biography about benjamin franklin

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Benjamin Franklin

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

One of the leading figures of early American history, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a statesman, author, publisher, scientist, inventor and diplomat. Born into a Boston family of modest means, Franklin had little formal education. He went on to start a successful printing business in Philadelphia and grew wealthy. Franklin was deeply active in public affairs in his adopted city, where he helped launch a lending library, hospital and college and garnered acclaim for his experiments with electricity, among other projects. During the American Revolution , he served in the Second Continental Congress and helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He also negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War (1775-83). In 1787, in his final significant act of public service, he was a delegate to the convention that produced the U.S. Constitution .

Benjamin Franklin’s Early Years

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in colonial Boston. His father, Josiah Franklin (1657-1745), a native of England, was a candle and soap maker who married twice and had 17 children. Franklin’s mother was Abiah Folger (1667-1752) of Nantucket, Massachusetts , Josiah’s second wife. Franklin was the eighth of Abiah and Josiah’s 10 offspring.

Did you know? Benjamin Franklin is the only Founding Father  to have signed all four of the key documents establishing the U.S.: the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris establishing peace with Great Britain (1783) and the U.S. Constitution (1787).

Franklin’s formal education was limited and ended when he was 10; however, he was an avid reader and taught himself to become a skilled writer. In 1718, at age 12, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a Boston printer. By age 16, Franklin was contributing essays (under the pseudonym Silence Dogood) to a newspaper published by his brother. At age 17, Franklin ran away from his apprenticeship to Philadelphia, where he found work as a printer. In late 1724, he traveled to London, England, and again found employment in the printing business.

Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Publisher

Benjamin Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726, and two years later opened a printing shop. The business became highly successful producing a range of materials, including government pamphlets, books and currency. In 1729, Franklin became the owner and publisher of a colonial newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette , which proved popular—and to which he contributed much of the content, often using pseudonyms. Franklin achieved fame and further financial success with “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” which he published every year from 1733 to 1758. The almanac became known for its witty sayings, which often had to do with the importance of diligence and frugality, such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

In 1730, Franklin began living with Deborah Read (c. 1705-74), the daughter of his former Philadelphia landlady, as his common-law wife. Read’s first husband had abandoned her; however, due to bigamy laws, she and Franklin could not have an official wedding ceremony. Franklin and Read had a son, Francis Folger Franklin (1732-36), who died of smallpox at age 4, and a daughter, Sarah Franklin Bache (1743-1808). Franklin had another son, William Franklin (c. 1730-1813), who was born out of wedlock. William Franklin served as the last colonial governor of New Jersey , from 1763 to 1776, and remained loyal to the British during the American Revolution . He died in exile in England.

Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia

As Franklin’s printing business prospered, he became increasingly involved in civic affairs. Starting in the 1730s, he helped establish a number of community organizations in Philadelphia, including a lending library (it was founded in 1731, a time when books weren’t widely available in the colonies, and remained the largest U.S. public library until the 1850s), the city’s first fire company , a police patrol and the American Philosophical Society , a group devoted to the sciences and other scholarly pursuits. 

Franklin also organized the Pennsylvania militia, raised funds to build a city hospital and spearheaded a program to pave and light city streets. Additionally, Franklin was instrumental in the creation of the Academy of Philadelphia, a college which opened in 1751 and became known as the University of Pennsylvania in 1791.

Franklin also was a key figure in the colonial postal system. In 1737, the British appointed him postmaster of Philadelphia, and he went on to become, in 1753, joint postmaster general for all the American colonies. In this role he instituted various measures to improve mail service; however, the British dismissed him from the job in 1774 because he was deemed too sympathetic to colonial interests. In July 1775, the Continental Congress appointed Franklin the first postmaster general of the United States, giving him authority over all post offices from Massachusetts to Georgia . He held this position until November 1776, when he was succeeded by his son-in-law. (The first U.S. postage stamps, issued on July 1, 1847, featured images of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington .)

Benjamin Franklin's Inventions

In 1748, Franklin, then 42 years old, had expanded his printing business throughout the colonies and become successful enough to stop working. Retirement allowed him to concentrate on public service and also pursue more fully his longtime interest in science. In the 1740s, he conducted experiments that contributed to the understanding of electricity, and invented the lightning rod, which protected buildings from fires caused by lightning. In 1752, he conducted his famous kite experiment and demonstrated that lightning is electricity. Franklin also coined a number of electricity-related terms, including battery, charge and conductor.

In addition to electricity, Franklin studied a number of other topics, including ocean currents, meteorology, causes of the common cold and refrigeration. He developed the Franklin stove, which provided more heat while using less fuel than other stoves, and bifocal eyeglasses, which allow for distance and reading use. In the early 1760s, Franklin invented a musical instrument called the glass armonica. Composers such as Ludwig Beethoven (1770-1827) and Wolfgang Mozart (1756-91) wrote music for Franklin’s armonica; however, by the early part of the 19th century, the once-popular instrument had largely fallen out of use.

READ MORE: 11 Surprising Facts About Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution

In 1754, at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York , Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies under a national congress. Although his Albany Plan was rejected, it helped lay the groundwork for the Articles of Confederation , which became the first constitution of the United States when ratified in 1781.

In 1757, Franklin traveled to London as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to which he was elected in 1751. Over several years, he worked to settle a tax dispute and other issues involving descendants of William Penn (1644-1718), the owners of the colony of Pennsylvania. After a brief period back in the U.S., Franklin lived primarily in London until 1775. While he was abroad, the British government began, in the mid-1760s, to impose a series of regulatory measures to assert greater control over its American colonies. In 1766, Franklin testified in the British Parliament against the Stamp Act of 1765, which required that all legal documents, newspapers, books, playing cards and other printed materials in the American colonies carry a tax stamp. Although the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, additional regulatory measures followed, leading to ever-increasing anti-British sentiment and eventual armed uprising in the American colonies .

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, shortly after the Revolutionary War (1775-83) had begun, and was selected to serve as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, America’s governing body at the time. In 1776, he was part of the five-member committee that helped draft the Declaration of Independence , in which the 13 American colonies declared their freedom from British rule. That same year, Congress sent Franklin to France to enlist that nation’s help with the Revolutionary War. In February 1778, the French signed a military alliance with America and went on to provide soldiers, supplies and money that proved critical to America’s victory in the war.

As minister to France starting in 1778, Franklin helped negotiate and draft the 1783  Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.

Benjamin Franklin’s Later Years

In 1785, Franklin left France and returned once again to Philadelphia. In 1787, he was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention. (The 81-year-old Franklin was the convention’s oldest delegate.) At the end of the convention, in September 1787, he urged his fellow delegates to support the heavily debated new document. The U.S. Constitution was ratified by the required nine states in June 1788, and George Washington (1732-99) was inaugurated as America’s first president in April 1789.

Franklin died a year later, at age 84, on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia. Following a funeral that was attended by an estimated 20,000 people, he was buried in Philadelphia’s Christ Church cemetery. In his will, he left money to Boston and Philadelphia, which was later used to establish a trade school and a science museum and fund scholarships and other community projects.

More than 200 years after his death, Franklin remains one of the most celebrated figures in U.S. history. His image appears on the $100 bill, and towns, schools and businesses across America are named for him.

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Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin is best known as one of the Founding Fathers who never served as president but was a respected inventor, publisher, scientist and diplomat.

Quick Facts

Silence dogood, living in london, wife and children, life in philadelphia, poor richard's almanack, scientist and inventor, electricity, election to the government, stamp act and declaration of independence, life in paris, drafting the u.s. constitution, accomplishments, who was benjamin franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father and a polymath, inventor, scientist, printer, politician, freemason and diplomat. Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution , and he negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War .

His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking. A writer known for his wit and wisdom, Franklin also published Poor Richard’s Almanack , invented bifocal glasses and organized the first successful American lending library.

FULL NAME: Benjamin Franklin BORN: January 17, 1706 DIED: April 17, 1790 BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts SPOUSE: Deborah Read (1730-1774) CHILDREN: William, Francis, Sarah ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, in what was then known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Franklin’s father, English-born soap and candlemaker Josiah Franklin, had seven children with first wife, Anne Child, and 10 more with second wife, Abiah Folger. Franklin was his 15th child and youngest son.

Franklin learned to read at an early age, and despite his success at the Boston Latin School, he stopped his formal schooling at 10 to work full-time in his cash-strapped father’s candle and soap shop. Dipping wax and cutting wicks didn’t fire the young boy’s imagination, however.

Perhaps to dissuade him from going to sea as one of his other sons had done, Josiah apprenticed 12-year-old Franklin at the print shop run by his older brother James.

Although James mistreated and frequently beat his younger brother, Franklin learned a great deal about newspaper publishing and adopted a similar brand of subversive politics under the printer’s tutelage.

When James refused to publish any of his brother’s writing, 16-year-old Franklin adopted the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood, and “her” 14 imaginative and witty letters delighted readers of his brother’s newspaper, The New England Courant . James grew angry, however, when he learned that his apprentice had penned the letters.

Tired of his brother’s “harsh and tyrannical” behavior, Franklin fled Boston in 1723 although he had three years remaining on a legally binding contract with his master.

He escaped to New York before settling in Philadelphia and began working with another printer. Philadelphia became his home base for the rest of his life.

Encouraged by Pennsylvania Governor William Keith to set up his own print shop, Franklin left for London in 1724 to purchase supplies from stationers, booksellers and printers. When the teenager arrived in England, however, he felt duped when Keith’s letters of introduction never arrived as promised.

Although forced to find work at London’s print shops, Franklin took full advantage of the city’s pleasures—attending theater performances, mingling with the locals in coffee houses and continuing his lifelong passion for reading.

A self-taught swimmer who crafted his own wooden flippers, Franklin performed long-distance swims on the Thames River. (In 1968, he was inducted as an honorary member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame .)

In 1725 Franklin published his first pamphlet, "A Dissertation upon Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain," which argued that humans lack free will and, thus, are not morally responsible for their actions. (Franklin later repudiated this thought and burned all but one copy of the pamphlet still in his possession.)

In 1723, after Franklin moved from Boston to Philadelphia, he lodged at the home of John Read, where he met and courted his landlord’s daughter Deborah.

After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726, he discovered that Deborah had married in the interim, only to be abandoned by her husband just months after the wedding.

The future Founding Father rekindled his romance with Deborah Read and he took her as his common-law wife in 1730. Around that time, Franklin fathered a son, William, out of wedlock who was taken in by the couple. The pair’s first son, Francis, was born in 1732, but he died four years later of smallpox. The couple’s only daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743.

The two times Franklin moved to London, in 1757 and again in 1764, it was without Deborah, who refused to leave Philadelphia. His second stay was the last time the couple saw each other. Franklin would not return home before Deborah passed away in 1774 from a stroke at the age of 66.

