brief biography of benjamin franklin

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.

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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

Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father, member of the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and signer of the United States Constitution. Arguably, the most accomplished individual in American history, he was also a successful printer, publisher, scientist, inventor, diplomat, civic leader, statesman, philosopher, and helped negotiate French support during the American Revolutionary War.

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Image Source: Wikimedia.

Biography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was an American printer, scientist, inventor, politician, diplomat, statesman, author, and one of the most colorful characters of the American Revolution.

Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1706 to Josiah Franklin and Abiah Folger. He was the 15th and youngest son of Josiah’s seventeen children.

Franklin learned the printing trade while working for the weekly Boston newspaper, New England Courant . The paper was owned by his brother James. When the brothers quarreled over letters young Benjamin published under a pseudonym, he left Boston before his apprenticeship expired. Franklin ran off to Philadelphia.

To London and Back

In Philadelphia, Franklin worked as a printer at several different shops. Encouraged by the Governor of Pennsylvania, Sir William Keith, he traveled to London to purchase equipment to start his own newspaper. Unfortunately, this did not work out and Franklin found employment as a typesetter in the Smithfield area of London. A Quaker merchant, Thomas Denham, loaned him the money for passage on a ship back to Philadelphia.  In debt to Denham, Franklin worked in his shop until he passed away.

Franklin in Philadelphia

Franklin formally attended school for less than three years, but he read a considerable amount and in 1727 he created the Junto. The Junto was a group of “like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community.” The members of the Junto created a library, which eventually led to the creation of the Library Company. In 1731, Franklin chartered the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Marriage to Deborah Read

In 1730, Franklin married Deborah Read by common-law and adopted his illegitimate son, William. The identity of William’s mother remains unknown. Franklin had two other children with Deborah, Francis, born in 1732, and Sarah, born in 1743.

Business Success and Political Connections

Franklin began saving money and became a successful businessman selling books and publishing the weekly Pennsylvania Gazette . He also clerked for the House of Representatives and promoted civic enterprises, such as the library, that still thrive today. He was on good terms with Lord Thomas Penn and was rewarded with local offices. He aligned himself with Penn’s secret agent, William Smith, in opposition to a large influx of German immigrants from the Rhineland, which seemed to threaten English sovereignty. The Germans had been aided by the Quakers in their move to the colony, and in return, the Germans supported Quaker politicians. Franklin was ambivalent toward the Quakers, who were pacifists. Although he respected their toleration, he hated their pacifism. During King George’s War (1744–1748), he organized an extralegal military association that helped him gain popular support, to the dismay of Penn, who feared popular leaders.

Franklin Gains Fame with the Kite Experiment

Franklin’s most famous scientific experiment is likely that of flying a kite in a thunderstorm with a key attached to a piece of twine. The purpose of the experiment was to prove that lightning is a form of electricity. He published the proposal for the experiment in 1750, although there is some debate as to whether or not he actually conducted the experiment himself, due to the danger of electrocution. His experiments and research into electricity, a new science at the time, led the London Royal Society to award him the Copley Gold Medal. As a result, his name became well-known both in America and abroad.

Deputy Postmaster and Pennsylvania Assembly

Franklin was appointed as deputy postmaster of the colonies in 1753 and served in that capacity until 1774. During his tenure, he made the post offices profitable and essentially franchised several printers by supplying them with equipment on a profit-sharing basis. In 1751 he was elected to the Assembly, where he had to cooperate with the dominant Quakers. In 1755 he persuaded German farmers to rent their heavy wagons to Major General Edward Braddock for his doomed campaign against the French and Fort Duquesne.

Albany Congress and Plan of Union

In 1754, the  French and Indian War , pitting Great Britain against France and its allies from the Native Tribes, loomed on the horizon.  Sensing the need to strengthen the alliance with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy , British officials called for a conference between the American colonies and Iroquois leaders in Albany, New York. Franklin was selected as a delegate from Pennsylvania for the Albany Congress .

The most significant part of the conference was the development of the Albany Plan of Union , which Franklin proposed. The plan outlines a permanent federation of the colonies, as a means to reform colonial-imperial relations and to more effectively address shared colonial interests. The plan was introduced on June 19, and the commissioners adopted a final version on July 10.

Despite the support of those who attended the Albany Congress, the Albany Plan of Union was rejected by King George II and by all of the individual colonial governments that considered its adoption. The Congress and the plan were significant milestones, however, as they marked the first official attempts to develop inter-colonial cooperation among the American colonies.

