Benjamin Franklin

About this figure

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on 17 January 1706, one of seventeen children of a tallow chandler, and left formal schooling at ten. Apprenticed at twelve to his older brother James, a printer, he ran away from that arrangement at seventeen and arrived in Philadelphia in October 1723 with almost nothing. He built there the printing business that made him independently comfortable by his early forties: his Pennsylvania Gazette and, especially, Poor Richard's Almanack, written under the pseudonym "Richard Saunders" from 1732 to 1758, spread proverbs about thrift and industry that are still quoted today. The almanac's closing essay, later reprinted separately as The Way to Wealth, gathered many of these sayings into a single sermon on self-reliance, delivered through the mouth of a character called Father Abraham.

Franklin largely retired from active business in 1748 to give more time to science and public life, and it was in the years that followed that he did the electrical research that made him famous well beyond America. His letters to the London naturalist Peter Collinson, describing his experiments with what he called the "electrical fire," were collected and published in England as Experiments and Observations on Electricity beginning in 1751; they argued that lightning and the electricity produced by rubbing glass tubes were the same phenomenon, a claim borne out by experiments he and others conducted, and they led directly to his invention of the lightning rod. The story of his own kite-and-key experiment in 1752 rests on secondhand and later accounts rather than a detailed contemporary record in his own hand, so its precise particulars are less certain than the electrical theory itself, which is well documented in his own writing.

Franklin also helped found civic institutions that outlasted him, including the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, one of the first subscription libraries in the colonies, the American Philosophical Society in 1743, and an academy that later grew into the University of Pennsylvania. He spent much of the 1750s, 1760s, and early 1770s in London as a colonial agent, representing Pennsylvania and other colonies and arguing against measures such as the Stamp Act, before returning to America in 1775 already known as a leading critic of British policy. He signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then spent most of the Revolutionary War in Paris as an American diplomat, where he helped secure the French alliance and financial support that were crucial to the war effort; he was one of the three American negotiators, alongside John Adams and John Jay, of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended it. He later served as president of Pennsylvania's executive council from 1785 to 1788, and, in one of his last public acts, signed the United States Constitution in 1787 as a Pennsylvania delegate.

In his final years Franklin wrote an account of his own life, left unfinished at his death and covering mainly his youth and early rise rather than his most famous public years; that Autobiography, published only after he died, remains the fullest source for the story of his early life in his own words. He died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790, at eighty-four.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.