In 1762, Franklin’s son William took office as New Jersey’s royal governor, a position his father arranged through his political connections in the British government. Franklin’s later support for the patriot cause put him at odds with his loyalist son. When the New Jersey militia stripped William Franklin of his post as royal governor and imprisoned him in 1776, his father chose not to intercede on his behalf.

After his return to Philadelphia in 1726, Franklin held varied jobs including bookkeeper, shopkeeper and currency cutter. In 1728 he returned to a familiar trade - printing paper currency - in New Jersey before partnering with a friend to open his own print shop in Philadelphia that published government pamphlets and books.

In 1730 Franklin was named the official printer of Pennsylvania. By that time, he had formed the “Junto,” a social and self-improvement study group for young men that met every Friday to debate morality, philosophy and politics.

When Junto members sought to expand their reading choices, Franklin helped to incorporate America’s first subscription library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, in 1731.

In 1729 Franklin published another pamphlet, "A Modest Enquiry into The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency," which advocated for an increase in the money supply to stimulate the economy.

With the cash Franklin earned from his money-related treatise, he was able to purchase The Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper from a former boss. Under his ownership, the struggling newspaper was transformed into the most widely-read paper in the colonies and became one of the first to turn a profit.

He had less luck in 1732 when he launched the first German-language newspaper in the colonies, the short-lived Philadelphische Zeitung . Nonetheless, Franklin’s prominence and success grew during the 1730s.

Franklin amassed real estate and businesses and organized the volunteer Union Fire Company to counteract dangerous fire hazards in Philadelphia. He joined the Freemasons in 1731 and was eventually elected grand master of the Masons of Pennsylvania.

At the end of 1732, Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack .

In addition to weather forecasts, astronomical information and poetry, the almanac—which Franklin published for 25 consecutive years—included proverbs and Franklin’s witty maxims such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” and “He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”

In the 1740s, Franklin expanded into science and entrepreneurship. His 1743 pamphlet "A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge" underscored his interests and served as the founding document of the American Philosophical Society , the first scientific society in the colonies.

By 1748, the 42-year-old Franklin had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania, and he became a soldier in the Pennsylvania militia. He turned his printing business over to a partner to give himself more time to conduct scientific experiments. He moved into a new house in 1748.

Franklin was a prolific inventor and scientist who was responsible for the following inventions:

• Franklin stove : Franklin’s first invention, created around 1740, provided more heat with less fuel.
• Bifocals : Anyone tired of switching between two pairs of glasses understands why Franklin developed bifocals that could be used for both distance and reading.
• Armonica : Franklin’s inventions took on a musical bent when, in 1761, he commenced development on the armonica, a musical instrument composed of spinning glass bowls on a shaft. Both Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed music for the strange instrument.
• Rocking chair
• Flexible catheter
• American penny

Franklin also discovered the Gulf Stream after his return trip across the Atlantic Ocean from London in 1775. He began to speculate about why the westbound trip always took longer, and his measurements of ocean temperatures led to his discovery of the existence of the Gulf Stream. This knowledge served to cut two weeks off the previous sailing time from Europe to North America.

Franklin even devised a new “scheme” for the alphabet that proposed to eliminate the letters C, J, Q, W, X and Y as redundant.

Franklin’s self-education earned him honorary degrees from Harvard , Yale , England’s University of Oxford and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

In 1749, Franklin wrote a pamphlet concerning the education of youth in Pennsylvania that resulted in the establishment of the Academy of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania .

In 1752, Franklin conducted the famous kite-and-key experiment to demonstrate that lightning was electricity and soon after invented the lightning rod.

His investigations into electrical phenomena were compiled into “Experiments and Observations on Electricity,” published in England in 1751. He coined new electricity-related terms that are still part of the lexicon, such as battery, charge, conductor and electrify.

In 1748, Franklin acquired the first of several enslaved people to work in his new home and in the print shop. Franklin’s views on slavery evolved over the following decades to the point that he considered the institution inherently evil, and thus, he freed his enslaved people in the 1760s.

Later in life, he became more vociferous in his opposition to slavery. Franklin served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and wrote many tracts urging the abolition of slavery . In 1790 he petitioned the U.S. Congress to end slavery and the trade.

Franklin became a member of Philadelphia’s city council in 1748 and a justice of the peace the following year. In 1751, he was elected a Philadelphia alderman and a representative to the Pennsylvania Assembly, a position to which he was re-elected annually until 1764. Two years later, he accepted a royal appointment as deputy postmaster general of North America.

When the French and Indian War began in 1754, Franklin called on the colonies to band together for their common defense, which he dramatized in The Pennsylvania Gazette with a cartoon of a snake cut into sections with the caption “Join or Die.”

He represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress, which adopted his proposal to create a unified government for the 13 colonies. Franklin’s “Plan of Union,” however, failed to be ratified by the colonies.

In 1757 Franklin was appointed by the Pennsylvania Assembly to serve as the colony’s agent in England. Franklin sailed to London to negotiate a long-standing dispute with the proprietors of the colony, the Penn family, taking William and his two enslaved people but leaving behind Deborah and Sarah.

He spent much of the next two decades in London, where he was drawn to the high society and intellectual salons of the cosmopolitan city.

After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, he toured the colonies to inspect its post offices.

After Franklin lost his seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1764, he returned to London as the colony’s agent. Franklin returned at a tense time in Great Britain’s relations with the American colonies.

The British Parliament ’s passage of the Stamp Act in March 1765 imposed a highly unpopular tax on all printed materials for commercial and legal use in the American colonies. Since Franklin purchased stamps for his printing business and nominated a friend as the Pennsylvania stamp distributor, some colonists thought Franklin implicitly supported the new tax, and rioters in Philadelphia even threatened his house.

Franklin’s passionate denunciation of the tax in testimony before Parliament, however, contributed to the Stamp Act’s repeal in 1766.

Two years later he penned a pamphlet, “Causes of the American Discontents before 1768,” and he soon became an agent for Massachusetts, Georgia and New Jersey as well. Franklin fanned the flames of revolution by sending the private letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson to America.

The letters called for the restriction of the rights of colonists, which caused a firestorm after their publication by Boston newspapers. In the wake of the scandal, Franklin was removed as deputy postmaster general, and he returned to North America in 1775 as a devotee of the patriot cause.

In 1775, Franklin was elected to the Second Continental Congress and appointed the first postmaster general for the colonies. In 1776, he was appointed commissioner to Canada and was one of five men to draft the Declaration of Independence.

After voting for independence in 1776, Franklin was elected commissioner to France, making him essentially the first U.S. ambassador to France. He set sail to negotiate a treaty for the country’s military and financial support.

Much has been made of Franklin’s years in Paris, chiefly his rich romantic life in his nine years abroad after Deborah’s death. At the age of 74, he even proposed marriage to a widow named Madame Helvetius, but she rejected him.

Franklin was embraced in France as much, if not more, for his wit and intellectual standing in the scientific community as for his status as a political appointee from a fledgling country.

His reputation facilitated respect and entrees into closed communities, including the court of King Louis XVI . And it was his adept diplomacy that led to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War. After almost a decade in France, Franklin returned to the United States in 1785.

Franklin was elected in 1787 to represent Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention , which drafted and ratified the new U.S. Constitution.

The oldest delegate at the age of 81, Franklin initially supported proportional representation in Congress, but he fashioned the Great Compromise that resulted in proportional representation in the House of Representatives and equal representation by state in the Senate . In 1787, he helped found the Society for Political Inquiries, dedicated to improving knowledge of government.

Franklin was never elected president of the United States. However, he played an important role as one of eight Founding Fathers, helping draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

He also served several roles in the government: He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly and appointed as the first postmaster general for the colonies as well as diplomat to France. He was a true polymath and entrepreneur, which is no doubt why he is often called the "First American."

Franklin died on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the home of his daughter, Sarah Bache. He was 84, suffered from gout and had complained of ailments for some time, completing the final codicil to his will a little more than a year and a half prior to his death.

He bequeathed most of his estate to Sarah and very little to his son William, whose opposition to the patriot cause still stung him. He also donated money that funded scholarships, schools and museums in Boston and Philadelphia.

Franklin had actually written his epitaph when he was 22: “The body of B. Franklin, Printer (Like the Cover of an Old Book Its Contents torn Out And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding) Lies Here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be Lost; For it will (as he Believ'd) Appear once More In a New and More Elegant Edition Revised and Corrected By the Author.”

In the end, however, the stone on the grave he shared with his wife in the cemetery of Philadelphia’s Christ Church reads simply, “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790.”

The image of Franklin that has come down through history, along with his likeness on the $100 bill, is something of a caricature—a bald man in a frock coat holding a kite string with a key attached. But the scope of things he applied himself to was so broad it seems a shame.

Founding universities and libraries, the post office, shaping the foreign policy of the fledgling United States, helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, publishing newspapers, warming us with the Franklin stove, pioneering advances in science, letting us see with bifocals and lighting our way with electricity—all from a man who never finished school but shaped his life through abundant reading and experience, a strong moral compass and an unflagging commitment to civic duty. Franklin illuminated corners of American life that still have the lingering glow of his attention.

• A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
• Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.
• From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.
• So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
• In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
• Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.
• There never was a good war or a bad peace.
• In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
• Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.
• He does not possess wealth, it possesses him.
• Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.

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Benjamin Franklin Biography

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a scientist, ambassador, philosopher, statesmen, writer, businessman and celebrated free thinker and wit. Franklin is often referred to as ‘America’s Renaissance Man’ and he played a pivotal role in forging a united American identity during the American Revolution.

Early life Benjamin Franklin

At an early age, he also started writing articles which were published in the ‘New England Courant’ under a pseudonym; Franklin wrote under pseudonyms throughout his life. After several had been published, he admitted to his father that he had written them. Rather than being pleased, his father beat him for his impudence. Therefore, aged 17, the young Benjamin left the family business and travelled to Philadelphia.

“The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.”

-— Benjamin Franklin

In Philadelphia, Benjamin’s reputation as an acerbic man of letters grew. His writings were both humorous and satirical, and his capacity to take down powerful men came to the attention of Pennsylvania governor, William Keith. William Keith was fearful of Benjamin’s satire so offered him a job in England with all expenses paid. Benjamin took the offer, but once in England, the governor deserted Franklin, leaving him with no funds.

Benjamin Franklin frequently found himself in awkward situations, but his natural resourcefulness and determination always overcame difficult odds. Benjamin found a job at a printer in London. Here he was known as the “Water American” – as he preferred to drink water rather than the usual six pints of beer daily. Franklin remarked there was ‘more nourishment in a pennyworth of bread than in a quart of beer.’

In 1726, a Quaker Merchant, Mr Denham offered him a position in Philadelphia. Franklin accepted and sailed back to the US.

On his journey home, Benjamin wrote a list of 13 virtues he thought important for his future life. Amongst these were temperance, frugality, sincerity, justice and tranquillity. He originally had 12, but, since a friend remarked he had great pride, he added a 13th – humility (Imitate Jesus and Socrates.)

