I walk right by it, oblivious. The red brick building looks identical to the other red brick buildings lining Philadelphia’s Fifth Street—vaguely colonial but otherwise unremarkable. There is no obvious indication this is home to America’s oldest scholarly organization.
“Scholarly” doesn’t tell the whole story. Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society in 1743 with the aim of “promoting useful knowledge.” Of course. Never knowledge for its own sake, always useful knowledge.
Franklin is again looking down at me, this time from the top of the unremarkable red brick building, the small bust mocking anyone who tries to unmask him. Good luck, he says, before adding, from behind his Poor Richard guise, “Men and melons are hard to know.”
They sure are, Ben. I feel like a shopper adrift in the produce department, trying to commune with a melon and attracting disapproving looks from other shoppers.
Undaunted, I cross the street to a small museum run by the society. I’ll take a small museum over a large one any day. Small museums are intimate and digestible. They’re less likely to overwhelm or induce spasms of guilt for overlooking some LIFE-CHANGING exhibit. What? You visited the Met and didn’t see the ancient Egyptian paint-by-numbers exhibit? Cretin! Small museums, like small books or small portions, make you feel better, not worse, about yourself.
The current exhibit here is titled “Dr. Franklin: Citizen Scientist.” I smile, knowing the “Dr.” title is partly subterfuge, but I let it slide. I am focused on the “citizen scientist” part. It’s an intriguing combination. We don’t normally associate the two. Citizen soldier? Yes. Citizen Kane? Sure. But citizen scientist? The term, coined only in 1998, refers to crowdsourced research. Another term for citizen scientist is “free labor.”
I once spent a week as a citizen scientist. I was on an Earthwatch expedition in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest. Half a dozen citizen scientists and I helped actual Brazilian scientists plant trees and track the health of the rodent population in the rainforest, all in hopes of helping to stem climate change. It was difficult, dirty work. I molded table-tennis-sized balls of rodent bait, a mealy mush of bananas, peanut butter, and rancid meat that felt and smelled exactly how you’d expect it to feel and smell. I collected seeds, planted seeds, replanted seeds, watered seeds, and did other things to seeds that I now cannot recall but at the time felt meaningful. I sweated more than I had ever sweated in my life even though I showered more than I’ve ever showered. I weighed and measured and photographed numerous mammals, including Rodents of Unusual Size. I set animal traps and expunged slimy, encrusted lizard scat from them.
I had worked—with my hands. Not just any work but demanding, dirt-under-your-fingernails, tropical-sun-on-your-head, mosquitos-up-your-nose work. I was not paid for this work but had—and I realize this sounds crazy—paid for the privilege of doing it. I had (and this is the truly insane part) enjoyed the work, for I knew that in some minuscule yet undeniable way, I had made the world a better place: a slightly greener, cooler, healthier planet.
Ben would approve, I’m sure, of my spate as a citizen scientist. Technically speaking, though, he was neither. For the bulk of his long and useful life, he was a proud subject of the British Empire. As for “scientist,” the word didn’t exist in the eighteenth century. Franklin was a natural philosopher, a term that encompassed what today we call science. The two disciplines had yet to divorce, though the marriage was in trouble.
The difference between a scientist and a natural philosopher is more than nominative. The natural philosopher was not consigned to any one discipline. He (and it was almost always a he) pivoted effortlessly from chemistry to botany, from botany to ethics. All human knowledge was of a piece.
I step inside the small museum and find books from Franklin’s sprawling library: sturdy, leather-bound volumes that look like they will last forever. They just might. Books printed in the eighteenth century are far more durable than those printed later, owing to the type of paper used and the overall attention to quality—a sign, I think, that progress moves in more than one direction.
I notice one book in particular: The Philosophy of Earthquakes by William Stukeley. At first, the title strikes me as odd. Do earthquakes have philosophies? In a way, they do. Earthquakes were much on people’s minds. In 1755, a massive temblor struck Lisbon, leveling the city and killing more than 50,000 people. The natural disaster presented a major challenge to the sunny optimism of the Enlightenment. Was the earthquake divine punishment for people’s misdeeds? Or was it a result of natural laws? If so, what kind of God would establish such cruel laws? “Evil stalks the land,” warned the French philosopher Voltaire in a poem about the quake, “its secret principle unknown to us.”
