A plane departing Logan International roars overhead, and I’m reminded how Franklin regretted being born too soon: “It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried in a thousand years the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity & give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport.”
Nailed that one, Ben. I, on the other hand, regret being born too late. The future is a phantom, a mirage, tantalizingly close but always just out of reach, like those fifteen pounds I need to lose. No, when I’m able to purchase my portable solar-powered time machine on Amazon—order within the next three hours and receive it yesterday!—it is the past, not the future where I’ll be heading. I yearn for a time when there were still uncharted lands to explore, genuine adventures to be had, a time before Google Maps and packaged tours and selfies.
The part of me drawn to the past is the same part drawn to travel. Both are illuminating, clarifying experiences. Spending a single day in a foreign land reveals more about the place than reading a dozen books. Sadly, we can never truly know distant times. We forever remain outsiders, pressing our noses against the windows of the past. “The past is a foreign country,” said British writer Leslie Hartley. “They do things differently there.”
The uneasy relationship between past and present is on my mind as I snake my way to Boston’s waterfront, passing statues of Paul Revere and other Revolutionary heroes who populate the city’s Freedom Trail. To my left stands a phalanx of red brick condominiums and, to my right, a small flotilla of fiberglass-hulled sailboats. Straight ahead lie the frigid waters of Massachusetts Bay. Reaching into the time traveler’s bag of tricks, I squint and try to erase the condominiums and sailboats, imagining the bay as it looked during Franklin’s time.
The year is 1718. Boston is a water world. Life revolved around the sea and bay, as well as the many rivers and estuaries, ponds and lakes. The town had an excellent harbor, the largest in British North America. On any given day, a ship might arrive from some distant port of call: Brazil, Madeira, Barbados, Madagascar, and, of course, England. Loitering at the harbor, young Ben no doubt heard tales of nautical adventures. It must have been heady stuff for a boy who had never roamed more than a few miles from home. No wonder he yearned to “break away and get to sea.” But his father soon nixed the idea. Josiah Jr., one of Franklin’s many brothers, had become a sailor and was never heard from again. Josiah Sr. was not about to lose another son to the sea.
So Ben contented himself with exploring amphibious Boston. He was fond of Mill Pond, a salt marsh on the edge of the broad mouth of the Charles River. (Sadly, it is long gone, now the site of TD Garden, the arena where the Boston Celtics and Bruins play.) He spent a lot of time there, just like the other boys. But unlike these boys—and most other Bostonians, for that matter—Ben didn’t merely row on the water or fish in it. He dove in and swam.
He’d swim for hours at a time. He’d swim on and under the water and perform aquatic tricks that delighted onlookers. His upper-body strength was impressive. Modern bathing suits did not yet exist, so Franklin, like all boys and men of the day, swam naked. Women did not swim, at least not in public.
During the Classical Age, the ability to swim was considered a mark of education and common sense. The Romans had an expression: a good-for-nothing was someone who had not learned to read or swim. Swimming then fell out of favor for many centuries. During Ben’s time, few people, not even sailors, could swim. Colonial newspapers carried reports of regular drownings. There was, I think, another reason Franklin enjoyed swimming. It was a mildly subversive activity, prohibited on the Sabbath and seen as almost preternatural. The test for witches was whether they floated or sank. Mortals sank. Witches floated.
Franklin’s aquatic childhood didn’t just happen, of course. He had to learn how to swim, and there were no schools for that. He turned to a book, an odd little volume called The Art of Swimming Illustrated by Proper Figures with Advice for Bathing. It’s not exactly a bestseller these days, but I managed to get ahold of a copy, a reprint of the 1696 original.
On page 1, the author, a Frenchman named Melchisédech Thévenot, explains the book is intended for sailors and others who earn their living on the water but also those who want to swim for pleasure. What grabs my attention are not the words but the woodcut illustrations. They depict naked men striking various awkward poses in and above the water. A few look as though they might have something to do with swimming, but I can’t be sure. How, I wonder, did Franklin learn to swim by reading this book?
He didn’t. Ben knew when to read—and when to stop reading. He loved books but recognized their limitations. Book knowledge, valuable as it is, is imperfect. It is always, by definition, secondhand. By recognizing this, Franklin avoided the trap that befalls many book people. We confuse books with humans and, given a choice, would rather spend time with a book. It’s understandable. Unlike people, books don’t bully you or shame you. A book can’t break your heart. Ensconced between the covers, nobody can hurt you.
I wonder, if it wasn’t a book that taught Franklin to swim, what was it? I decide to return to the sidewalk mosaic commemorating the Latin School. I have a nagging feeling I missed something. I look closely and, sure enough, there it is: a quote from the school’s most famous dropout: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”
Experience. The word, the concept, mattered a lot to Franklin. It mattered as much, or more, than another word: experiment. No, that’s not quite right. In Franklin’s mind, the two words were nearly identical. So, too, in the dictionary. In most languages derived from Latin, the words experience and experiment are the same. Both entail, Merriam-Webster informs me, the “testing of possibilities.” But a diehard possibilian like Benjamin Franklin didn’t need a dictionary to tell him that.
Franklin was an empiricist. He believed all knowledge is acquired, not innate. We are born with hardware only, no preinstalled software. We obtain knowledge via our senses. The French philosopher René Descartes famously wrote, cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” Franklin and his fellow empiricists didn’t buy this. “I sense therefore I am” was their unofficial motto. What does this approach to life look like in action? Franklin liked to answer a question with a story, so I will too.
One of Franklin’s more ingenious experiments involved water and oil. He discovered you can calm turbulent waters by adding a small amount of oil. One day at a pond, he met a skeptic. How was such a thing possible? Franklin then demonstrated the “trick,” and with a showman’s flamboyance. The man was stunned.