Virtues of Benjamin Franklin

1. “TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.”

2. “SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.”

3. “ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.”

4. “RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”

5. “FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.”

6. “INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”

7. “SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.”

8. “JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.”

9. “MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.”

10. “CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.”

11. “TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.”

12. “CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.”

13. “HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

Franklin sought to cultivate these virtues throughout the remainder of life. His approach to self-improvement lasted throughout his life.

Back in America, Franklin had many successful endeavours in business, journalism, science and statesmanship.

Scientific Achievements of Benjamin Franklin

Science experiments were a hobby of Franklin. This led to the:

• Franklin stove – a mechanism for distributing heat throughout a room.
• The famous kite and key in the thunderstorm. This proved that lightning and electricity were one and the same thing.
• He was the first person to give electricity positive and negative charges
• The first flexible urinary catheter
• Glass harmonica (also known as the glass armonica)
• Bifocal glasses.

Franklin never patented his inventions, preferring to offer them freely for the benefit of society. As he wrote:

“… as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”

Benjamin Franklin as Ambassador

Franklin was chosen as an ambassador to England in the dispute over taxes. For five years he held conferences with political leaders as well as continuing his scientific experiments and musical studies.

Later on, Franklin played a key role in warning the British government over the dangers of taxing the American colonies. In a contest of wills, Franklin was instrumental in encouraging the British Parliament to revoke the hated Stamp Act. However, this reversal was to be short-lived. And when further taxes were issued, Franklin declared himself a supporter of the new American independence movement.

In 1775, he returned to an America in conflict. He was one of the five representatives chosen to draw up the American Declaration of Independence with Thomas Jefferson as the author.

Franklin was chosen to be America’s ambassador to France, where he worked hard to gain the support of the French in America’s war effort. During his time in French society, Franklin was widely admired, and his portrait was hung in many houses.

At the age of 75, the newly formed US government beseeched Franklin to be America’s representative in signing a peace treaty with Great Britain which was signed in 1783.

He was finally replaced as French ambassador by Thomas Jefferson, who paid tribute to his enormous capacity Jefferson remarked; “I succeed him; no one can replace him.”

Religious Beliefs of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin believed in God throughout his life. In his early life, he professed a belief in Deism. However, he never gave too much importance to organised religion. He was well known for his religious tolerance, and it was remarked how people from different religions could think of him as one of them. As John Adams noted:

“The Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterian’s thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker.”

Franklin embodied the spirit of the enlightenment and spirituality over organised religion.

Franklin was a keen debater, but his style was to avoid confrontation and condemnation. He would prefer to argue topics through the asking of awkward questions, not dissimilar to the Greek philosopher Socrates .

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of  Benjamin Franklin ”, Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net , 5th Feb 2010. Last updated 5 March 2019.

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Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706–April 17, 1790) was a scientist, publisher, and statesman in colonial North America, where he lacked the cultural and commercial institutions to nourish original ideas. He dedicated himself to creating those institutions and improving everyday life for the widest number of people, making an indelible mark on the emerging nation.

Fast Facts: Benjamin Franklin

• Born : January 17, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts
• Parents : Josiah Franklin and Abiah Folger
• Died : April 17, 1790 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Education : Two years of formal education
• Published Works : The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack
• Spouse : Deborah Read (common law, 1730–1790)
• Children : William (unknown mother, born about 1730–1731), Francis Folger (1732–1734), Sarah Franklin Bache (1743–1808)

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Josiah Franklin, a soap and candlemaker, and his second wife Abiah Folger. Josiah Franklin and his first wife Anne Child (m. 1677–1689) immigrated to Boston from Northamptonshire, England in 1682. Anne died in 1689 and, left with seven children, Josiah soon married a prominent colonist named Abiah Folger.

Benjamin was Josiah's and Abiah's eighth child and Josiah's 10th son and 15th child—Josiah would eventually have 17 children. In such a crowded household, there were no luxuries. Benjamin's period of formal schooling was less than two years, after which he was put to work in his father's shop at the age of 10.

Colonial Newspapers

Franklin's fondness for books finally determined his career. His older brother James Franklin (1697–1735) was the editor and printer of the New England Courant , the fourth newspaper published in the colonies. James needed an apprentice, so in 1718 the 13-year-old Benjamin Franklin was bound by law to serve his brother. Soon after, Benjamin began writing articles for this newspaper. When James was put in jail in February 1723 after printing content considered libelous, the newspaper was published under Benjamin Franklin's name.

Escape to Philadelphia

After a month, James Franklin took back the de facto editorship and Benjamin Franklin went back to being a poorly treated apprentice. In September 1723, Benjamin sailed for New York and then Philadelphia, arriving in October 1723.

In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin found employment with Samuel Keimer, an eccentric printer just beginning a business. He found lodging at the home of John Read, who would become his father-in-law. The young printer soon attracted the notice of Pennsylvania Governor Sir William Keith, who promised to set him up in his own business. For that to happen, however, Benjamin had to go to London to buy a printing press .

London and 'Pleasure and Pain'

Franklin set sail for London in November 1724, engaged to John Read's daughter Deborah (1708–1774). Governor Keith promised to send a letter of credit to London, but when Franklin arrived he discovered that Keith had not sent the letter; Keith, Franklin learned, was known to have been a man who dealt primarily in "expectations." Benjamin Franklin remained in London for nearly two years as he worked for his fare home.

Franklin found employment at the famous printer's shop owned by Samuel Palmer and helped him produce "The Religion of Nature Delineated" by William Wollaston, which argued that the best way to study religion was through science. Inspired, Franklin printed the first of his many pamphlets in 1725, an attack on conservative religion called "A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain." After a year at Palmer's, Franklin found a better paying job at John Watt's printing house; but in July 1726, he set sail for home with Thomas Denham, a sensible mentor and father figure he had met during his stay in London.

During the 11-week voyage, Franklin wrote "Plan for Future Conduct," the first of his many personal credos describing what lessons he had learned and what he intended to do in the future to avoid pitfalls.

Philadelphia and the Junto Society

After returning to Philadelphia in late 1726, Franklin opened a general store with Thomas Denham and when Denham died in 1727, and Franklin went back to work with the printer Samuel Keimer.

In 1727 he founded the Junto Society, commonly known as the "Leather Apron Club," a small group of middle-class young men who were engaged in business and who met in a local tavern and debated morality, politics, and philosophy. Historian Walter Isaacson described the Junto as a public version of Franklin himself, a "practical, industrious, inquiring, convivial, and middle-brow philosophical [group that] celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits, the improvement of self and society, and the proposition that hardworking citizens could do well by doing good."

Becoming a Newspaper Man

By 1728, Franklin and another apprentice, Hugh Meredith, set up their own shop with funding from Meredith's father. The son soon sold his share, and Benjamin Franklin was left with his own business at the age of 24. He anonymously printed a pamphlet called "The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency," which called attention to the need for paper money in Pennsylvania. The effort was a success, and he won the contract to print the money.

In part driven by his competitive streak, Franklin began writing a series of anonymous letters known collectively as the "Busy-Body" essays, signed under several pseudonyms and criticizing the existing newspapers and printers in Philadelphia—including one operated by his old employer Samuel Keimer, called The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette . Keimer went bankrupt in 1729 and sold his 90-subscriber paper to Franklin, who renamed it The Pennsylvania Gazette . The newspaper was later renamed The Saturday Evening Post .

The Gazette printed local news, extracts from the London newspaper Spectator , jokes, verses, humorous attacks on rival Andrew Bradford's American Weekly Mercury , moral essays, elaborate hoaxes, and political satire. Franklin often wrote and printed letters to himself, either to emphasize some truth or to ridicule some mythical but typical reader.

A Common Law Marriage

By 1730, Franklin began looking for a wife. Deborah Read had married during his long stay in London, so Franklin courted a number of girls and even fathered an illegitimate child named William, who was born between April 1730 and April 1731. When Deborah's marriage failed, she and Franklin began living together as a married couple with William in September 1730, an arrangement that protected them from bigamy charges that never materialized.

A Library and 'Poor Richard'

In 1731, Franklin established a subscription library called the Library Company of Philadelphia , in which users would pay dues to borrow books. The first 45 titles purchased included science, history, politics, and reference works. Today, the library has 500,000 books and 160,000 manuscripts and is the oldest cultural institution in the United States.

In 1732, Benjamin Franklin published "Poor Richard's Almanack." Three editions were produced and sold out within a few months. During its 25-year run, the sayings of the publisher Richard Saunders and his wife Bridget—both aliases of Benjamin Franklin—were printed in the almanac. It became a humor classic, one of the earliest in the colonies, and years later the most striking of its sayings were collected and published in a book.

Deborah gave birth to Francis Folger Franklin in 1732. Francis, known as "Franky," died of smallpox at the age of 4 before he could be vaccinated. Franklin, a fierce advocate of smallpox vaccination, had planned to vaccinate the boy but the illness intervened.

Public Service

In 1736, Franklin organized and incorporated the Union Fire Company, based on a similar service established in Boston some years earlier. He became enthralled by the Great Awakening religious revival movement , rushing to the defense of Samuel Hemphill, attending George Whitefield's nightly outdoor revival meetings, and publishing Whitefield's journals between 1739 and 1741 before cooling to the enterprise.

During this period in his life, Franklin also kept a shop in which he sold a variety of goods. Deborah Read was the shopkeeper. He ran a frugal shop, and with all his other activities, Benjamin Franklin's wealth rapidly increased.

American Philosophical Society

About 1743, Franklin moved that the Junto society become intercontinental, and the result was named the American Philosophical Society . Based in Philadelphia, the society had among its members many leading men of scientific attainments or tastes from all over the world. In 1769, Franklin was elected president and served until his death. The first important undertaking was the successful observation of the transit of Venus in 1769; since then, the group has made several important scientific discoveries.

In 1743, Deborah gave birth to their second child Sarah, known as Sally.

An Early 'Retirement'

All of the societies Franklin had created up to this point were noncontroversial, in so far as they kept with the colonial governmental policies. In 1747, however, Franklin proposed the institution of a volunteer Pennsylvania Militia to protect the colony from French and Spanish privateers raiding on the Delaware River. Soon, 10,000 men signed up and formed themselves into more than 100 companies. It was disbanded in 1748, but not before word of what Pennsylvania colony's leader Thomas Penn called "a part little less than treason" was communicated to the British governor.

In 1748 at the age of 42, with a comparatively small family and the frugality of his nature, Franklin was able to retire from active business and devote himself to philosophical and scientific studies.

Franklin the Scientist

Although Franklin had neither formal training nor grounding in math, he now undertook a vast amount of what he called " scientific amusements. " Among his many inventions was the "Pennsylvania fireplace" in 1749, a wood-burning stove that could be built into fireplaces to maximize heat while minimizing smoke and drafts. The Franklin stove was remarkably popular, and Franklin was offered a lucrative patent that he turned down. In his autobiography, Franklin wrote, "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." He never patented any of his inventions.