Unknown so far, Voltaire implied. Nature was revealing its secrets, thanks to the work of natural philosophers like Franklin, but that only increased the urgency of the era’s animating question: Was nature humanity’s friend or foe? It was into this supercharged atmosphere that Franklin’s electrical discoveries would soon arrive like a thunderclap.
Several examples of Franklin’s handwriting are on display in the museum. The pen strokes are confident and distinctive—not quite John Hancockian but close. I want to touch it, but I can’t. The papers, yellowing but intact, are behind glass. Not for the first or last time, I lament that we are permitted to see the past but not touch it.
I nearly collide with Isabel Miller. She is a docent. It is one of my favorite words. I always smile when I hear it. It sounds like a composite of doer and decent. Isabel has been docenting here for the past two decades, a long time, yes, but only a small portion of her eighty-four years.
“Oh,” I blurt out, when she tells me her age. “You’re the same age as Franklin when he died.”
“Yes,” she says, giving me a look that I would see again several times during our conversation. No words, just that look, an incongruous combination of crushing disdain and utter indifference. Like Franklin, Isabel knows that silence stings.
I like Isabel. There is something Franklinesque about her, and not just her age. Perhaps it’s the way she’s so comfortable in her own skin, or how she deflects delicate questions with a joke or a story. She is sharp and opinionated and, at times, saucy and provoking, just like Ben. When I ask her what most visitors to the museum know about Franklin, she doesn’t hesitate.
“Two things,” she says, “the kite experiment and the women.”
I decide to start with the women. Franklin has a reputation, then and now, as a Lothario, the founding flirt. Was he?
Yes, says Isabel, but not in the way I’m thinking. “Franklin knew that the way to a woman’s heart is through her brains. He recognized that women were more than bodies. They had brains.” Franklin was content to know their brains, and only their brains, she believes, dismissing rumors of his serial philandering. “He flirted with a lot of women but he never bedded them,” she says. Historians are not so sure. There is no evidence Franklin was ever unfaithful to his wife, Deborah, during their long separations but, as the good doctor himself would agree, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The rumors persist to this day.
No wonder. Ben fueled them himself through his occasionally risqué writing. Most famous, or infamous, is his “Advice to a Friend Choosing a Mistress” (also known as the “Old Mistress’s Apologue”), in which he enumerates the many advantages of older women (reason number eight: “They are so grateful!!”). But I think we are also to blame for sustaining bawdy Ben. We like this image of Franklin as the naughty founder. It makes him more real. It makes him one of us.
I trail Isabel as she greets tour groups, large and small, deploying her Franklinian knowledge fluently and humbly. I’m sure she’s delivered her spiel a thousand times before, but it sounds like the first.
“I’m a colonial gossip,” she tells a couple from Florida, eliciting a laugh.
“The average person, learned person, back then, in the eighteenth century, owned eleven books,” she tells a family from India. “Books were precious.” They nod knowingly.
Now she is talking about how Franklin was “addicted to chess” (true) and how he was “not so kind to the women in his life” (also true, up to a point). She points to a portrait of Deborah and explains how she ran the business and post office while Franklin was away for years at a time yet gets no credit. “Anyway, that’s Deborah,” concludes Isabel, keeping the mood light. “We’re good friends.”
One tourist, a fit young guy wearing a baseball cap, says, “He was a womanizer, right?”
“No, he was more of a woman user,” Isabel parries. That silences him.
“He had nice handwriting,” someone else says.
“Yes, he did,” Isabel says.
Later, when we’re alone again, I ask her: “If you could transport yourself to colonial America, who would you want to have lunch with?”
Not Franklin, she replies: “He is too self-centered for me.” I notice she speaks of him, and all these other historical figures, in the present tense. “No, I’d probably have lunch with his sister, Jane. As a woman, she was stuck. If she were a man, she would have been another Ben Franklin.” This is quite possible, as Jane herself acknowledged toward the end of her long life. “Thousand[s] of Boyles, Clarks and Newtons have probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being placed in favourable situations, and enjoying proper advantages.” There are dozens of portraits of Ben Franklin but not a single one of Jane. The women and enslaved persons in Franklin’s life, his invisible helpers, remain largely out of sight.