“But what, sir,” he stammered, “should I derive from all this?”
“Nothing,” replied Franklin, “but what you see.”
Empiricism in a nutshell. For Franklin, experience wasn’t flimsy or trivial. It was another form of knowledge. Books can take you only so far. Not so with experience. You can question a book’s validity but not that of an experience. You can argue with a book. You can’t argue with an experience.
Consider happiness. How do researchers studying the emotion determine if someone is happy? They don’t deploy brain scans or any other technology. Instead, they ask people, “How happy are you these days, on a scale of one to ten?”
Many people find this approach suspect. Aren’t such self-reports subjective? Absolutely, but that doesn’t render them any less valid. Only the person experiencing happiness or sadness, or any other emotional state, is qualified to assess the intensity of these states. The term “subjective data” is not an oxymoron. A doctor, a good one at least, won’t dismiss a patient’s pain even if the MRI shows nothing amiss. We are all experts of ourselves, the author of our own book. It is a tale told one experience at a time, legible only to us.
I need to remind myself of this truth constantly. A case in point: my troubled relationship with my smartwatch. At first, we got along swimmingly. It could do everything: track my steps, calories, and sleep. It monitored my stress levels, my blood oxygen saturation, and my “body battery,” how much juice remained in my tank. It even told time.
But our relationship soon soured. It started with sleep tracking. Every morning, I’d wake to a sleep score that was alarmingly low. “You slept poorly last night,” my watch scolded. I felt like a failure before I brushed my teeth, a completed task my smug watch failed to acknowledge. Scrolling down, I learned of the dire consequences of my below-par sleep: “Your body did not recover very well,” my watch chided. “You will likely feel tired today.”
My watch was right. I did feel tired that day, but was it because I was truly tired or because my scheming watch had planted the idea in my mind?
“I slept terribly last night,” I’d tell my wife morning after morning. She was mildly sympathetic, but one day she snapped.
“How do you know you slept terribly?”
“My watch told me.”
She shot me that look, delivering an unspoken message: Are you going to trust a piece of technology strapped to your wrist or your own body?
She was right. I had outsourced my sense of well-being to an alien device. Who is to say whether my sleep was restorative or not? If I feel that I had a restful night’s sleep, isn’t that what matters? Franklin would answer yes. My experiential data are every bit as valid as my smartwatch’s data—more valid in fact.
Still, like a lover who can’t bear to say goodbye, I couldn’t part with my smartwatch. I craved its calorie counts and vibrating alarms. I craved its outside validation, even if it made me feel worse about myself. I’d wear it for a week, then stash it in a desk drawer the following week. And so it went for several months, until one day I discovered the hybrid watch: the mechanical hands of an analog watch combined with some of the tracking of a smart one. Like all hybrids, it is an imperfect compromise but I, an imperfect man, can live with that.
Young Ben trusted his taut and muscular gut. Waist-deep in the Mill Pond, naked and smartwatch-less, he experienced and experimented. Using Thévenot’s book as a guide, he mastered the simple strokes, then invented a few of his own, “aiming at the graceful and easy, as well as the useful.” I love that. It neatly sums up Franklin’s philosophy of life. Any activity worth doing must meet those two criteria: grace and utility. It is a rare combination, but when the graceful and the useful do merge, it is something to behold. Roger Federer’s backhand comes to mind. Not only is it powerful and graceful; it is powerful because it is graceful.
Can I swim? If managing not to drown qualifies as swimming then, yes, I can swim. My preferred stroke? The doggie paddle. It’s not the exertion part of swimming that trips me up but the water part. The truth is I don’t like water, never have. I wonder what this hydro-aversion says about me. Nothing good, I fear. The math is troubling. We humans are 60 percent water, so if I dislike water, does that mean I like only 40 percent of myself?
When I recall my early swimming lessons in suburban Baltimore, I get a queasy feeling. I remember only two details: the acrid hospital smell of chlorine, which to this day makes my heart race, and a particularly dreadful exercise called the “survival float.” The instructor told us to float on our stomachs, face down, with our arms outstretched above our heads. We were to raise our heads for oxygen as little as possible. No wonder I despise the water. How you learn to do something determines not only whether you master it but whether you enjoy it.
Young Ben, free from such draconian instruction, toyed with various ways of propelling his muscular body through the water more efficiently. Humans are well designed for swimming, with two exceptions: the palms of our hands and soles of our feet are too small, limiting our ability to generate power. Young Ben set about to remedy these hindrances. He constructed two oval boards that resembled painter’s palettes and added a hole for the thumb so he could affix them securely. “I pushed the edges of these forward, and I struck the water with their flat surfaces as I drew them back,” he recalled.
It worked. He swam faster! He was less successful when he fitted his feet with “a kind of sandals,” an early version of flippers. Franklin had the right idea but unfortunately was ahead of his time. Flexible rubber had not yet been invented.
Then there was his most daring aquatic experiment. One day, he wondered what would happen if he married his love of swimming with his love of kites. He waded into a local pond and launched the kite, while holding tight and lying on his back. “I was drawn along the surface of the water in a very agreeable manner,” he recalled. He had just invented an early form of windsurfing (or wind-swimming). He did not accomplish this by reading a book but by trial and error, by regularly attending the school of experience.
By inventing these new forms of water propulsion he had also invented new experiences, and it is these, not any newfangled device, that are the true product of all ingenuity. The greatest invention to emerge from the eighteenth century was not Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine or Eli Whitney’s cotton gin but an idea: happiness. Not in some nebulous afterlife, but happiness here and now. It is an idea that Franklin had much to say about.