Benjamin Franklin studied many different branches of science. He studied smoky chimneys; he invented bifocal glasses ; he studied the effect of oil upon ruffled water; he identified the "dry bellyache" as lead poisoning; he advocated ventilation in the days when windows were closed tight at night, and with patients at all times; and he investigated fertilizers in agriculture. His scientific observations show that he foresaw some of the great developments of the 19th century.

Electricity

His greatest fame as a scientist was the result of his discoveries in electricity . During a visit to Boston in 1746, he saw some electrical experiments and at once became deeply interested. His friend Peter Collinson of London sent him some of the crude electrical apparatuses of the day, which Franklin used, as well as some equipment he had purchased in Boston. He wrote in a letter to Collinson: "For my own part, I never was before engaged in any study that so engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done."

Experiments conducted with a small group of friends and described in this correspondence showed the effect of pointed bodies in drawing off electricity. Franklin decided that electricity was not the result of friction, but that the mysterious force was diffused through most substances, and that nature always restored its equilibrium. He developed the theory of positive and negative electricity, or plus and minus electrification.

Franklin carried on experiments with the Leyden jar, made an electrical battery, killed a fowl and roasted it upon a spit turned by electricity, sent a current through water to ignite alcohol, ignited gunpowder, and charged glasses of wine so that the drinkers received shocks.

More importantly, he began to develop the theory of the identity of lightning and electricity and the possibility of protecting buildings with iron rods. He brought electricity into his house using an iron rod, and he concluded, after studying electricity's effect on bells, that clouds were generally negatively electrified. In June 1752, Franklin performed his famous kite experiment, drawing down electricity from the clouds and charging a Leyden jar from the key at the end of the string.

Peter Collinson gathered Benjamin Franklin's letters together and had them published in a pamphlet in England, which attracted wide attention. The Royal Society elected Franklin a member and awarded him the Copley medal with a complimentary address in 1753.

Education and the Making of a Rebel

In 1749, Franklin proposed an academy of education for the youth of Pennsylvania. It would be different from the existing institutions ( Harvard , Yale , Princeton , William & Mary) in that it would be neither religiously affiliated nor reserved for the elites. The focus, he wrote, was to be on practical instruction: writing, arithmetic, accounting, oratory, history, and business skills. It opened in 1751 as the first nonsectarian college in America, and by 1791 it became known as the University of Pennsylvania .

Franklin also raised money for a hospital and began arguing against British restraint of manufacturing in America. He wrestled with the idea of enslavement, personally enslaving and then selling an African American couple in 1751, and then keeping an enslaved person as a servant on occasion later in life. But in his writings, he attacked the practice on economic grounds and helped establish schools for Black children in Philadelphia in the late 1750s. Later, he became an ardent and active abolitionist.

Political Career Begins

In 1751, Franklin took a seat on the Pennsylvania Assembly, where he (literally) cleaned up the streets in Philadelphia by establishing street sweepers, installing street lamps, and paving.

In 1753, he was appointed one of three commissioners to the Carlisle Conference, a congregation of Native American leaders at Albany, New York, intended to secure the allegiance of the Delaware Indians to the British. More than 100 members of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) attended; the Iroquois leader Scaroyady proposed a peace plan, which was dismissed almost entirely, and the upshot was that the Delaware Indians fought on the side of the French in the final struggles of the French and Indian War.

While in Albany, the colonies' delegates had a second agenda, at Franklin's instigation: to appoint a committee to "prepare and receive plans or schemes for the union of the colonies." They would create a national congress of representatives from each colony, who would be led by a "president general" appointed by the king. Despite some opposition, the measure known as the "Albany Plan" passed, but it was rejected by all of the colonial assemblies as usurping too much of their power and by London as giving too much power to voters and setting a path toward union.

When Franklin returned to Philadelphia, he discovered the British government had finally given him the job he had been lobbying for: deputy postmaster for the colonies.

Post Office

As deputy postmaster, Franklin visited nearly all the post offices in the colonies and introduced many improvements into the service. He established new postal routes and shortened others. Postal carriers now could deliver newspapers, and the mail service between New York and Philadelphia was increased to three deliveries a week in summer and one in winter.

Franklin set milestones at fixed distances along the main post road that ran from northern New England to Savannah, Georgia, to enable the postmasters to compute postage. Crossroads connected some of the larger communities away from the seacoast with the main road, but when Benjamin Franklin died, after also serving as postmaster general of the United States, there were still only 75 post offices in the entire country.

Defense Funding

Raising funds for the defense was always a grave problem in the colonies because the assemblies controlled the purse-strings and released them with a grudging hand. When the British sent General Edward Braddock to defend the colonies in the French and Indian war, Franklin personally guaranteed that the required funds from the Pennsylvania farmers would be repaid.

The assembly refused to raise a tax on the British peers who owned much of the land in Pennsylvania (the "Proprietary Faction") in order to pay those farmers for their contribution, and Franklin was outraged. In general, Franklin opposed Parliament levying taxes on the colonies—no taxation without representation—but he used all his influence to bring the Quaker Assembly to vote for money for the defense of the colony.

In January 1757, the Assembly sent Franklin to London to lobby the Proprietary faction to be more accommodating to the Assembly and, failing that, to bring the issue to the British government.

Franklin reached London in July 1757, and from that time on his life was to be closely linked with Europe. He returned to America six years later and made a trip of 1,600 miles to inspect postal affairs, but in 1764 he was again sent to England to renew the petition for a royal government for Pennsylvania, which had not yet been granted. In 1765, that petition was made obsolete by the Stamp Act, and Franklin became the representative of the American colonies against King George III and Parliament.

Benjamin Franklin did his best to avert the conflict that would become the American Revolution. He made many friends in England, wrote pamphlets and articles, told comical stories and fables where they might do some good, and constantly strove to enlighten the ruling class of England upon conditions and sentiment in the colonies. His appearance before the House of Commons in February 1766 hastened the repeal of the Stamp Act . Benjamin Franklin remained in England for nine more years, but his efforts to reconcile the conflicting claims of Parliament and the colonies were of no avail. He sailed for home in early 1775.

During Franklin's 18-month stay in America, he sat in the Continental Congress and was a member of the most important committees; submitted a plan for a union of the colonies; served as postmaster general and as chairman of the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety; visited George Washington at Cambridge; went to Montreal to do what he could for the cause of independence in Canada; presided over the convention that framed a constitution for Pennsylvania; and was a member of the committee appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence and of the committee sent on the futile mission to New York to discuss terms of peace with Lord Howe.

Treaty With France

In September 1776, the 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin was appointed envoy to France and sailed soon afterward. The French ministers were not at first willing to make a treaty of alliance, but under Franklin's influence they lent money to the struggling colonies. Congress sought to finance the war with paper currency and by borrowing rather than by taxation. The legislators sent bill after bill to Franklin, who continually appealed to the French government. He fitted out privateers and negotiated with the British concerning prisoners. At length, he won from France recognition of the United States and then the Treaty of Alliance .

The U.S. Constitution

Congress permitted Franklin to return home in 1785, and when he arrived he was pushed to keep working. He was elected president of the Council of Pennsylvania and was twice reelected despite his protests. He was sent to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which resulted in the creation of the Constitution of the United States . He seldom spoke at the event but was always to the point when he did, and all of his suggestions for the Constitution were followed.

America's most famous citizen lived until near the end of the first year of President George Washington's administration. On April 17, 1790, Benjamin Franklin died at his home in Philadelphia at age 84.

• Clark, Ronald W. "Benjamin Franklin: A Biography." New York: Random House, 1983.
• Fleming, Thomas (ed.). "Benjamin Franklin: A Biography in His Own Words." New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
• Franklin, Benjamin. "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin." Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909.
• Isaacson, Walter. "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life." New York, Simon and Schuster, 2003.
• Lepore, Jill. "Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin." Boston: Vintage Books, 2013. 
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Benjamin Franklin

American polymath and statesman (1706–1790) / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

Can you list the top facts and stats about Benjamin Franklin?

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Benjamin Franklin FRS FRSA FRSE ( January 17, 1706 [ O.S. January 6, 1705 ] [Note 1]   – April 17, 1790) was an American polymath , a leading writer , scientist , inventor, statesman , diplomat , printer , publisher , and political philosopher . [1] Among the most influential intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States ; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence ; and the first postmaster general . [2]

Franklin became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette at age 23. [3] He became wealthy publishing this and Poor Richard's Almanack , which he wrote under the pseudonym "Richard Saunders". [4] After 1767, he was associated with the Pennsylvania Chronicle , a newspaper known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the policies of the British Parliament and the Crown . [5]

He pioneered and was the first president of the Academy and College of Philadelphia , which opened in 1751 and later became the University of Pennsylvania. He organized and was the first secretary of the American Philosophical Society and was elected its president in 1769. He was appointed deputy postmaster-general for the British colonies in 1753, [6] which enabled him to set up the first national communications network.

He was active in community affairs and colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. Franklin became a hero in America when, as an agent in London for several colonies, he spearheaded the repeal of the unpopular Stamp Act by the British Parliament. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired as the first U.S. ambassador to France and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco – American relations . His efforts proved vital for the American Revolution in securing French aid.

From 1785 to 1788, he served as President of Pennsylvania . At some points in his life, he owned slaves and ran "for sale" ads for slaves in his newspaper, but by the late 1750s, he began arguing against slavery , became an active abolitionist , and promoted the education and integration of African Americans into U.S. society.

As a scientist, his studies of electricity made him a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics . He also charted and named the Gulf Stream current. His numerous important inventions include the lightning rod , bifocals , and the Franklin stove . [7] He founded many civic organizations , including the Library Company , Philadelphia 's first fire department , [8] and the University of Pennsylvania . [9] Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity . Foundational in defining the American ethos, Franklin has been called "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become". [10]

His life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and his status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, have seen Franklin honored for more than two centuries after his death on the $100 bill and in the names of warships , many towns and counties, educational institutions, and corporations , as well as in numerous cultural references and a portrait in the Oval Office . His more than 30,000 letters and documents have been collected in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin .

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 17, 1706. Growing up, Franklin came from a modest family and was one of seventeen children. He began his formal education at eight when his father enrolled him in the Boston Latin School. While in school, Franklin showed strong leadership skills and was an avid reader and writer. Since his family could only afford Franklin's education for two years, he dropped out and began working for his father at age ten. At 15, Franklin's older brother James accepted him as an apprentice at his print shop in Boston. Under James, Franklin began working for one of the first newspapers in America, The New England Courant. While working at the print shop, Franklin wrote under the pseudonym Silence Dogood. He became an advocate for free speech, despite his brother's wishes. At age 17, Franklin ran away from his family to Philadelphia. In doing so, he broke his apprenticeship, making him a fugitive. While in Philadelphia, Franklin found work as a printer and began making connections, including meeting his future wife, Deborah Reed. Franklin sailed to London, England, a year later and began working as a typesetter in a print shop. He returned in 1726 and opened his own print shop in Philadelphia, where he published a newspaper called the Pennsylvania Gazette and the   "Poor Richard's Almanack."  