Or, says Isabel, she might lunch with one of Philadelphia’s other Benjamins: Rush or Lay, early abolitionists both. And, yes, the New Englander John Adams may have been “prim and proper,” as she generously puts it, but unlike Franklin, he never enslaved anyone. She has a point. Franklin would change his mind about slavery, but it took him a long while.
I’m not sure why, but I feel the need to defend Ben. “This is all true,” I say feebly, “but he could be quite witty and charming.”
“Sometimes charm and wit cover a great hole in your character,” she counters, before moving in for the kill. “No, he is just a fat old fart.”
Ouch. How would Ben respond? He’d laugh, I’m sure, and probably agree. For much of his life, he was fat (“Dr. Fatsides,” he called himself). And he was old, outliving nearly all his contemporaries. As for flatulence, he wrote an entire essay extolling its virtues. Yes, he was a fat old fart but a self-aware fat old fart.
We are all born with an innate sense of wonder and curiosity. Somewhere between birth and adolescence, this quality is beaten out of us. It happens so gradually we’re not even aware of it. One moment we’re staring for hours at the rainwater sluicing across the road and glowing alternately green and red from the light cast by a nearby traffic signal, and the next moment we’re sleepwalking by the same scene, oblivious to its beauty.
Franklin never lost his sense of wonder. He was curious about everything. He was curious about how rain falls, the nature of sunspots, the Gulf Stream, nor’easters, dust devils, recipes for cheese (parmesan in particular), how windmills are built in Poland, the electric shocks delivered by the torpedo fish, the biochemistry of flatulence, the causes of the common cold. Peering through a microscope for the first time, he marveled at how it “opened to us… a world utterly unknown to the ancients,” noting that the spleen of a single codfish contained ten times more living organisms “than the inhabitants of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.” I have never seen the spleen of a codfish under a microscope, but I doubt I would have the same reaction as Franklin. This worries me: I’m beginning to wonder about my sense of wonder. Has it been beaten out of me? Worse, have I beaten it out of myself?
The full range of Ben’s curiosity is on display here at the American Philosophical Society’s small museum: a detailed map he drew of the Gulf Stream, a portable chess set, illustrations of waterspouts. What I see as an impressive variety Isabel diagnoses as an inability to focus. Early ADHD. “He was a dabbler,” she says.
Yes, he was, but is that so terrible? Another word for dabbling is experimenting. How do we know which flavor of ice cream we like best if we don’t sample many? Besides, everyone was a dabbler back then. The Age of Enlightenment was also the Age of the Amateur. Many of the era’s greatest scientific breakthroughs were made by rank amateurs with no special training. An English clergyman named Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen. A German composer named William Herschel discovered a new planet, Uranus. And a Philadelphia printer with two years of formal education pioneered a new science.
Today, Franklin, he of the electrified kite, is so coupled with electricity we assume it could not have been any other way. Electricity, though, was not an obvious choice. Other fields, such as chemistry and botany, were far riper for exploration. Electricity was a scientific cul-de-sac, “a strikingly useless commodity.” So why did Franklin, the King of Usefulness, choose to focus his not insignificant intellectual powers on such a “useless” discipline? Was it merely, as he said, a “philosophical amusement”? No, he had a hunch that electricity would prove fruitful, a hunch driven partly by his love of adventure and partly pure chance. Distrust not providence.
He happened to be visiting his hometown of Boston in 1743 when he attended the electrical demonstration by Archibald Spencer. What he saw “surprised and pleased” him. Franklin relished surprise, cultivated it. To be surprised was to be invited to play a game, and for Franklin, there was nothing better than a good game.
Spencer was one of the era’s itinerant “electricians,” as those who studied electricity were known. They held public lectures that were partly educational but mostly entertainment. A popular demonstration, which Franklin witnessed in Boston, was called the Dangling Boy. An eight-year-old boy was suspended above the floor. The electrician then touched a charged glass tube to his bare feet. The boy, now electrified, could attract metal shavings as if by magic, while sparks flew from his face and hands.
Some electrical demonstrations had erotic overtones. In the eighteenth century, electricity and sex were linked. Electric eels inspired erotic poems. Some people believed the sexual act was, literally, electrified. No wonder an audience pleaser was the “Venus electrificata,” or electric kiss. The electrician asked a woman volunteer to sit on an insulated stool. He then connected her to a conductor and charged her with static electricity. When a man from the audience attempted to kiss her, sparks flew from her lips, and he received an electric shock.