Franklin Organizes and Leads Pennsylvania Militia

During the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Franklin served in the Pennsylvania Assembly. He helped to organize a legal militia and was chosen as its commanding colonel. He used Tun Tavern in Philadelphia as a recruiting station. The Pennsylvania Militia was organized as Pennsylvania’s 103rd Artillery and 11th Infantry Regiment at the Continental Army. He set up a ring of garrisoned forts for defense against Indian raids and eventually learned that the Indians were upset over being cheated out of their lands by Lord Thomas Penn. This led to Franklin eventually turning against the Quakers.

Franklin Opposes the Stamp Act

In 1764, Franklin found himself embroiled in disputes between members of the Pennsylvania Assembly and the heirs of William Penn. He was dispatched to London where in 1765 he was on hand to voice American opposition to the Stamp Act . His testimony to the House of Commons helped lead to its repeal and he emerged as a leading voice for American interests in England.

Franklin Leaks Massachusetts Letters

For several years, Franklin traveled throughout Europe, where his popularity continued to grow due to his eccentric personality. Yet while in England he grew weary of corruption and was able to obtain the private letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor, Andrew Oliver. These letters made it clear that they were encouraging the British to come down hard on the rights of the citizens of Boston. He left London in March 1775.

Second Continental Congress and Declaration of Independence

Upon arriving in America, he became a leading figure in the Second Continental Congress , which led to the Declaration of Independence . He served on the Committee of Five, which was tasked with drafting a document that would proclaim to the world the reasons for removing the colonies from the British Empire. The other members were John Adams , Thomas Jefferson , Robert Livingston , and Roger Sherman . Jefferson produced a draft that was reviewed by Adams and Franklin, who recommended minor changes. The document was presented to Congress on Friday, June 28, 1776. At the signing, he supposedly said “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Peace Negotiations

In December of 1776, Franklin was sent to France to serve as an ambassador of the United States, in an effort to gain aid from the French in the Revolutionary War. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which brought peace with Great Britain.  He returned to the United States in 1785.

Governor of Pennsylvania

On October 18, 1785, he was elected the sixth President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, a role that is equivalent to Governor. He replaced fellow Founding Father John Dickinson . He was re-elected to a full term on October 29, 1785, then again in the Fall of 1786 and 1787.

Constitutional Convention of 1787

In 1787 he served as a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention which resulted in the United States Constitution. Franklin signed the Constitution, becoming the only Founding Father to have signed the four major documents that helped to found and establish the nation. The other documents were the Declaration of Independence, Treaty of Paris, and Treaty of Alliance with France.

Supporter of Abolition

In his later years, Franklin wrote several essays concerning the abolition of slavery. Those essays were, An Address to the Public , published in 1789, A Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks , also in 1789, and  Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade in 1790.

On April 17, 1790, Franklin passed away. His body was laid to rest at Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia.

Significance

Benjamin Franklin is important because he helped write the Declaration of Independence, was involved in negotiating the Treaty of Alliance with France, helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris with Britain that ended the American Revolutionary War, participated in the Constitutional Convention, and signed the United States Constitution. Very few Americans participated in so many key moments in American history and the founding of the nation.

Founding Father

Benjamin Franklin is considered a Founding Father for all of his dedication to the cause of American liberty and freedom. He represented American interests in Europe during the Stamp Act Crisis and after the War for Independence. During the war, he played a vital role in helping shape the direction of the Second Continental Congress, which culminated in the Declaration of Independence. It is quite possible that no other American played as important a role in the political formation of the United States of America as Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin — Quick Facts

• Born January 17, 1706, Boston, Massachusetts.
• Attended Boston Latin School from 1714 to 1716.
• Began working as a printer apprenticed to his brother from 1718 to 1723.
• Moved o Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1724.
• Bought the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729.
• Began publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1733.
• Helped launch the American Philosophical Society in 1743.
• Conducted experiments and verified the nature of electricity during the 1750s.
• Credited with inventing the Franklin Stove, bifocal glasses, and the lightning rod.
• Was instrumental in establishing a library, hospital, fire company, and an insurance company in the City of Philadelphia.
• Moved to London and represented the interests of Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts before Parliament from 1757 to 1775.
• Elected to the Second Continental Congress and worked on a committee of five that helped to draft the Declaration of Independence.
• Signed Declaration of Independence in 1776.
• Served as the American Ambassador to France during the American Revolution and during the Confederation Era.
• Signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution, in 1783.
• Served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and signed the U.S. Constitution.
• Died April 17, 1790, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• Buried at Christ Church Burial Ground, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Benjamin Franklin Quotes from “Poor Richard’s Almanack”

“God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.”