While in Philadelphia, Franklin created the first volunteer firefighting company and became involved with public affairs. In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society and began researching electricity. During his lifetime, Franklin continued to study science, including oceanography, engineering, meteorology, and physics. While studying, he created experiments, including the kite experiment, and invent products like the lighting rod based on his research. In addition to science, Franklin was interested in education and caring for society. Due to his wealth, Franklin organized the Pennsylvania militia and founded the first hospital in the colonies. Under Franklin's influence, the city streets were clean, and colonists in Philadelphia had homeowners' insurance. Franklin's popularity grew when he aided in founding the Academy of Philadelphia, later known as the University of Pennsylvania.  

Since the French and Indian War, Franklin supported the American cause. In 1754, during the Albany Congress, he used the press to circulate the famous "Join or Die" cartoon in an attempt for the colonies to rally against the French. While at the congress, Franklin proposed the Albany Plan, which failed then but later inspired the Articles of Confederation and a uniting of the colonies. As tensions rose in the colonies, the Franklin press continued to publish pro-independence articles and stories. In 1751, Franklin was elected to represent the Pennsylvania assembly in the British parliament in London. He made connections in England with parliament officials and worked to settle disputes between the colonies and Britain. Franklin temporarily  returned home until he was sent back to London in 1765 to testify against the Stamp Act. During Franklin's second mission to England in 1775, the British fired upon colonists at Lexington and Concord, officially beginning the American Revolution.   

Upon hearing the news, Franklin returned to the colonies. He arrived in Philadelphia in May of 1775, and the Pennsylvania Assembly elected Franklin to the Second Continental Congress . The congress met to discuss the revolution's goals and plan the next steps for the colonies. While serving as a delegate for Pennsylvania, Franklin served as the United States' first postmaster general, suffered from gout, and missed most of the delegations. In early 1776, he was elected to the "Committee of Five," alongside Thomas Jefferson , John Adams , Robert Livingston, and Rodger Sherman was assigned to write the Declaration of Independence. Although Thomas Jefferson wrote most of the declaration, Franklin made "small but important changes." On July 4, the Declaration of Independence was signed, and the colonies readied to take the next step toward independence. In October 1776, Franklin was assigned the duty of Ambassador to France. To beat the British, the colonist needed European aid, and it was Franklin's mission to convince France to help the United States.  

While in France, Franklin made connections with French politicians and the monarchy. France was willing to aid the colonies but needed proof that the American Revolution was not a lost cause. In October 1777, the Continental Army won a significant victory over the British during the Battle of Saratoga , forcing a British army to surrender. The battle showed that the United States had the potential to win and the French to sign the 1 778 Alliance Treaty , solidifying the Franco-American alliance. French troops arrived in the colonies under the command o f Jean-Baptiste, Comte de Rochambeau . The Continental and the French army worked together and were victorious during the Battle of Yorktown . In 1783, Franklin aided in the surrender under the Treaty of Paris . He remained in France for another two years, continuing to serve as the American minister for France and Sweden, despite never visiting. In 1785, Franklin returned to the United States and was immediately assigned to represent Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention.  

At age 81, Franklin was the oldest representative at the convention. As a supporter of the United States Constitution, Franklin urged his fellow delegates to support the document. The Constitution was ratified in 1788, and the following year George Washington was selected as the United States' first President. On April 17, 1790, Franklin died in his Philadelphia home. Over 20,000 people attended his funeral in Pennsylvania to celebrate his life, accomplishments, and impact on the founding of the United States. 

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Benjamin Franklin 1706 - 1790

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Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1706, Benjamin Franklin assisted his father, a tallow chandler and soap boiler, in his business from 1716 to 1718. In 1718 young Franklin was apprenticed to his brother James as a printer. Franklin ran away in 1723, heading for Philadelphia where he worked for the printer Samuel Keimer. After traveling to London in 1724 to continue learning his trade as a journeyman printer, Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726. By 1730, Franklin established himself as an independent master printer.

Franklin quickly became not only the most prominent printer in the colonies, but the figure who shaped and defined colonial and revolutionary Philadelphia. As one who believed that the phenomena of nature should serve human welfare, Franklin was greatly interested in applied scientific inquiry. Franklin’s groundbreaking discoveries and contributions to fundamental knowledge—most famously those involving lightning and the nature of electricity—made him internationally known for his experiments and insatiable curiosity. He was as renowned for the practical inventions that followed. Many of these profoundly altered everyday life for the better, including the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove.

Franklin was equally interested in the improvement of individuals and society as well. He was the center of the Junto, an elite group of intellectuals who were at the core of Philadelphia politics and cultural life for some time and who became the basis for the American Philosophical Society. He was also instrumental in the improvement of the lighting and paving of Philadelphia and in the organization of a police force, fire companies, Pennsylvania Hospital, the Library Company of Philadelphia, as well as the Academy and College of Philadelphia.

Franklin was a key political leader at many levels. In 1736 he was chosen clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, which position he held until 1751. In 1737 he was made postmaster at Philadelphia. In 1754 he was sent to the Albany Convention where he submitted a plan for colonial unity. He provisioned Braddock’s army and in 1756 was put in charge of the northwestern frontier of the province by the governor. He was sent to London twice as agent for the Assembly, 1757-1762 and 1764-1775. With the outbreak of the Revolution, he was sent as commissioner to France, 1776-1785, and in 1781 was on the commission to make peace with Great Britain. Franklin was a member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a framer of both the Pennsylvania and United States Constitutions. Franklin also served as the American ambassador to France.

Franklin was the primary founder and shaper of the new institution which became the University of Pennsylvania. His 1749 Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania were the basis of the Academy which opened two years later. Franklin was responsible for the hiring of William Smith as the first provost in 1754. From 1749 to 1755 Benjamin Franklin was president of the Board of Trustees of the College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia, and he continued as a trustee of the College and then of the University of the State of Pennsylvania until his death in 1790. For most of this period he served as an elected trustee; but from 1785-1788 while president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council (the equivalent of governor), Franklin was an ex officio trustee.

Franklin was also a well-known abolitionist later in life, but he only came to that position over many years. From as early as 1735 to as late as the 1770s, Franklin owned at least seven enslaved people. From 1729, when Franklin purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette , to 1790, the paper advertised slave auctions and notices of runaway slaves while also printing essays by authors deeply critical of slavery. In 1757, Franklin lent his vocal support for the creation of a school for African Americans in Philadelphia, the first of its kind in the colonies. In subsequent years, he began writing publicly against the institution of slavery. In 1787, Franklin became President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. In February 1790, Franklin petitioned Congress for the abolition of slavery. In the petition, he argued that “the blessings of liberty” applied to all “People of the United States.”

It was among his final acts. Franklin died later that year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and is buried in the Christ Church burial ground.

History | June 2024

Benjamin Franklin Was the Nation’s First Newsman

Before he helped launch a revolution, Benjamin Franklin was colonial America’s leading editor and printer of novels, almanacs, soap wrappers, and everything in between

Looming large on Philadelphia’s Broad Street, a ten-foot-high statue—a gift to the city from the Pennsylvania Freemasons—shows young Benjamin Franklin at his printing press.

By Adam Smyth

Author, The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives 

Benjamin Franklin was, in his own words, “the youngest son of the youngest son for five Generations back.” Born to a Boston candlemaker who had emigrated from Ecton, England, Franklin became an American printer of national significance: the editor and publisher, at 23, of what became his nation’s most important newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette . An internationally lauded scientist of electricity, he broke through the frosty anteroom of London’s Royal Society—a colonial autodidact!—to become a celebrated fellow. A prolific humorist, he invented a tradition of wry, plain-speaking wit (among his pseudonyms: Margaret Aftercast and Ephraim Censorious).

He was the author of one of the only pre-19th-century American best sellers still read today (his Autobiography ). A Pennsylvanian politician and civic reformer of tireless energy. Founder of the Junto, a self-improvement society; of the Library Company of Philadelphia , the first subscription library in North America; of the American Philosophical Society; of the Union Fire Company; of the University of Pennsylvania. The author of essays on phonetic alphabets, demography, paper currency. A leader of resistance to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed taxes on colonial legal documents and printed materials, and, ultimately, to British colonial rule of America. Grand master of the Masons, Pennsylvania. The deputy postmaster general of North America and, eventually, postmaster general of the United States.

He was the ambassador to France . A famous Londoner; a famous Parisian; a famous Pennsylvanian. A celebrity in a time when that concept was only emerging. (Guests at his Fourth of July celebration in Paris, in 1778, stole cutlery as souvenirs.) One of the founding fathers who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence. The inventor of the Franklin wood-burning stove, the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, a chair that converted into a stepladder, the glass armonica, a new kind of street lamp (with a funnel dispersing the smoke), a rocking chair with a fan, swimming fins, a flexible urinary catheter and a “long arm” for removing objects from high shelves.

The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

From Wynkyn de Worde’s printing of 15th-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunard’s avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.

Do you feel small? Don’t feel small. Franklin knew his faults as much as he cherished his fame: the absent husband away for his wife’s death; the man prone to jettisoning friends who ceased to be useful (former friend John Collins, too often drunk, was sent off to Barbados with a West India captain to work as a tutor: “I never heard of him after,” Franklin recalled); the public moralizer who refused to name the mother of his illegitimate son; the life punctuated by furious arguments and the obsession with public credit and reputation. And—in ways that are becoming increasingly apparent at the time of writing—a man who was actively complicit in the slave trade.

President John Adams hailed Franklin’s benefaction “to his country and mankind,” but described also his personal hypocrisy and vanity: “He has a passion for reputation and fame, as strong as you can imagine, and his time and thoughts are chiefly employed to obtain it.”

The medium Franklin moved in was ink: He waded in it, up to his neck. The printing trade was his start, the profession that made him. While Franklin grew up at a time when printing in colonial America was not yet established, the trade was coiled like a spring, and his timing was right; to a considerable extent, Franklin released it. The first printing press in the British colonies was not established until 1638, when locksmith Stephen Daye sailed from Cambridge, England, to Massachusetts, carrying a press in pieces. In 1722, when Franklin was 16, there were just four cities in Britain’s North American colonies with presses, and only eight printing shops in all: five in Boston and one each in Philadelphia, New York, and New London, Connecticut. The Boston News-Letter started its publication in 1704; it was the only newspaper in the colonies for the next 15 years.

