A gift for aphorism can be indistinguishable, in the long run, from the gift of prophecy. And so Benjamin Franklin, dead for 234 years, shouldered his way into the discourse of 2024 with his legendary answer to the question posed to him outside the Pennsylvania State House in 1787, of what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had come up with: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Whether or not Franklin actually said this is debatable; his reported interlocutor, Elizabeth Willing Powel, said years later that she didn’t remember hearing it, yet the Maryland delegate James McHenry had set the exchange down in his diary at the time. Aphorism also has a way of blurring into apocrypha; nevertheless, no one disputed that it sounded like what Franklin would have said.
And everyone in the newborn country knew Franklin’s tone by then. The political Franklin is not supposed to be the subject of Richard Munson’s Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist. Yet trying to separate Franklin’s various roles and personae from one another is a hopeless task—as Munson makes clear, there was no separation between the printer, the journalist, the tinkerer, the diplomat, the sage, and all the rest. Sent back and forth across the Atlantic through the decades, as a loyal official of the British Crown and then as an architect of the breakaway nation, he dipped bottles deep below the waves along the way to chart and measure the Gulf Stream, and he speculated on the forces that flattened the ocean where the ships’ cooks had dumped grease.
Munson’s contention that “historians tend to dismiss Franklin’s science” furrowed my brow a little, as I weighed it against the memory of walking with my Philadelphia cousins through a giant model of the human heart at the Franklin Institute science museum—or against the book’s own cover, with its readily intelligible shorthand of a key dangling from a string under a stormy sky. Any schoolchild knows that at one end of the string there was a flying kite, and at the other end there was Franklin, and in between them was electricity.
That moment, outside “the burgeoning village of Philadelphia,” is where Munson opens the book, with Franklin drawing down not lightning but a stream of sparks, as the man himself wrote, appearing “plentifully from the key at the approach of a person’s finger.” Later on, Munson notes that Franklin “made no immediate record” of the kite experiment, leading some historians to wonder if it was apocryphal. By the time Franklin did or didn’t launch his kite, though, word was on its way from France that Thomas-François Dalibard—following an experimental design published by Franklin—had raised a long iron pole “from a church bell tower in Marly-la-Ville,” pulling electric charges from the clouds and capturing them in glass jars.
Even in the crowded field of the Enlightenment, with bright people throughout the West chasing scientific mysteries all at once, Franklin’s command of electrical science set him so clearly apart that the French would go on to call their electricity enthusiasts “franklinistes.” He discerned that when experimenters used friction to conjure electricity, Munson writes, they were not creating electrical charges but gathering them, leading him to propose the law of the conservation of charge; he worked out principles of conduction and insulation; and he named the opposing charges “positive” and “negative.”
Franklin also devised an arrangement of glass plates he dubbed an electrical battery, and, for outside the laboratory, he designed and installed lightning rods to prevent fires. His curiosity and whimsy were constantly drawn toward practicality, as the Boston youth trying out swimming flippers in the Charles River quickly grew into a runaway printer’s apprentice, building a reputation in Philadelphia for technical facility and winning over the officials of New Jersey with his meticulous work on the colony’s paper money.
There was no separation between the printer, the journalist, the tinkerer, the diplomat, the sage, and all the rest.
The trail of inventions Munson follows remains astonishingly wide-ranging: his cast-iron heating stove (though the “Franklin stove” was another inventor’s improvement on his design); the glass harmonica, with 37 different-sized bowls turning on a spindle (“Mozart and Beethoven composed music for it”); a urinary catheter “made of flexible and aseptic silver”; bifocals.
But he was every bit as active in creating institutions. He set up a subscription library, a volunteer fire brigade, and a force of constables in colonial Philadelphia, persuading the legislature to start a property tax to pay for the police. He helped organize the American Philosophical Society to disseminate new knowledge and discoveries through the colonies, established the University of Pennsylvania, and was the founding president of the Society for Political Enquiries in order to apply scientific methods to what he called “mutual improvement in the knowledge of government.”
If Munson sometimes lets the science slip into the background and regular old United States history take control of the story, that’s because Franklin’s one great project was to make life on this side of the Atlantic rational, flourishing—and, ultimately, independent. As a deputy postmaster for the colonies, Munson writes, Franklin saw his job as “a means to enhance the empire” and “paid particular attention to networking among North American scientists, enhancing greatly the exchange of ideas and test results.”
But even while he sought, as an agent in London for the colonies, to serve Britain’s interests and defuse tensions with Parliament, he saw fundamental changes coming. In 1751, Munson writes, he “boldly forecast that America’s population in one hundred years would surpass England’s.” And if he was not originally in the vanguard of rebellion with the much younger revolutionary thinkers, the same sensitivity to invisible forces and hidden currents that led him to seek electricity in the sky and the Gulf Stream below his ship led him to embrace American sovereignty.
By 1775, he was back on his native shores, where he “took over and restructured the postal system, arranged for the printing of paper money, and oversaw the stockpiling of saltpeter, a key component of gunpowder.” In 1776, among the delegates gathered in Philadelphia, he read Thomas Jefferson’s draft declaration, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and, with his trained publisher’s pen, “tightened the wording and declared them to be ‘self-evident.’”
The trail of inventions Munson follows remains astonishingly wide-ranging. But Franklin was every bit as active in creating institutions.
As the old man of the American rebellion, Franklin spent the war on the Continent, nurturing the new country’s alliance with France. Beyond his abundant charm and the sense of political theater that led him to forsake a formal wig for a rustic fur cap, Munson notes that Franklin brought his scientific reputation to Paris, which had “French ministers and intelligentsia vying for audiences” as the American emissary negotiated for financial and military support. He reached out unsuccessfully to Spain as well, “in a note thanking Prince Don Gabriel de Bourbon for forwarding a valuable physics book.”
Franklin in Paris stood as a living proof of concept that the former colonies were fit to stand on their own—a citizen of both a new country and an international community of intellectuals. Even as he “pushed American sea captains … to invade England’s coastal towns and seize ‘ready money and hostages,’” he told the American Navy to grant safe passage to the returning ship of the late Captain James Cook, bearing “maps and specimens” from its exploratory Pacific expeditions.
Liberty and progress were expressions of one another. The message borne by Franklin’s story in this moment is that the keeping of a republic is not simply a matter of hanging on to it through political ritual but of keeping it in the sense of tending and maintaining the nation. Underneath the written ideals and the processes of government—“he supported the regular punishment of the executive when his misconduct should deserve it”—Franklin set out building a nation of fire brigades, of effective postal service, of productive industry.
The same mind that deduced from hailstones that there was “a region high in the air over all countries where it is always winter” and pondered how one ant could summon a swarm to a pot of molasses turned itself also to the problem of streetlamp globes collecting soot and overheating, so they needed constant cleaning and replacement. The solution was a lamp with vents and a funnel to “facilitate the ascent of the smoke,” encased in “four flat panes.” The new design, Franklin wrote, “continued bright till morning, and an accidental stroke would generally break but a single pane, easily repaired.”
Tom Scocca is the editor of Indignity and a member of Flaming Hydra