Meanwhile in France, the electrician Jean-Antoine Nollet asked that age-old question: Does this nonsense scale? He gathered two hundred monks in a circle, connecting them with iron wires. He then delivered an electric shock to one monk and all two hundred recoiled, demonstrating both the profound speed of an electrical charge and the profound credulity of French monks. Thus was the state of electricity when Franklin found it, more parlor trick than science.
On display at this blissfully small museum is an original copy of the book that cemented Franklin’s reputation: Experiments and Observations on Electricity. The subtitle is key: Made at Philadelphia in America. The Philadelphia Experiments, as Franklin’s research became known, both impressed and perplexed Europeans—impressed because it represented a giant leap in humanity’s understanding of a previously mysterious force, perplexed because of where it happened, not in London or Paris, or even Edinburgh, but in far-flung “Filthy-dirty.” How could this be?
American researchers such as Franklin were working at a disadvantage. Scientific instruments were scarce. A telescope was a rare treasure. There wasn’t a single laboratory in the colonies. For his experiments, Franklin used simple materials from his house: cork spheres, metal bodkins or pins, silk thread, thimbles, a cake of wax, a pump handle, the gold leaf on a book binding.
But distance is a blessing as well as a curse. From where he sat, Franklin possessed bifocal vision; he could see both near and far. He had the space to think differently, to pursue hunches without the scientific establishment peering over his shoulder. He looked at what the European scientists looked at and saw something different. As William James would later say, “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
Franklin may have been working far afield, but he remained tethered to the mother ship, thanks to help from friends. Peter Collinson, an English botanist from London, was the conduit that made Franklin, Franklin. He may not be a household name, but without Mr. Collinson, there would be no Dr. Franklin. Collinson sent Franklin experimental apparatus and the latest literature on electricity. He corresponded with Franklin throughout his electric days, then compiled those letters into the extraordinary book I am looking at now.
Franklin also had help in Philadelphia from an unlikely assortment of friends: a silversmith named Philip Syng, a lawyer named Thomas Hopkinson, and an unemployed Baptist minister named Ebenezer Kinnersley. Syng and Hopkinson were also members of the Junto, underscoring how Franklin’s social ties overlapped and complemented each other. One connection led to another, like an unbroken electrical circuit.
Isabel points out a collection of glass jars on display, each about the size of a milk bottle, arranged in neat rows and housed in a chunky wooden case. The jars are crude electrical capacitors connected by wires. The gangly contraption made it possible for the first time to store electrical charges. I am looking at the world’s first battery. Invented in 1745, just as Franklin was embarking on his electrical experiments, it was the handiwork of a Dutch scientist named Pieter van Musschenbroek. It was called the Leyden jar, named after the town where it was invented (presumably easier to pronounce than “Musschenbroek”).
The Leyden jar represented a giant leap forward. The only problem was no one knew in which direction they had just leaped or where to leap next. Electricians had no idea why or how the jar worked. It was one of the great scientific puzzles of the eighteenth century. Even Musschenbroek was baffled by his own invention: “I’ve found out so much about electricity that I’ve reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain nothing,” he said.
The Leyden jar wasn’t only mysterious. It was also dangerous. Musschenbroek was handling one when “my right hand was struck with such force that my whole body quivered just like someone hit by lightning.… I thought I was done for.” He would not want to experience such an electrical shock again, he said, even if offered the kingdom of France.
Musschenbroek’s close call underscores the visceral nature of electricity. It was a physical science in the truest sense. Crafting the glass tubes and other equipment needed for the experiments demanded manual dexterity, as did the experiments themselves. They were tactile. Nothing separated the experimenter from the phenomenon he was studying. The scientist’s body was no different from the Leyden jar or conducting wires, another tool in the service of knowledge.
The downside of this physicality was the inconvenient possibility of grave injury or even death. On the bright side, it made for an intimate science, which suited Franklin’s temperament, not to mention his fleshly and fluid body. In no other scientific discipline were intellect and intuition so closely linked. “To know was to feel, and to feel was to know,” as one historian put it.