“God helps them that help themselves.”

“Work as if you were to live 100 years; pray as if you were to die tomorrow.”

“Keep your eyes open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”

“My father convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest.”

“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.”

“Virtue alone is sufficient to make a man great, glorious and happy.”

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

• Content for this article has been compiled and edited by Randal Rust .

Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, Inventor, Statesman

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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. 
• American History Timeline: 1726 to 1750
• History of the United States Postal Service
• The Pennsylvania Colony: A Quaker Experiment in America
• American History Timeline - 1701 - 1725
• Thomas Paine, Political Activist and Voice of the American Revolution
• Brief History of the Declaration of Independence
• Committees of Correspondence: Definition and History
• Inventions and Scientific Achievements of Benjamin Franklin
• Continental Congress: History, Significance, and Purpose
• The Albany Plan of Union
• Major Events That Led to the American Revolution
• Benjamin Day
• Benjamin Franklin Printables
• Biography of Benjamin Banneker, Author and Naturalist
• Samuel Morse and the Invention of the Telegraph
• American Revolution: General Sir Henry Clinton

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

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A Brief Biography of Benjamin Franklin

By Tim Lambert

His Early Life

Benjamin Franklin was a writer and diplomat. He was also an inventor. Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 17 January 1706. His father Josiah Franklin was a soap maker. Benjamin went to school for only a very short time. When he was 10 he started work in his father’s shop. Later Benjamin was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer.

Benjamin soon argued with James and in 1723 he went to Philadelphia where he found a job in a print shop. In 1724 Franklin then went to London to buy print equipment. He returned to Philadelphia in 1726 and shortly afterward he started his own printing business. Benjamin Franklin prospered and in 1730 he bought a newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette. In 1732 he began publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac. Meanwhile, in 1730 Benjamin married a woman named Deborah Read.

The Statesman

Franklin was clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1736 to 1751. He was a member of the assembly from 1751 to 1764. He was deputy postmaster for the colonies from 1753 to 1774. Franklin also invented a kind of metal stove in 1742. According to legend in June 1752 Franklin experimented with a kite in a thunderstorm.

In 1757 Franklin went to England as a diplomat as relations between Britain and the North American colonies deteriorated. Franklin spent the years 1757-1762 and 1764-1775 in England. He returned to America in 1775. Franklin was elected to the Second Continental Congress and he signed the Declaration of Independence.

At the end of 1776, Franklin was sent to France as a diplomat. France declared war on Britain in support of the colonies in 1778. Franklin returned to France in 1785. Benjamin Franklin died on 17 April 1790. He was 84.

There is a crater on the Moon named after Franklin.

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Benjamin Franklin

• Occupation: Statesman and Inventor
• Born: January 17, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: April 17, 1790 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Best known for: Founding father of the United States

• Ben was his dad's 15th child of 17 total children!
• Ben Franklin was the first Postmaster General of the United States.
• Later in life, Ben set his slaves free and became a fighter for the freedom of slaves.
• He didn't patent any of his many inventions, letting people use his ideas for free.
• Franklin became fairly wealthy from the publishing of Poor Richard's Almanack .
• He loved playing chess and was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1999.
• As a teenager, Franklin had several letters published in his brother's newspaper under the fake name "Silence Dogood." His brother was not happy when he found out.
• During his life, Franklin's views on slavery changed dramatically. In 1748, he purchased his first slave, but by 1760 he had freed all of his slaves. He became a staunch abolitionist and spent much of his later life campaigning for an end to slavery.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

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APPENDIX No. VII.

Proceedings of Congress, and of the National Assembly of France, on the Death of Franklin.

THE Congress of the United States was in session at New York at the time of Franklin's death. On receiving the news of that event, they passed the following joint resolution.

"The House, being informed of the decease of Benjamin Franklin, a citizen whose native genius was not more an ornament to human natural than his various exertions of it have been precious to science, to freedom, and to his country, do resolve, as a mark of the veneration due to his memory, that the members wear the customary badge of mourning for one month."