For Franklin, it starts early. In 1717, having alarmed his Puritan father with talk of a life on the seas, 12-year-old Franklin is set up as an apprentice to his elder brother, James, a printer. His brother had served his own apprenticeship in London and returned to Boston to found and edit the New-England Courant , the fourth paper in the colonies (and the third in Boston). As apprentice, Benjamin Franklin does the grunt work—“I was employed to carry the papers through the streets to the customers”—but he is ambitious, and he’s resentful of being held in check by an elder brother. He writes pseudonymous letters under the name of Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow who mocks aspects of colonial life. Franklin’s letters are a hit; when it’s known that Silence is widowed, men write in with proposals of marriage.

Franklin, who left school at 10, has a powerfully “bookish inclination,” as he would later put it. He feeds off scraps in his father’s “little library” and then whatever volumes he can find. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.” His youthful language and conception of the world are forged by Pilgrim’s Progress , Daniel Defoe, Cotton Mather and John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives —that work of Greek and Roman biographies (such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar) conveying, to the young Franklin, the potential scope of a life.

In 1723, Franklin, squirming under his brother’s rule, flees the Boston print shop. He is illegally breaking the terms of his apprenticeship: He is on the run. Arriving disheveled and almost penniless in Philadelphia on October 6, he is bewildered and alone but seized also by the symbolism of a new start in this new place, Pennsylvania Colony having been founded just over 40 years before by William Penn. “I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market house I met a boy with bread.” His future wife, Deborah, happens to see the down-at-heel 17-year-old and thinks he has “a most awkward ridiculous appearance.” Franklin—“forgetting Boston as much as I could”—finds printing work with English-born Samuel Keimer, a patchy printer who’d spent time in London’s Fleet Prison for debt before trying to start again in Philadelphia. Keimer is a bad poet, too, with a habit of composing verse directly in type, without recourse to pen and paper.

Franklin quickly decides that Keimer (“slovenly to extreme dirtiness” and an “odd fish”) knows “nothing of presswork”—that is, of working the press, in contrast to composing or ordering the metal type. Keimer’s hardware consists, in Franklin’s words, “of an old shattered press and one small, worn-out fount of English.” (“English” is a type size, the equivalent of 14 points on your computer, and, Franklin probably thought, unhelpfully large. “Font,” or occasionally “fount,” from the French fondre , to melt or cast, means a complete set of type, and the design it represents.)

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This article is a selection from the June 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Keimer asks Franklin to finish printing an elegy on a recently deceased young poet and printer’s assistant. This is the first work that Franklin prints in Philadelphia: not a book, but a fragile single leaf on the death of a young man with the impossibly poetic name of Aquila Rose. ( Aquila is Latin for “eagle.”) All known copies disappear by the early 19th century until 200 years later, when a book dealer finds a sheet in a scrapbook and sells it in 2017 to the University of Pennsylvania, where it now resides.

A pattern forms that will be repeated in Franklin’s early career. He vaults past the lesser talents he sees around him—he finds the two established Philadelphia printers “wretched,” Keimer “a mere compositor” and Andrew Bradford “very illiterate”—and catches the eyes of powerful men. Sir William Keith, governor of Pennsylvania, sees a young man of promising parts, and on his urging, Franklin sails to London to gain a printer’s education.

He arrives in London on December 24, 1724, to find Keith has failed to send the letters of support he promised. (“He wished to please everybody, and, having little to give, he gave expectations,” Franklin will later write of his would-be patron.)

Forced on by his ceaseless drive, and managing to hold at bay some if not all calls to the taverns, playhouses and brothels, Franklin secures work at two major London printers, where he learns quickly. At the print shop of Samuel Palmer, he sets the type for the third edition of William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated , an early work of Deism that argues ethics can be implied from the natural world and need not depend on revealed religion.

But Franklin feels he could do better, and he writes “a little metaphysical piece” titled “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,” arguing for the incompatibility of an omnipotent God and human free will. The pamphlet carries no note of author or place of publication. It’s bad: Palmer thinks it “abominable.” Franklin quickly regrets it, burning the copies he can find.

Franklin is being shaped by everything bookish. He borrows secondhand volumes about medicine and religion from “one Wilcox, a bookseller, whose shop was at the next door,” at the sign of the Green Dragon. He moves from Palmer’s print shop to John Watts’: a more prestigious establishment that doesn’t share the printing of single works with other printers. This means, as book historian Hazel Wilkinson notes, that a voracious autodidact like Franklin can read whole works as he prints them, peering closely at the copy and setting type.

In the beer-soaked world of the printing apprentice in 18th-century London, Franklin is the abstemious “Water-American”: “My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.” Franklin thinks this a “detestable custom” and proposes what he calls “some reasonable alterations in their chapel [printing house] laws.” It’s easy to imagine how these rational proposals sound to the ears of Franklin’s fellow apprentices: He urges his peers to leave off their breakfast of “beer and bread and cheese” and to instead eat “hot water-gruel, sprinkled with pepper.” No, thank you!

Franklin, now full of what London can offer, his head eternally generating new schemes (like the establishment, rather implausibly, of a swimming school), sails back to Philadelphia, and within two years, in 1728, he sets up his own print shop in partnership with Hugh Meredith, in a narrow brick house on Market Street. Type arrives from London. Orders trickle and then flow. Three-quarters of William Sewel’s History of the Quakers were printed by Keimer, but Franklin printed the remaining 178 pages plus the title page for each copy. Understanding he has to conspicuously surpass (to the point of humiliating) his rival, Franklin throws everything he has at the printing of his sheets of Sewel’s History . Keimer has been inching his way through printing this book for three years. Franklin composes a sheet a day—which means four large pages—as Meredith works the press.

Franklin, realizing that building “character and credit” is crucial, not only works with irresistible force; he also makes sure his neighbors see this industry. He wears plain clothes and pushes a wheelbarrow full of paper through the streets to convey the impression of honest labor. He wants to be a walking emblem of industry. “I see him still at work when I go home from club,” an eminent neighbor says, “and he is at work again before his neighbors are out of bed.” Virtue is crucial, for Franklin, but so is the chatter about virtue.

The personalities who dominate the early years of Franklin’s printing are soon pushed to the fringes and finally expelled. His partner Hugh Meredith—in Franklin’s judgment, “no compositor, a poor pressman, and seldom sober”—agrees to leave the business for life as a farmer in North Carolina. Franklin pays him £30 and a new saddle. Through drive, intelligence, determination and a variety of low cunning, Franklin is established as the major printer in Philadelphia.

It’s 1730. Franklin is 24. His ambitions can now unfold.

The history of the book is typically organized around big volumes. Books like Johannes Gutenberg’s 1450s Bible, the earliest full-scale work printed from movable metal type on Royal paper measuring 24 by 17 inches per leaf; or the Biblia Polyglotta , printed at Christopher Plantin’s shop in Antwerp, Belgium, between 1568 and 1572, in eight folio volumes, with parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic, and translations and commentary in Latin, a wonder of mise-en-page; or the great 17-volume statement of Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert; or the 435 hand-colored, life-size prints in John James Audubon’s Birds of America .

These titles are deeply unrepresentative of the texts that typically emerged from binders’ offices and printing chapels and that filled the stalls of booksellers and the pockets of readers. The flip side is the world of jobbing printing: the production of cheap, everyday, usually ephemeral texts, the torrent of non-book print that circulated in the world starting in the 1450s. And it still does today. Look around you: the takeaway menu; the supermarket receipt. Packaging is very easily the largest consumer of print in 2024.

Benjamin Franklin was sustained by just this kind of printing work. Since it was cheaper to import large books from London, American printing before about 1740 tended to concentrate on small books, pamphlets, government printing, sermons and ephemera. Franklin had his moments with big volumes. Most notable was his 1744 publication of Cicero’s Cato Major , a 44 B.C. essay on aging and death, translated by James Logan. Seventy-three copies survive today of a print run of 1,000, and it’s often held up with admiration as the best example of colonial printing: printed in Caslon type in black and red on either American-milled or Genoese paper, depending on the copy. Logan’s translation had been circulating in manuscript some years before, and Franklin actively pursued it—rightly perceiving the volume not as a source of financial profit (it wasn’t) but a means to acquire cultural capital in powerful, learned circles.

Two years earlier, in 1742, Franklin had begun printing Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded , Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel about 15-year-old maidservant Pamela Andrews and her attempts to fend off the unwanted advances of her wealthy employer, the enigmatically titled “Mr. B.” Pamela was a huge hit in London, but it took Franklin more than two years to complete. He sold it unstitched—folded, in sheets—for 6 shillings. But by the time Franklin’s edition was ready, the market was awash with cheap imported copies. The lesson he learned—and Franklin was all about lessons learned—was to avoid heavy investment in a single title.

Jobbing work meant printing many copies quickly, moving rapidly from order to order with no thought to posterity. Most of these items lack an imprint and were only ascribed to Franklin, or Franklin and Hall (that is, David Hall, Franklin’s business partner starting around 1748), by the meticulous study of account books and ledgers by Franklin’s pre-eminent bibliographer, C. William Miller. Jobbing commissions were frequent and not labor-intensive. In 1742, Franklin repeatedly suspended work on Pamela to print lottery tickets, licenses for peddlers and public houses, sheriff’s warrants, naval certificates, soap wrappers, medical cures, bookplates for libraries, 1,000 hat bills, Irish Society tickets, and thousands of advertisements.

If we could walk down Second Street, in Philadelphia, in the spring of 1757, past the former offices of Franklin’s rival Andrew Bradford, we might see one of the playbills Franklin and Hall printed for the visiting London Theater Company. (Of 4,300 copies, only two are known to survive today.) Or if in 1761 we turned up Market Street, we might notice, pasted on a lamppost or passing between hands, a copy of instructions for operating a watch printed by Franklin and Hall. One of the features of print that is most often invoked is its capacity to endure, but this was a world of transient texts: of print read, then dropped, or lost, or used to light pipes, or to stop mustard pots, or to wrap pies. Or, with modern toilet paper still awaiting its great movement—it came in 1857—as what the 17th-century English poet Alexander Brome referred to as “bum fodder.”

Franklin concentrated his attention on three kinds of printed text whose import and profit far exceeded Cicero’s Cato Major or Richardson’s Pamela . The first was paper money. Franklin printed money for the governments of Pennsylvania (from 1729 to 1764), New Jersey (1728-46) and Delaware (1734-60), producing nearly 2,500,000 individual paper bills, just a handful of which survive today in public collections.

Paper money was a polarizing issue—farmers and tradesmen liked it; the rich did not—and Franklin contributed to the political controversy by advocating for it in A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency . Franklin also had some clever ideas about the printing process, and from 1739, the verso of his bills carried the impression of leaves to prevent counterfeits: Franklin placed a leaf on a piece of wet fabric and pressed this into smooth plaster, and used this negative impression as the mold for melted metal type. He had a capacity to see what was not there, and then to find it, or invent it. He devised and built a copper-plate press—“the first that had been seen in the country,” he later boasted—to produce these engravings.