One day, Franklin was attempting to electrocute a turkey (it supposedly tasted better that way) when something went wrong. Handling two large Leyden jars, he inadvertently touched an electrified wire connecting them. There was a bright flash and “a crack as loud as a pistol.” Franklin only knew this from friends who were present. He had blacked out. When he regained consciousness, “part of my hand and fingers which held the chain was left white as tho’ the blood had been driven out, and remained so 8 or 10 minutes after, feeling like dead flesh, and I had a numbness in my arms and the back of my neck, which continued till the next morning.” Franklin was lucky. At about the same time, a Russian electrician named Georg Richmann was killed while conducting an experiment.
Franklin trusted knowledge gained by experience more than that acquired by reading. Such experiential knowledge is immediate and irrefutable. “If any one should doubt, whether the electrical matter passes thro’ the substance of bodies… a shock from an electrified large glass jar, taken thro’ his own body, will probably convince him,” he said. He also deployed reason, of course, but always in tandem with experience, head and hand working together.
Franklin was no dispassionate observer. He had skin in the game, as well as bone and soft tissue, and was clearly in awe of this invisible yet powerful force. Writing about the “doctrine of points”—how pointed objects attract more electricity than rounded ones—he said, “The doctrine of points is very curious, and the effects of them truly wonderful.” Here he is describing the properties of a Leyden jar. “So wonderfully are these two states of electricity, the plus and minus combined and balanced in this miraculous bottle! situated and related to each other in a manner that I can by no means comprehend!”
I’ve never seen so many exclamation marks in a scientific paper. Question marks? Sure. Semicolons? Absolutely. But not exclamations. Some of my scientist friends possess an almost childlike sense of wonder, but most, as far as I can tell, seem to suppress any signs of wide-eyed enthusiasm, suspect as it is among today’s scientists. This is a shame. Natural philosophers didn’t merely study the wonders of the world. They stood in awe of them.
I was once like that too. I remember my first airline flight at age ten, wearing my first suit, a powder blue polyester abomination with matching clip-on tie. I gazed out the window from takeoff to landing, soaking it all up. Now I choose an aisle seat for easy lavatory access. This must stop. The heart is a more vital organ than the bladder.
Almost as remarkable as Ben’s curiosity is his scientific writing. It is simple and clear and inspiring. He was the Carl Sagan of his time. He devised an entire electrical vocabulary, one still used today: electrical battery; positive and negative; plus and minus; conductor; condenser; charging; discharge. These are Franklin’s terms.
How we talk about something matters. Scientists, no matter the field, need a shared and nuanced vocabulary. How we frame a subject determines not only how we see but what we see. Words matter. Embedded in each is not only a literal meaning but a suggestion, and often an expectation. When my wife tells me that she is “simply saying” (her favorite term) that when I have a chance I might want to possibly if it’s not too much trouble perhaps consider taking out the trash before it rains, I know exactly what she is saying and exactly what I need to do.
Through a series of cleverly designed experiments, Franklin demonstrated that electrical charges arise not from the creation of any new substance but, rather, from redistribution of electrical “currents” (another Franklin term). He showed that electricity isn’t created by friction. It is always present in all matter. At the time, researchers believed there were two types of electrical fluid, vitreous and resinous. One attracts and the other repels. Franklin disproved this. What appeared to be two separate entities was actually one.
Franklin soon landed on his greatest theoretical finding: the law of conservation of charge. Electricity is never really destroyed; it is only dispersed. What appeared to be differing amounts of electrical charge was an illusion. “There is really no more electrical fire in the [vial] after… charging than before; nor less after it’s discharging… the equality [of charge] is never destroyed, the fire only circulating.”
How did Franklin see what others did not? By deploying analogous thinking. He borrowed concepts from one field to understand and explain phenomena in another. The personal and the scientific intersected and complemented one another. His electrical experiments may have lasted only a few years, but they reflected a lifetime’s contemplation. The concepts he used to describe electrical phenomena—equal and opposite budget, natural capacity, free circulation, ultimate restoration—appear in his writing two decades before he adapted them to describe electricity.
Ben valued equilibrium. He sought balance in his relationships and in his statesmanship. So he brought that mindset to his makeshift laboratory in Philadelphia, that cluttered collection of Leyden jars, wax cakes, silk threads, and nervous turkeys. When he saw that nature also valued equilibrium, he recognized it instantly. Electricity, like all other fluids, seeks a state of equilibrium. Any imbalances are temporary. “When by any operation of art or nature, there happens to be a greater proportion of this fluid in one body than in another, the body which has most, will communicate to that which has least, till the proportion becomes equal.” He’s describing electrical currents, but the face of American capitalism also appears to anticipate the words of Karl Marx: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Natural philosophers of the eighteenth century explored connections between the laws of nature and the laws of the moral universe in ways we no longer do.