Honors still more distinguished were paid to him by the National Assembly of France. On the morning after the intelligence reached Paris, June 11th, when the Assembly was convened, Mirabeau rose and spoke as follows.

"Franklin is dead ! The genius, that freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe, has returned to the bosom of the Divinity.

"The sage whom two worlds claim as their own, the man for whom the history of science and the history of empires contend with each other, held, without doubt, a high rank in the human race.

"Too long have political cabinets taken formal note of the death of those who were great only in their funeral panegyrics. "Too long has the etiquette of courts prescribed hypocritical mourning. Nations should wear mourning only for their benefactors. The representatives of nations should recommend to their homage none but the heroes of humanity.

"The Congress has ordained, throughout the United States, a mourning of one month for the death of Franklin; and, at this moment, America is paying this tribute of veneration and gratitude to one of the fathers of her Constitution.

"Would it not become as, Gentlemen, to join in this religious act, to bear a part in this homage, rendered, in the face of the world, both to the rights of man, and to the philosopher who has most contributed to extend their sway over the whole earth? Antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty genius, who, to the advantage of mankind, compassing in his mind the heavens and the earth, was able to restrain alike thunderbolts and tyrants. Europe, enlightened and free, owes at least a token of remembrance and regret to one of the greatest men who have ever been engaged in the service of philosophy and of liberty."

I propose that it be decreed, that the National Assembly, during, three days, shall wear mourning for Benjamin Franklin."

Rochefoucauld and Lafayette rose immediately to Second the motion. The Assembly adopted it by acclamation ; and afterwards decreed, that, on the 14th of June, they should go into mourning for three days; that the discourse of M. Mirabeau should be printed; and that the President should write a letter of condolence on the occasion to the Congress of the United States. The following letter was accordingly written, and directed to President Washington.

Paris, 20 June, 1790. ×

"MR. PRESIDENT,

"The National Assembly has during three days worn mourning for Benjamin Franklin, your fellow-citizen, your friend, and one of the most useful of your cooperators in the establishment of American liberty. They charge me to communicate their resolution to the Congress of the United States. In consequence, I have the honor to address to you, Mr. President, an extract from the proceedings of their session of the 11th, which contains the deliberation.

"The National Assembly have not been stopped in their decree by the consideration that Franklin was a stranger. Great men are the fathers of universal humanity; their loss ought to he felt, as a common misfortune, by all the tribes of the great human family; and it belongs without doubt to a nation still affected by all the sentiments, which accompany the achievement of their liberty, and which owes its enfranchisement essentially to the progress of the public reason, to be the first to give the example of the filial gratitude of the people towards their true benefactors. Besides that these ideas and this example are so proper to disseminate a happy emulation of patriotism, and thus to extend more and more the empire of reason and virtue, which could not fail promptly to determine a body, devoted to the most important legislative combinations, charged with assuring to the French the rights of men and citizens, it has believed, without doubt, that fruitful and great truths were likewise numbered among the rights of man.

"The name of Benjamin Franklin will be immortal in the records of freedom and philosophy; but it is more particularly dear to a country, where, conducted by the most sublime mission, this venerable man knew how very soon to acquire an infinite number of friends and admirers, as well by the simplicity and sweetness of his manners, as by the purity of his principles, the extent of his knowledge, and the charms of his mind.

"It will be remembered, that every success, which he obtained in his important negotiation, was applauded and celebrated (so to express it) all over France, as so many crowns conferred on genius and virtue.

"Even then the sentiment of our rights existed in the bottom of our souls. It was easily perceived, that it feelingly mingled in the interest which we took in behalf of America, and in the public vows which we preferred for your liberty.

"At last the hour of the French has arrived; we love to think, that the citizens of the United States have not regarded with indifference our steps towards liberty. Twenty-six millions of men breaking their chains, and seriously occupied in giving themselves a durable constitution, are not unworthy of the esteem of a generous people, who have preceded them in that noble career.

"We hope they will learn with interest the funeral homage, which we have rendered to the Nestor of America. May this solemn act of fraternal friendship serve more and more to bind the tie, which ought to unite two free nations! May the common enjoyment of liberty shed itself over the whole globe, and become an indissoluble chain of connexion among all the people of the earth ! For ought they not to perceive, that they will march more steadfastly and more certainly to their true happiness, in understanding and loving each other, than in being jealous and fighting? I

"May the Congress of the United States and the National Assembly of France be the first to furnish this fine spectacle to the world! And may the individuals of the two nations connect themselves by a mutual affection, worthy of the friendship which unites the two men, at this day most illustrious by their exertions for liberty, WASHINGTON and LAFAYETTE!