Franklin’s second crucial kind of non-book printing was his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette . The Gazette became the most popular paper in the colonies. The sum of 10 shillings bought you a year’s subscription—that’s about 2 pence for every weekly four-page issue—and subscribers grew from a feeble 90 to more than 1,500 in 1748. What is a newspaper at this moment in history? And what qualities did Franklin’s possess that marked it out for success? Franklin’s paper, like most other colonial newspapers, was printed on both sides of one small folio sheet, but it was a better object. As Franklin himself wrote, “Our first papers made a quite different appearance from any before in the province; a better type”—a mix of English, pica and long primer—“and better printed.”

But it was the quality of Franklin’s writing, too, that set the Gazette apart—“one of the first good effects of my having learnt a little to scribble.” Like other papers, Franklin’s Gazette included reports from foreign newspapers, but Franklin increased the local and colonial content, cut tiresome encyclopedia recyclings, and added instead a series of essays, either reprinted from English journals (the London Journal, Spectator or Tatler ), or written by Franklin’s friends or Franklin himself. There were more advertisements. In a way that seems unimaginable amid the information overload of the 21st century, news was often thin on the ground—if the Delaware River froze over and ships didn’t come in, the news was stuck in the ice, too—and Franklin became adept at improvising content, often through the composition of original writing or (greatest of all literary genres) fake reader letters.

The effect was to produce a set of juxtapositions that at first might seem unstable: European and domestic news next to excerpts from Xenophon or The Morals of Confucius ; bawdy anecdotes written by Franklin and inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron , next to letters from readers, many written by Franklin under pseudonyms; an important interview with Andrew Hamilton, speaker of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives, in 1733, alongside mock news that crashes through our modern sense of acceptable limits but that proved hugely popular in its time. (“And sometime last week, we are informed, that one Piles a Fidler, with his wife, were overset in a canoe near Newtown Creek. The good man, ’tis said, prudently secured his fiddle, and let his wife go to the bottom.”) His paper ran the first American political cartoon in 1754 as part of an editorial titled “The Disunited State,” as well as jokes, satirical sketches, mocking accounts of the clergy, obituaries (Franklin’s inclusions did much to establish and popularize the form) and essays motivated by a growing sense of outrage at English rule (the dire conditions of English prisons, and the suffering endured by the Irish as a result of “their griping avaricious landlords”).

In his Autobiography , Franklin wrote, “I considered my newspaper, also, as another means of communicating instruction,” and this commitment played out in essays that often originated in his autodidacts’ club, the Junto. The Gazette was a newspaper, and Franklin an editor, increasingly convinced of the importance of the press as a means for what he called “Zeal for the Publick Good.” This meant the cultivation of informed, civic-minded leaders and represented a commitment that ultimately found expression in Franklin’s successful advocacy of American independence.

But one topic among the Gazette ’s noisy miscellanies is disturbing, if not unexpected, for a modern reader. This is the presence of advertisements for slaves, and Franklin’s role in these as a kind of broker. Recent work by historian Jordan E. Taylor has done much to uncover the intimate links between 18th-century American newspapers and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, articulated through both notices about runaway slaves, and—Taylor’s particular focus—through thousands of advertisements for slaves for sale that “empowered enslavers and strengthened the slave system.” In the 37 years that Franklin published the Gazette , his newspaper printed at least 277 advertisements offering at least 308 slaves for sale. (And these are conservative counts.)

In the 1740s in particular, Franklin’s Gazette was the crucial site for these advertisements. On March 10, 1743, the Gazette ran an advertisement for “A Negro man 22 years of age, of uncommon strength and activity.” (Advertisements typically denude slaves of anything as individuating as character and use instead stark identity—categories such as wench, woman, lad, boy, fellow, man, girl or child, with few details save age, health, sex and skills.) The advertisement instructed: “Any person that wants such a one may see him by enquiring of the printer hereof.” That was the clause that typically signed off these advertisements, and it implicates absolutely the newspaper printer in this slave-trade economy. Franklin is here the middleman, linking buyers and sellers and oiling the wheels of a slave economy, the advertisements serving as informal proxies for the auction or merchant firm. In an “enquire of the printer” advertisement in the Gazette for 1733, Franklin offered a “very likely Negro woman aged about 30 years” with a son “aged about 6 years, who … will be sold with his mother, or by himself, as the buyer pleases.”

Franklin’s brother James had also advertised slaves in his New-England Courant . Learning from his brother’s example, Franklin was the first printer outside Boston to broker slaves regularly through his newspaper, and his commercial success (but moral failure) catalyzed similar advertisements in newspapers in New York City, Baltimore and Providence, Rhode Island. Franklin later in life was known as a vocal and influential abolitionist, but as Taylor notes, “For most of the 18th century, to be a newspaper printer was to be a slave trader.”

Yet another publication at the heart of Franklin’s success was his Poor Richard series of almanacs. In publishing almanacs, Franklin was following the scent of the best seller. Almanacs compressed the world into miniature form. They were cheap, small, eminently portable books that provided readers with monthly calendars; astrological and meteorological prognostications; details of fairs and journeys between towns; chronologies of history; medical advice; a “zodiacal body” anatomizing the influence of the planets on parts of the body; and more. Thomas Nashe in 1596 said selling almanacs was “readier money than ale and cakes.”

The first edition of Franklin’s Poor Richard was printed in 1732; it sold for 5 pence a copy—or 3 shillings and 6 pence for a dozen—and contained, as the title page declares, “The Lunations, Eclipses, Judgment of the Weather, Spring Tides, Planets Motions & mutual Aspects, Sun and Moon’s Rising and Setting, Length of Days, Time of High Water, Fairs, Courts, and observable Days.” It was a huge commercial hit—“vending annually near ten thousand,” according to Franklin, in a colony with a 1730s population of around 50,000, with “scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it.” The almanac was a perfect form for Franklin, with an inclusive sweep of contents and a particularly Franklinian combination of big sales with plain-talking humility.

Franklin used the cheapest of books to educate a vast reading public toward his idea of virtue. In the 26th and final edition of Poor Richard , for 1758, Franklin gathered about 100 aphorisms and wove them into the speech of “Father Abraham” (“a plain clean old man, with white locks”). This piece of writing, variously known as “Father Abraham’s Speech,” “The Way to Wealth” or “La Science du Bonhomme Richard,” is Franklin’s most widely reprinted text. Franklin himself was proudly aware of its influence. In the Autobiography, he wrote: “The piece, being universally approved, was copied in all the newspapers of the Continent; reprinted in Britain on a broadside, to be stuck up in houses; two translations were made of it in French, and great numbers bought by the clergy and gentry, to distribute gratis among their poor parishioners and tenants.”

In it, Franklin reports how he overheard one Father Abraham (invented by Franklin) dispensing wisdom he had gathered from reading Poor Richard almanacs (written by Franklin):

Sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. ‘Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright,’ as Poor Richard says. ‘But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of,’ as Poor Richard says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep! forgetting that ‘The sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave,’ as Poor Richard says.

The collective wisdom was the unsurprising philosophy that hard work, thrift and moderation produced both material comforts and spiritual salvation.

Franklin’s immersion in book culture was so complete that he repeatedly imagined his life, and even his physical self, as a printed book. As a young man in 1728, Franklin composed his own epitaph, which—eternal self-promoter that he was, even in the image of death—he was fond of copying out for friends:

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author. He was born January 6, 1706. Died 17­—

His actual gravestone, which he shares with his wife, reads simply: BENJAMIN AND DEBORAH FRANKLIN 1790.

Adapted from The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC., a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. New York, NY, U.S.A. All rights reserved.

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Adam Smyth | READ MORE

Adam Smyth, an English professor at Oxford, is the author of The Book-Makers .

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Walter isaacson.

586 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2003

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History Books » American History » Books on American Presidents

The best books on benjamin franklin, recommended by d.g. hart.

Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant by D.G. Hart

The Founding Fathers of the United States were a remarkable bunch of people, but Benjamin Franklin might have been the most remarkable of them all. Coming from humble stock, he became a businessman, scientist, diplomat and politician—a giant of the Enlightenment. Historian D.G. Hart sheds some light on his character and background and puts him in his broader social and political context.

Interview by Benedict King

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood

Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius: the Boston Years by Arthur Bernon Tourtellot

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History by David D. Hall

The Enlightenment in America by Henry May

William Penn’s Legacy: Politics and Social Structure in Provincial Pennsylvania 1726-1755 by Alan Tully

1 The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood

2 benjamin franklin: the shaping of genius: the boston years by arthur bernon tourtellot, 3 the puritans: a transatlantic history by david d. hall, 4 the enlightenment in america by henry may, 5 william penn’s legacy: politics and social structure in provincial pennsylvania 1726-1755 by alan tully.

W hat story does your book,  Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant,  tell? What hole in Franklin studies was it trying to fill?

Part of what I’ve thought was missing in treatments of Franklin was how he fits into Protestantism and the culture that Protestantism produced in the centuries after the Reformation. The book is bridging studies of Franklin and studies of Anglo-American culture, post- Reformation .

Was he a deist? Or was he a complete non-believer?

He was a deist and rented a pew for his wife Deborah at Christ Church in Philadelphia . And he attended some services there. He’s buried there in that church’s burial ground—America has fewer church burial grounds than in Europe. But he was a deist early on. Studies of deism can be a little peculiar because there was no membership required. It seems to be a category imposed on people.

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Franklin, early in his life had a radical phase. He was caught up in philosophical speculation, which people could count as deism. But he was a God-fearer. I really do believe that he was genuine about that, thinking that he was going to meet his rewards after death. So, he believed there was going to be some kind of reckoning. And he invokes Providence a lot, which so many of the founders did, so he’s not unusual in that regard. But I couldn’t say he was an unbeliever, in the way somebody else I’ve worked on, such as H.L. Mencken, the journalist and modernist literary critic, clearly was. Mencken was an agnostic and identified as such. He just could not come to believe in God. Period.

Who else is in this spiritual biography series?

John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson are the two I know about for sure. There will be more in the pipeline. I think Andrew Jackson is going to be in it.

Among the founding fathers, there were some who were openly committed Christians, others who were less so. Were any of them avowed atheists? The reason I ask is because there seems to be a big debate in United States politics at the moment around the Founding Fathers, and about what kind of country they thought they were founding.

Probably Jefferson comes the closest, I think, although this gets into questions of what was acceptable in public as well. My sense is that most of them were church-attending and would generally say the sorts of things you’d expect people to say about the churches. So, I don’t think there were any who were outright antagonistic to religion. The one person who might qualify as an atheist is Tom Paine. But I think even there, Americans read him differently than the English did. The English saw him much more as a radical because he has was anti-monarchy, but that didn’t really bother Americans as much. In what Paine wrote he was still interacting with scripture, and seeming to pay deference to it, although maybe coming up with novel interpretations.

Let’s move on to your Benjamin Franklin books. The first of the books is The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon Wood. Why have you chosen this one?

