturned stool, they could quickly flip everything over and “the Bible remain’d conceal’d.” Not for the last time would a Franklin invent a clever device, but Benjamin’s English ancestors preferred, he stressed, “to enjoy their Mode of Religion with Freedom” and so emigrated to New England, the edge of nowhere.2

  Most English people took little interest in their colonial cousins or in the ocean they had crossed. Indeed, they did not even think of the vast water as a single body. Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the ocean we now call the Atlantic carried several names, including Atlantic but also Western Ocean or North Sea. The North Sea was considered an ocean unto itself—what we now refer to as the South Atlantic was then commonly referred
to as the Ethiopian Sea. Europe was always the point of geographic orientation: the different parts of the Atlantic designated western and southern boundaries to the world of Europeans. Although Europeans had colonized the Western and Southern Hemispheres, they thought of those regions as forbiddingly remote.3

  Born in 1706, Franklin was the fifteenth of his twice-married father’s seventeen children and the eighth of his mother’s ten children. Even in Josiah and Abiah Franklin’s teeming family, their youngest son stood out. He remembered such an “early Readiness in learning to read” that he could not recall a time when he was unable to do so. For that reason, he recalled, his father intended “to devote me as the Tithe of his Sons to the Service of the Church.” At the age of eight, he began to attend a Latin grammar school in Boston, from which he could proceed to Harvard College.4

  In pious New England, college was the gateway to social and intellectual prominence. The Franklins would have known the Reverend Cotton Mather, whose monumental career dominated public life in New England during Benjamin’s youth. A college-educated divine who owned about 3,000 books, which was then, as now, a substantial private library, Mather was widely recognized as the towering figure in American learning. His influential publications included Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good (1710), which recommended the formation of small self-improvement societies in New England and urged greater civic responsibility among ordinary New Englanders.5

  By linking learning to Christian leadership, New England’s puritans followed a tradition that stretched back to medieval monasteries. Sequestered from the world, monks mastered Latin texts that were incomprehensible even to those literate in vernacular languages. They took religious vows (including celibacy), a sign of the unworldly nature of their wisdom. Universities were offshoots of monasteries and were similarly populated with dark-garbed men who knew Latin and were celibate “professors” of the faith. Puritan colonists likewise founded Harvard College to train their religious leaders. They drew on the monastic tradition but protestantized it. Harvard graduates, for instance, were expected to marry.6

  Grammar schools sprang up in New England in order to prepare bright boys, such as Franklin, for college. Franklin excelled at his school. Within a year of his enrollment, he rose to the head of the class and was promoted to the next. Latin, learning, college—a career as a minister would surely follow. But Josiah Franklin had a large family. At a moment of instability in Boston’s economy, he was straining his income by spending so much on one son. The money ran out, and Benjamin had to transfer to a lesser “School for Writing and Arithmetic.” The Reverend Mr. Benjamin Franklin, A.B. Harvard, would never exist. Instead, at ten, when he had learned to write (arithmetic defeated him), Benjamin returned home to assist his father.7

  Franklin’s father was a craftsman. He had been a cloth dyer in England, and then, after emigrating, he was a Boston tallow chandler who made soap and candles from animal fat. Various Franklin sons were also craftsmen—blacksmith, printer, soap-maker. Craftsmen such as Josiah Franklin worked independently in small workshops that were near or even within households. They had far greater autonomy than their descendants would have as they labored under central control in factories. But household workshops could be dangerous, not least to small children exposed to fire, sharp tools, or heavily shod work animals. Before Benjamin was born, his brother Ebenezer had, at sixteen months, accidentally “drown’d in a Tub of Suds,” presumably one of his father’s soap vats.8

  As a chandler and soap-maker, Josiah Franklin was in the middle rank of society. Men of higher rank, such as gentlemen and members of the professions, did not work with their hands. Yet men such as Josiah were respected for their economic independence. With the labor of their wives and older children, they supported their families without recourse to charity. They could acquire property—and if they accumulated enough, they could vote. The boundary between skilled working people and the gentry was permeable, as evidenced by Josiah’s desire to send a son to grammar school and college.

  Craftspeople kept the world going—from building its ships to delivering its babies—because they possessed crucial skills or knew trade secrets. So prized was craftsmanship that some people even described nature as an amazing piece of artifice, as if God were a master artisan. Knowledge was, in this way, an important attainment even for ordinary people who worked with their hands. Valuable trade secrets were not usually written down; masters communicated them orally to apprentices. The word mystery was, at that time, a synonym for craft or guild; the indentures that bound an apprentice to a master specified an initiation into the “mystery” of a trade. In Europe, apprentices had to pay fees, take oaths, and participate in rituals, all of which separated the skilled from the unskilled. Secrecy protected craft artisans from economic competition, guaranteed the quality of products or services, and instilled solidarity among workers.9

  Guild structure was weak or absent in the colonies, however, and craftspeople of Josiah Franklin’s generation were, in any case, losing some control over the mysteries of their trades as those secrets—and many others—made their way into books.