"Permit me, Mr. President, to offer on this occasion my particular homage of esteem and admiration.

"I have the honor to be, with respectful consideration, Mr. President, your most humble and most obedient servant,

" SIEYES, President ."

Washington transmitted this letter to Congress, and it was resolved, that he should be requested "to communicate to the National Assembly of France the peculiar sensibility of Congress to the tribute paid to the memory of Benjamin Franklin by the enlightened and free representatives of a great nation." In compliance with this request, Washington wrote an answer, dated January 27th, 1791, in which he said;

"I received with particular satisfaction, and imparted to Congress, the communication made by the President's letter of the 20th of June last, in the name of the National Assembly of France. So peculiar and so signal an expression of the esteem of that respectable body for a citizen of the United States, whose eminent and patriotic services are indelibly engraved on the minds of his countrymen, cannot fail to be appreciated by them as it ought to be. On my part, I assure you, Sir, that I am sensible of all its value."

Two days after the decree of the National Assembly, M. de la Rochefoucauld read to the Society, called the "Society of 1789," a paper on the life and character of Franklin. The members then voted, that they would wear mourning for three days, and that the bust of Franklin should be placed in the hall of the Assembly, with this inscription. " Homage rendered by the unanimous voice of the Society of 1789 to Benjamin Franklin, the object of the admiration and regrets of the friends of liberty ."

The Commune of Paris ordered a public celebration in honor of the memory of Franklin. On this occasion the Abbe Fauchet pronounced a Civic Eulogy ( Eloge Civique ) in the presence of a very large concourse of auditors, consisting of the deputies of the National Assembly, the deputies of the departments, the presidents of the districts, the public officers and electors of Paris, and private citizens. The ceremony took place in the vast round a of the Grain-Market, which was hung in black, and decorated in an imposing manner. The auditors were all dressed in mourning. The Abbe Fauchet's Eulogy was printed, and twenty-six copies were forwarded to Congress, with a letter from the President of the Commune of Paris, which were acknowledged by the following vote.

"The House being highly sensible of the polite attention of the Commons of Paris, in directing, copies of an Eulogium lately pronounced before them, as a tribute to the illustrious memory of Benjamin Franklin, to be transmitted to Congress; Resolved, that the Speaker do accordingly communicate the sense of the House thereon to the President of the Commons of Paris."

Condorcet pronounced a Eulogy of Franklin ( Eloge de Franklin ) before the French, Academy of Sciences, on the 13th of November, 1790. This discourse is very elaborate, full in its details, able, and eloquent.

A society of printers in Paris celebrated the event in a novel manner. They assembled in a large ball, in which there was a column surmounted by a bust of Franklin, with a civic, crown. Below the bust were arrayed printers' cases and types, with a press, and all the apparatus of the art, which the philosopher had practised with such distinguished success. While one of the fraternity pronounced a eulogy on Franklin, several printers were employed in composing it at the cases; and, as soon as it was finished, impressions of it were taken, and distributed to the large concourse of people, who had been drawn together as spectators of the ceremony. ×

The American Philosophical Society honored the memory of their President by appointing Dr. William Smith to deliver a Eulogy; and a similar honor was conferred in Yale College by a Latin Oration from President Stiles. Both these performances have been published.

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Chronological events in the life of Benjamin Franklin

1706 Sunday January 17: Benjamin Franklin was born in the City of Boston . His parents were Josiah Franklin and Abiah Folger.

1714-1715 Attended South Grammar School ( Boston Latin ).

1715-1716 Attended George Brownell’s English School.

1717 Franklin was briefly indentured as a cutler. As an avid swimmer Franklin invented swim fins for his hands.

1718 At age 12 started apprenticeship as a printer in his older brother, James, printing shop.

1720 Moved out of his home into a boarding house.

1721 Brother James started publishing The New England Courant , the first American newspaper to use literary content and humorous essays.

1722 Franklin published his first letter in the Courant under the pen name of “Silence Dogood”, a fictional widow of a country minister who has strong opinions. He became a vegetarian.

1723 His brother James was charged with contempt against law authorities. Benjamin took over the printing business while James served time in jail.