Well, Gordon Wood is just a great historian. I’ve enjoyed his work for such a long time. I leaned heavily on this book in writing my own, and he does a really good job with the creation of Franklin. ‘Americanization’ is a way of saying that Franklin went from being very much pro-British Empire, which he remained all the way down, even into the 1770s, hoping that independence wouldn’t have to happen. But as things turned out, while he was a diplomat in London, he saw a polarization between the colonies and the English during that time.

“It’s just so unlikely that that Franklin’s life would have turned out the way it did”

The common perception of Franklin by contemporary Americans, if they know history, is that he’s just associated with the founding of the country, and you don’t really see how he developed and the incredible emergence of this person who was close to the bottom of colonial society and who made this life for himself as a businessman, printer and editor, and who then retired at the young age of 42, while still owning the business and receiving income from it. Then he begins to dabble in politics, and eventually worked his way into Pennsylvania politics. He goes overseas to negotiate with the Penn family to try to get a better deal for the colony in North America. And that’s how he also begins to make connections for other kinds of diplomatic endeavors, which occupy much of the last two or three decades of his life.

Excellent. And I think we can pick that theme up again in your next recommendation, which is Arthur Bernon-Tourtellot’s book , Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius . This is about his young life, isn’t it?

Yes, it is.

What case does this book make?

He was not a trained historian. He came to this book just as a writer of popular history. And he tells the story only up through Franklin leaving Boston, which is the prelude to what you would think of as the most important parts of Franklin’s life, which is his making it as a business man, his making it in Philadelphia, his success and then political career, and his scientific career.

It short circuits Franklin’s life, but he turns those early years into an amazing story. Tourtellot has a great eye for detail. He went deep into a lot of different source material for it. And so, just the description of Boston street life, the Franklin family home, Franklin’s father’s relationship with his Uncle Ben, who comes to visit and has a falling out with the family, his detail on Franklin’s mother’s family, the kinds of life going on in Boston, it’s all truly vivid. It’s just a great read. It really is.

Was Franklin recognized as an incredibly remarkable intellect from a very early age? Did his parents hothouse him, educationally? Or was he considered unremarkable at 17, when he left Boston, but flourished on his arrival in Philadelphia?

Boston, as least among those residents that were Puritans—and how you classify that as is a difficult question—was a remarkably literate, and at least by some standards, learned society. His father was bookish and had lots of books in the house. At least, that’s what Franklin recalled. His father didn’t have a formal education. There were the means for a formal education. Franklin’s parents, because Benjamin was the tenth child, wanted to make him a tithe to the church and send him into the ministry, as a gift to God, as it were. So he went to Latin school with the hopes of going to Harvard. But they also saw that he probably just didn’t have the religious devotion to do it. And so they pulled him out. It was also a way to save money, as well, although I’m not saying that was the only reason they did it.

“Franklin’s parents wanted to make him a tithe to the church and send him into the ministry… But they also saw that he probably just didn’t have the religious devotion to do it”

Let’s move on to the next of your Benjamin Franklin books, David Hall’s The Puritans: A Transatlantic History . Tell us a bit about this one.

Hall’s story is about Puritanism, from roughly the beginning of efforts to reform the Church of England in the 1570s down to the Glorious Revolution. He does both sides of the Atlantic, which is, really well done. Too often studies of Puritanism isolate the European side from the North American side. He’s spent his career writing about early modern Protestantism, and he’s a great historian. I put this in there because he’s part of a recent recovery of Puritanism, at least by historians in the United States, that links the developments in North America to political developments in 17th-century England, Scotland and beyond.

Oftentimes the history of Puritanism in the US looks at, say, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and the New England colonies in isolation from the British Isles. Perry Miller, who was another great historian, at Harvard, almost single handedly rescued Puritanism from the kinds of snipes that H.L. Mencken took at Puritans—Mencken famously defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. That was a common perception of Puritanism, until maybe 1940 or so. And then, Miller burst onto the stage at Harvard, recovers Puritanism with a boatload of graduate students under him. They go out and they wind up weaving the Puritan narrative into the understanding of America, which is in the midst of the Cold War. And the way that they tell that narrative helps America keep going with the Cold War.

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It’s actually a very interesting story. An historian recently, called Abram van Engen has a book out called A City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism , that refers to this creation of the Puritan narrative, and weaving it into the national narrative post-World War Two.

But what Hall does is look at it from a completely different perspective, not from a Cold War perspective, but from the 17th century, looking at what was happening in North America and how that was related to the politics and religion of 17th-century England and Scotland. And for that reason, it’s a great read, but it’s also a great background on Puritanism. And if you want to understand Puritanism and Franklin’s relationship to Puritanism, that’s an important book to consult.

Is it possible to identify things in Franklin’s personal culture or intellectual life that are specifically rooted in this Puritan background? Are there obvious things to point to?

A couple of examples. It’s a bit of a stretch to argue that Franklin is indebted to English Puritanism in some way, since he himself disavowed it. And it really left him cold, even though he held on to pieces about God, about the importance of doing good because there’d be a reckoning in the world to come. He held on to those sorts of things. But Puritanism was a very bookish culture and, and Franklin going into publishing and into print as much as he did was part of that Puritan inheritance. Even his interest in science could be part of it. There’s an old sociology of science scholar, Robert Merton, who has elaborated the so-called Puritan thesis about the origins of modern science being rooted in the culture of Puritanism in England. And I try to work that into understanding Franklin.

“Puritanism was a very bookish culture and, and Franklin going into publishing and into print as much as he did was part of that puritan inheritance. Even his interest in Science could be part of it”

Even his ideas about civic organizations and social order in Philadelphia, organizing libraries, hospitals, police, fire departments—you could argue that Franklin learned a lot of this from the civic culture of Puritans in Boston. Maybe he just intuited it by growing up in it, but those are the sorts of connections that I see, even though when it comes down to beliefs, they’re not there.

Let’s move on to your next Benjamin Franklin book, Henry May’s The Enlightenment in America .

Henry May, was a great intellectual historian of post-World War Two America. I have several good friends in academia who were students of Henry May as undergraduates, and I have other scholarly friends who knew him well as a colleague. My own claim to fame with Henry May, is that when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, I was the sommelier at the Harvard Faculty Club, which wasn’t the greatest of dining establishment—there were still rumors when I was there that they were serving horse, which they may have done during World War Two. But, anyway, May came to campus with a professor with whom I was studying, and they sat at a table. And so I was able to serve him wine.

Henry May was a great historian at University of California, Berkeley. This book was published in 1976. The story he tells has been carried on by many people. He told the story that the Enlightenment is not one thing. It is several things and it happens in different places, and at different times—in England, Scotland, France, Germany, North America. And it has different kinds of traditions, such as the moderate enlightenment of Newton , for instance, or the skeptical enlightenment, of Voltaire , the didactic enlightenment of the Scottish Enlightenment figures of Smith and the like.

May puts Franklin in the skeptical camp. I think he may emphasize that a little more than necessary. Because I think that in the revolutionary camp of the Enlightenment, there’s a utilitarian side and you really see that strain in Franklin. He was constantly thinking about how things worked, whether in the natural world, or the famous fireplace that he invented, or bifocals, or hospitals, or even colleges. He was not just a thinker, he was a tinkerer, his whole life and he tinkered with ideas as well. May is really useful for situating Franklin in that Enlightenment. Even though it’s almost 50 years old, it’s a very useful guide to thinking about the Enlightenment and how it unfolded in the United States.

And what does he say about the Founding Fathers? Did they see the founding of the United States as an Enlightenment project? 

Finally, for the last of your Benjamin Franklin books we have Alan Tully’s William Penn’s Legacy: Politics and Social Structure in Provincial Pennsylvania 1726-1755 .

Yes. For me, Tully is a fascinating read, because his book puts the Pennsylvania Colony and its political struggles in perspective, and allows readers to situate Franklin in that setting. I leaned on it heavily for a couple of chapters when it came to trying to explain Pennsylvania politics, say from the 1740s, down to the founding of the United States, especially where Franklin was involved.

But it’s of interest before that. You have these different kinds of colonies in America with either royal charters, or proprietary colonies where a family like the Penns would have a charter from the king, but they could run their colony in some ways independently of the government’s apparatus. And that created all sorts of struggles in Pennsylvania, when the governor of Pennsylvania Colony is insisting on certain views, and the legislature wants other things from the proprietors. And a conflict between the executive branch and the legislative branch of the government follows. That, in some ways sets into motion tensions similar to those between say, the monarchy and parliament, or even the British government and the legislature.

“Franklin may have been a dissembler, or insincere in some ways. And that characterizes his diplomacy also in London and Paris at times”

Those political dynamics are very useful to understand. But Tully also explores the different kinds of Protestants in particular—although there were also Jews and Roman Catholics in the colony. Penn set it up so there was great religious freedom, unlike other colonies that were either Anglican or Puritan. And, what wound up happening is that oftentimes the political polarization in Pennsylvania mapped onto different strains of Protestantism, with the Quaker Party being one group but with Presbyterians, reformed Lutherans, and more traditional Protestant groups, going with the Proprietary Party. Franklin was in the mix of that trying to situate himself with those groups.

In the French and Indian War (or Seven Years War), which takes place between 1756 and 1763, which is a major turning point in relations between France and Britain, Britain gained control of a big swathe of North America after victory. The Quakers were ambivalent about that war, because they are pacifists and they were in this difficult situation of asking how they should defend a colony while holding on to Quaker beliefs at the same time?

Franklin is really good at negotiating the Quaker interests with other groups and he may have been a dissembler, or insincere in some ways. And that characterizes his diplomacy also in London and Paris at times. But he was pretty good at reading people and getting things done. So that’s the reason why I think that book is so useful.

What’s his present day reputation in the United States?

He’s out of the news, in large measure. There’s not a lot written about Franklin these days. But during the anti-slavery protests surrounding various monuments last summer, at the University of Pennsylvania, where the main administrative building is called Franklin Hall, they didn’t demand that his statue be taken down.

There’s also a statue on campus of George Whitefield, the evangelist, Anglican priest, famous for the first Great Awakening, who went back on his views of slavery to introduce slavery into Georgia. He used slaves to help with his orphanage in Georgia. The University of Pennsylvania decided during the controversy to take the Whitefield statue down. But they also decided to keep Franklin up, even though Franklin had slaves at one point in his life, and even traveled to London with those slaves. But he was later a president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, toward the end of his life.

I think if you want to think about the American character, the American can-do spirit. Franklin embodies that America. When students in my courses encounter Franklin, they encounter somebody who explains a lot about the way America works. And there’s a way in which Franklin’s writing about Philadelphian and American politics or about family life captures something about the way American society works. And so in that way, he’s evergreen.

May 19, 2021

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is a native of suburban Philadelphia and teaches history at Hillsdale College.  He trained in U.S. history at Johns Hopkins University and is the author and editor of twenty books about religion, politics, and higher education in America.  He lives with his wife, Ann, and three cats in Hillsdale, Michigan.

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