Benjamin Franklin
American printer, scientist, and statesman who conducted foundational experiments on electricity, built Philadelphia's civic institutions, and helped draft the Declaration of Independence, negotiate the French alliance, and frame the U.S. Constitution.
1706–1790
Biography
Benjamin Franklin (1706 to 1790) was an American printer, scientist, and statesman who rose from a Boston tradesman's household to become one of the leading figures of the American Revolution and a member of the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the fifteenth of his father Josiah's seventeen children, he was apprenticed at twelve to his older brother James, a printer, and helped set type for the New-England Courant. After quarreling with James, he left the apprenticeship and arrived in Philadelphia in 1723, the city he would make his home.
Franklin built his fortune as a printer. He acquired the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729 and in 1732 began issuing Poor Richard's Almanack under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, a yearly publication filled with proverbs and practical maxims that sold widely across the colonies until 1758. His success in the trade let him retire from active printing in 1748 and turn to science and public affairs. In Philadelphia he organized a stream of civic institutions: the Library Company in 1731, the Union Fire Company in 1736, the American Philosophical Society in 1743, the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania in 1749, and the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751.
His investigations into electricity brought him international standing. Franklin proposed that lightning was an electrical discharge and, in 1752, tested the idea with the famous kite experiment; the work led to the lightning rod and to a vocabulary still in use, including the terms positive and negative charge. His papers were collected in London as Experiments and Observations on Electricity, and in 1753 the Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal. He also designed the Franklin stove and bifocal spectacles, and never patented his inventions, holding that they should be freely available.
Politics drew him steadily deeper. Franklin was made deputy postmaster general for the colonies in 1753 and served for years as the London agent for Pennsylvania and later other colonies. In 1766 he was questioned before the House of Commons during the debate over the Stamp Act, arguing against the tax. When reconciliation with Britain collapsed, he returned to Philadelphia in 1775, sat in the Second Continental Congress, and joined the Committee of Five that prepared the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Later that year Congress sent Franklin to France, where he spent nearly a decade as the American minister in Paris. Popular in French society, he secured the Treaty of Alliance of 1778 that brought France into the war, and he was among the commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1783, ending the conflict on terms favorable to the new nation. He returned home in 1785 and, at eighty-one, served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, urging the delegates to accept the compromise document.
In his final years Franklin served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, having earlier in his life owned enslaved people himself, and he signed a petition to Congress against the slave trade shortly before his death. He had begun his Autobiography in 1771 and worked on it intermittently, leaving it unfinished; published after his death, it became a foundational text of American memoir. Franklin died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, and roughly twenty thousand people attended his funeral.
Life & Career
Why Franklin Matters
Franklin's electrical research placed a colonial American at the front rank of eighteenth-century natural philosophy. His single-fluid theory of electricity, his demonstration that lightning was an electrical phenomenon, and the practical lightning rod that followed made his name known throughout Europe and won him election to the Royal Society and its Copley Medal in 1753. The terminology he introduced—positive and negative, conductor, charge—entered the permanent language of the science.
As a builder of institutions, Franklin left a civic infrastructure that outlived him. The Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Hospital all trace their founding to his initiative, and he reorganized the colonial postal system that became the basis for the United States Post Office. These projects reflected his conviction that voluntary association and self-improvement could supply what governments did not.
In the founding of the United States, Franklin was among the few to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. His diplomacy in France was central to the war's outcome: the alliance he negotiated in 1778 and the loans he obtained helped sustain the American war effort. At the Constitutional Convention his presence lent weight to a contested proceeding.
Through Poor Richard's Almanack and the Autobiography, Franklin also shaped how Americans wrote and thought about self-made success. The maxims on thrift, industry, and virtue that he circulated for a quarter century, and the account of his own rise from apprentice to statesman, established a model of individual advancement that later writers and readers returned to repeatedly.