Leaved Boston for New York where he failed to find employment. He proceeded to Philadelphia where he rented a room in John Read’s house. Franklin eventually married his daughter Deborah Read in 1730.

In Philadelphia he found work as a printer with Samuel Keimer.

1724 Benjamin returned to Boston to open a printing shop but his father did not loan him the money. Returned to Philadelphia and under the encouragement of Provincial Pennsylvania Governor William Keith traveled to London to buy printing equipment. His loan never materialized and was unable to travel back to America.

In London he was employed by printers Samuel Palmer and John Watts.

1725 Published his first pamphlet in London “A Dissertation on Liberty & Necessity, Pleasure and Pain”.

1726 Franklin returned to Philadelphia with a loan provided by Thomas Denham. To pay his debt he worked as a clerk, shopkeeper and bookkeeper in Denham’s imported goods store.

He returned to work for Samuel Keimer printing shop.

1727 Suffered his first pleurisy attack.

In Philadelphia Franklin founded the Junto Club , a group of young men who met on Friday evenings to discuss intellectual, personal, business and community topics. The Junto Club lasted until 1765.

1728 Franklin and Hugh Meredith opened their own printing shop with a loan from Meredith’s father.

1729 Purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette from former employer Samuel Keimer. The Gazette became one of the most prominent publications in Colonial America.

1730 Elected the official government printer for Pennsylvania.

Franklin bought Meredith’s share in the printing shop and became the sole owner.

Joined in common-law marriage with Deborah Read.

William Franklin is born out of wedlock to an unidentified mother.

1731 Franklin joined the Freemasons

Published “Apology for Printers” defending freedom of the press.

Entered a partnership with Thomas Whitmarsh in South Carolina. Franklin provided printing equipment in return for one third of the profits over six years, creating the first commercial franchise .

1732 Benjamin Franklin and Deborah Read have their first child, Francis Folger Franklin.

Published the first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack  under the pseudonym “Richard Saunders”. It became an instant best seller in the colonies.

1734 Elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Mason of Pennsylvania.

1735 Brother James died in Newport, Rhode Island.

1736 Franklin was appointed clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly.

His son, Francis Folger, died of smallpox at age 4.

Helped organize the Union Fire Company of Philadelphia which trained and organized firemen.

1737 Appointed Postmaster of Philadelphia, his service continued until 1753.

1739 Started campaign to clean Philadelphia’s docks, slaughter houses and tan yards.

1740 Became the official printer for New Jersey.

1741 Advertised his first model of the Pennsylvania fireplace for sale, also known as the Franklin Stove. He declined on principle on taking a patent for the sole right to sell it.

1743 Benjamin Franklin and Deborah Read had a daughter, Sarah who they call “Sally”.

1745 Benjamin’s father, Josiah Franklin, died at age 87.

Started electrical experiments after receiving an electric tube from Peter Collision.

1747 Helped organize a volunteer militia .

1748 Took David Hall as partner and Franklin retired from the daily operations of his printing business.

1749 Wrote and published pamphlet “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania”.

Helped organize the Academy of Philadelphia which later became the University of Pennsylvania .

1750 Franklin had first gout attack.

1751 Franklin, along with Dr. Thomas Bond, founded Pennsylvania Hospital , the nation’s first hospital, to care for the “sick-poor and insane of Philadelphia”.

1752 Abiah Folger, Franklin’s mother dies in Boston at age 84.

Conducted kite experiments by flying a kite in a thunderstorm proving that lightning is electrical. He published how to conduct the experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette .

Designed a flexible catheter for his brother who suffered from bladder stone.

1753 Appointed joint Deputy Postmaster General of the Colonies.

1754 To make a point about their own defense and colonial unity with the British against the French and Indians, Franklin printed his famous cartoon “Join, or Die” in the Pennsylvania Gazette. A decade later the cartoon would mean colonial unity against the British.

Attended the Albany Congress as representative of Pennsylvania proposing common defense for all colonies. The plan was rejected.

1757 Franklin was elected to go to England as a colonial agent.

1762 Awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Law from Oxford University.

Invented the glass armonica. Mozart and Beethoven later composed for it.

Mapped postal routes in the colonies.

1764 Franklin lost his seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly .

Returned to London as colonial agent.

1765 The Stamp Act was passed by the House of Commons.

Charted the Gulf Stream .