  This development had religious roots. During the Reformation, religious reformers had protested that monks and clergymen monopolized knowledge of God’s word. They encouraged the publication of scripture and the spread of literacy—hence the Bible that the English Franklins had hidden in a stool. To some extent, the printing press helped in this transformation. A literate person could now learn about religious controversy, or anything else, simply by reading. But printed knowledge was contested; books did not always inspire confidence. When printed books of trade knowledge began to appear, they were aptly called books of secrets. Some of these texts managed to convey a sense of mystery by using metaphor, code, and partial formulas in order to fool readers. The boundary between secret knowledge and published knowledge still existed, if haphazardly. If control of knowledge had given craftspeople power, they stood to lose that power.10

  Josiah Franklin could, however, control the labor of his younger children and of other unfree persons, such as slaves. Like other Boston craftsmen, he was engaged in a small way in the slave trade; in 1713, he advertised (on behalf of another party) that six slaves could be examined and purchased at his house. He could also raise a son to inherit his trade, thereby avoiding the expense of apprenticing him and gaining his labor. This was precisely what Josiah Franklin was doing when he took Benjamin from school and set him to cutting wicks and dipping candles.11

  But the younger Franklin soon rebelled and later emphasized that he “dislik’d the Trade and had a strong Inclination for the Sea.” The inclination would linger throughout Franklin’s life and indeed reflected very well the world in which he lived. Any alert child in Boston, one of the British empire’s port cities, would have noticed that seafaring was fairly exciting. Unlike their puritan forebears, who saw the Atlantic as a barrier against English meddling, colonists now saw the ocean as a place of opportunity. Sailors managed the ships that brought wealth to the nation; they connected colonies to the home country; and they manned the naval vessels that fought Britain’s enemies.12

  The supply of ships and sailors expanded as the empire did. And as colonial populations grew, young men from big families or in crowded port cities had to look seaward for their livelihood. During Franklin’s lifetime, the Royal Navy became the most powerful branch of the British state and drew many men into its service. (Franklin had two in-laws who were Royal Naval captains.) Oceans connected people and places—and they were doing so more readily than ever before. This trend was above all apparent in the establishment, in 1714 (when Franklin was eight), of a parliamentary prize for solving the problem of determining longitude at sea. Without accurate knowledge of a ship’s east-west position, navigation was a dangerous and inefficient business. 13

  The maritime trades ran deep in Franklin’s family, particularly on his mother’s side. Franklin’s mother, née Abiah Folger, came from Nantucket, a small island that support
ed little land-based activity. Many of the Folgers went to sea, including one Peleg Folger, who was a whaler. Via the prolific Folgers, Franklin was related to several Nantucket clans, including the still-extant Coffins. One of his cousins, Keziah Folger Coffin, was a Quaker who was notable on the island. The Folgers also intermarried with Nantucket’s Starbucks.14

  These names are familiar to anyone who has read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. That novel features a Captain Peleg, a Peter Coffin, and a Starbuck. Melville was not idly raiding Nantucket’s small stock of names—he knew very well the significance of its lineages: “They have something better than royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers—all kith and kin to noble Benjamin.”15

  “Noble Benjamin” was himself fascinated by his maternal genealogy and fond of his Nantucket kin, who would always seem to be visiting or writing him later in his life. The Folgers mattered to Franklin. In an era when ordinary people generally lacked middle names, Franklin bestowed one on his first legitimate child: Francis Folger Franklin. In 1747, he would report to his mother that “our family” in Philadelphia included “two Folgers, all well.” If anything, Franklin strengthened these ties after his mother’s death. When he traced his genealogy, “Loving Cousin” Keziah Folger Coffin evidently helped him sort out the Nantucket cousins. In 1773, Franklin reported seeing two Nantucket relatives at his house in London, and he would also entertain a Folger while he lived in Paris.16

  Many Franklins had joined the Folgers at sea. Franklin recalled a remarkable family “Entertainment” when the entire Boston family gathered “all at one Table” to celebrate the return of the oldest child, Benjamin’s half brother Josiah, who had “been absent in the East-Indies, and unheard of for nine Years.” This prodigal son was without a doubt the most exotic member of the Franklin family, filled as he would have been with stories of East Indian marvels, tempests, and spices. What a lesson he must have provided for his goggling little brother, who likely saw in Josiah’s example a way either to be the center of attention at home or to leave home—or both.17