1766 At the expiry of his partnership with David Hall, Franklin sold his entire printing business to him.

1767 Daughter Sarah married Richard Bache, a Philadelphia merchant.

1769 The American Philosophical Society elected Franklin as its president. He was elected every year until his death.

1771 Began writing his autobiography.

1773 Hutchinson Affair .

1774 Deborah Read, his wife, died in Philadelphia.

1775 Elected as Pennsylvania delegate to the Second Continental Congress.

Elected as Postmaster General of the Colonies.

King George III declared the American colonies in rebellion.

1776 Franklin was appointed as part of the committee of 5 who drafted the Declaration of Independence .

Appointed to the French Court as one of the commissioners of the Continental Congress.

1778 Negotiated Treaty of Alliance with France . France declared war on Great Britain.

1783 John Adams , John Jay and Benjamin Franklin signed the Treaty of Paris which put an end to the war between the colonies and Great Britain.

1784 Franklin wrote the essay “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” proposing the innovative concept of Daylight Savings Time.

1785 Franklin described his invention of bifocal glasses .

Returned to the United States after 18 of years of service in Europe.

Elected President of the Pennsylvania Executive Council.

1786 Invented instrument for taking books down from a library shelf.

1787 Signed the United States Constitution.

1788 Franklin wrote his will leaving most of his estate to his daughter Sarah.

1789 Elected president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

Submitted the first antislavery petition before the U.S. Congress.

1790 April 17 – Franklin died at age 84 . He is buried in Christ Church burial ground in Philadelphia . The cause of his death was pleurisy.

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Gary Brown: Financial advice from Ben Franklin remains relevant

"I have heard, that nothing gives an author so great pleasure, as to find his works respectfully quoted by others."

Benjamin Franklin said that to a "Courteous Reader" at the beginning of his writing, "The Way to Wealth.” So, I guess I've got permission from the great statesman to quote away from the booklet, which, when it first was published in 1758 was used as a preface to Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack."

So, "The Way to Wealth" is sort of ironic, by its title. At least it was for "Poor Richard."

When "The Way to Wealth" was republished in 1986 by Applewood Books, it was a hand-size, 30-page hardcover pocketbook that "summed up" Franklin's "previously published thoughts" on how to achieve financial success.

"This essay has become one of the most important and enduring business books ever published," said the people at Applewood in their introduction. "It has been printed and reprinted almost 400 times and has been translated into almost every language."

All of which made me a little surprised and I wondered, if it was so helpful and successful, why I found it on the "Free Books" rack at a library. You'd think that the best way to wealth would have been for the library people to sell it for at least 50 cents or a dollar.

Avoid unneeded purchases

The act of buying, especially unnecessary items, was one of Franklin's main beefs, although he wrote about it with far more eloquence.

"Buy what thou has no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessaries," he wrote. "Many a one, for the sake of finery on the back, have gone with a hungry belly, and half-starved their families; 'Silks and satins, scarlets and velvets, put out the kitchen fire,' as Poor Richard says. These are not the necessaries of life. ...And yet only because they look pretty, how many want to have them."

That sort of makes me feel guilty for buying that scarlet-and-gray golf jacket the other day – now my third golf jacket on the coat rack – no matter how much I support The Ohio State University's sports teams and regardless of the eye-catching beauty of the colors.

"If you would be wealthy, think of saving, as well as of getting," he explained. "Always taking out of the pot, and never putting in, one soon comes to the bottom."

When one reaches the bottom of a pot or the end of his money, both must be replenished ... at a cost.

"'If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some; for he that goes a borrowing, goes a sorrowing,' as Poor Richard says. ... The day comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you are able to satisfy it; or, if you bear your debt in mind, the term which at first seemed so long, will, as it lessens, appear extremely short.

"Those have a short Lent, who owe money to be paid by Easter."

We quote Franklin often

OK, by now many of us are saying, "Lighten up Ben; have some fun in life."

Trust me, few had more fun during Revolutionary times than Benjamin Franklin. A biography at the website for the National Park Service calls him "charming, naturally sociable, and witty."

Still, he wasn't joking with his words concerning saving and spending. Having arrived "almost penniless in Philadelphia in 1723" to begin his work as a printer, Franklin knew both about being broke and thriving thereafter.

His secrets to improving one's financial state were to be industrious and keep a positive outlook.

"Industry pays debts, while despair increases them," he wrote.

We've heard and repeated other Franklin quotations. They're all in "The Way to Wealth."

"Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

"Never leave till tomorrow what you can do today."

"Little strokes fell great oaks."

"Since you are not sure of a minute, do not throw away an hour."

"Keep your shop and your shop will keep you."

"A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two different things."

Franklin's words ring true even today.

The "Way to Wealth," as it turns out, is timeless.

Reach Gary at [email protected] . On Twitter: @gbrownREP.

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This Day In History : May 23

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Benjamin Franklin reveals his design for bifocal glasses

In a letter dated May 23, 1785, Benjamin Franklin reveals his design for what would later be called bifocal glasses. The Pennsylvania inventor, printer, author, diplomat and American Founding Father had grown tired of alternating between two different pairs of glasses to help his near or far vision. So he came up with an idea to, quite literally, split the difference. Franklin is widely credited as the inventor of bifocals.

In the letter to his friend George Whatley, a London merchant and pamphleteer, Franklin includes a sketch of his new invention, saying that he found the bifocals particularly useful while dining in France. With them, he wrote, he could see both the food he was eating and the facial expressions of people seated across the table, which helped him better interpret their words—crucial for a diplomat navigating a foreign country.

“I therefore had formerly two pair of spectacles, which I shifted occasionally, as in travelling I sometimes read, and often wanted to regard the prospects,” Franklin wrote. “Finding this change troublesome…I had the glasses cut, and half of each kind associated in the same circle. By this means, as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready. ”

The bifocal sketch came the year after Franklin made a special request to his optician: Slice in half the lenses of his reading glasses and long-distance glasses, then combine them together with the distance lenses on top and reading glasses on the bottom. Franklin called the glasses style “double spectacles,” later known as bifocals.

Like with his other inventions—including the lightning rod, swim fins and urinary catheter—Franklin had little interest in making money. He wanted his bifocal breakthrough to help other members of the community struggling with vision deterioration. Franklin never patented any of his inventions, intent on sharing them freely.

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'Franklin' Ending Explained: Benjamin Franklin seeks America's independence with a strategic move

Contains spoilers for 'Franklin'

PARIS, FRANCE: Apple TV+'s 'Franklin' has wrapped up its run with the eighth episode, which aired on May 17, 2024. It marks the conclusion of Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic endeavors in France to secure America's freedom.

The series, making its premiere on April 12, 2024, introduces Academy-award winner Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin , one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

During his unofficial mission in France, he faced several adversities. From Edward Bancroft's (Daniel Mays) betrayal to John Adams' (Eddie Marsan) incooperation, the series explores his prolonged stay, in detail.

Benjamin Franklin strikes a deal with Britain in Apple TV+'s 'Franklin'

In 'Franklin' Episode 8 , Benjamin Franklin sits down with British embassies for negotiations. In the first round of negotiations, Franklin is hesitant to sign a deal with Britain as he recalls his promise to the French.

However, Franklin soon realizes that his ultimate loyalty lies with America and his primary motive is to do what's best for his country.

Therefore, during the second round of negotiations, Franklin finally agrees to Britain's peace terms as it brings America more benefits that a deal with France would.

Signing The Treaty of Paris of 1763, thus officially marks the end of the American Revolutionary War, announcing America to be a free, sovereign, and independent state.

Benjamin Franklin's betrayal upsets Count of Vergennes in 'Franklin' finale episode

Soon after the negotiations are sealed, Benjamin Franklin sends an update on the events to the Count of Vergennes (Thibault de Montalembert).

Count of Vergennes is clearly upset with the betrayal. However, upon meeting Franklin, he is reminded of his own betrayal that he was planning by sending Gerard to England for negotiations with Britain.

Thus they end their differences with Franklin asking Count of Vergennes for another loan of six million livres.

Benjamin Franklin forgives Edward Bancroft for his betrayal in Apple TV+'s 'Franklin'

In the finale episode, it is revealed that Franklin was aware of Edward Bancroft's betrayal.

After the treaty is signed and Franklin prepares to leave France, he confronts Bancroft about his loyalties to Britain.

While Bancroft stands in silence, Franklin praises him for his friendship and shakes hands with him.

Benjamin Franklin and Temple Franklin bid farewell in 'Franklin' finale episode

As Franklin prepares to sail to America, he gets a visit from his grandson, Temple Franklin (Noah Jupe).

Temple announces his decision to stay in France. Both of them bid an emotional farewell.

'Franklin' is available to stream on Apple TV+.

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