Franklin was also obsessed with flow and circulation. Whirlwinds, waterspouts, and tornadoes fascinated him. He once followed a dust devil for miles, on horseback. He charted the Gulf Stream, studied the body’s circulatory system, and observed the ebbs and flows of history. So naturally he believed electricity could best be understood in terms of fluid dynamics. Electricity, “the electrical fluid,” moved like a current. Motion is how it reveals itself to us. “The electrical fire is never visible but when in motion, and leaping from body to body,” he observed. “It is through connection that we can see the full force.” Motion is not the exception. It is the rule, and a good rule too. Life is fluid. Only death is static.
Franklin explored the how of electricity, not the why. It is enough to know the natural laws themselves. You need not grasp the intricacies of Newton’s law of universal gravitation to know that if you drop a plate of fine china, it will break. “ ’Tis a Pleasure indeed to know them, but we can preserve our china without it,” he said.
Franklin gripped his china tightly but his conclusions lightly. He was always open to revising or even discarding them. He did not suffer from a lack of self-confidence, but he approached his experiments with “a winning modesty,” as one contemporary put it. He knew what he didn’t know and never muzzled his ignorance, for it supplied the path to knowledge. As he told Peter Collinson in 1747 after several electrical false starts, “If there is no other use discover’d of electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain man humble.”
Franklin was that rare person who didn’t merely talk about the weather. He did something about it. For centuries, thunder and lightning—“that great artillery of God Almighty”—terrified humans. Many church bells bore a Latin inscription, Vivos voco, mortuos plango, Deum laudo fulgura frango. “I summon the living, I mourn the dead, I praise God, I shatter the lightning.” Left unsaid was that lightning tends to strike church steeples, especially when the bells are ringing. Newspapers, including Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, regularly carried reports of people killed by lightning strikes.
Franklin couldn’t have invented the lightning rod had his analogous mind not linked observations made in the lab with phenomena in the “real world.” Franklin’s great discovery was that they were the same. The electricity in his lab was the same electricity found in lightning. Franklin was not the first person to speculate about this connection, but he was the first to design an experiment meant to prove it. There was only one problem: the experiment required a tall structure, and at the time Philadelphia had none. So he pivoted.
It was June 1752. His son William, twenty-four years old, accompanied him. He swore William to secrecy, lest the experiment fail and they face ridicule. He constructed a special kite, tied at the four ends to a thin silk handkerchief. To the top of the kite he attached a foot-long wire that extended to the middle, where he attached a hemp string and a key. Father and son waited for a thunderstorm. Franklin biographer Leo Lemay describes what happened next.
William raised the kite, and then Franklin, standing in a shed, held the hempen string by the silk ribbon, which would not, when dry, conduct electricity.… With the kite raised and Franklin waiting, one dark cloud passed, and nothing happened. Franklin must have been glad no one but William was watching. Perhaps his hypothesis was wrong. Then, as a second cloud drew near, the threads of the hempen string stood erect and avoided one another. The string was electrified! He put his knuckle near the key and drew a spark. Again, another spark. Again, another.
Today, Franklin’s kite experiment seems almost quaint, an endearing episode from colonial history. The reality is that it was dangerous. Had lightning struck the kite, Franklin could have been killed. Science took guts. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, Super Aude! “Dare to know!”
Franklin wasn’t looking for practical applications of his electrical experiments but, ever the possibilian, was receptive when one landed on his lap. Later in life, witnessing the launch of a manned balloon over the Champ de Mars in Paris, Franklin heard a bystander mutter, “What good is that?” Franklin turned and replied, “What good is a newborn baby?”
It was only once he linked electricity in the lab and electricity in the sky that he made the leap from the theoretical to the practical. It began with a thoughtlet articulated in a section of his pamphlet called Opinions and Conjectures. “What if we erected pointed rods on our houses and churches and ships? Would not these pointed rods probably draw the electrical fire silently out of a cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible mischief!”
The lightning rod fit Ben’s temperament. A lightning rod doesn’t combat electricity. It doesn’t vanquish it. It diverts it, draws it away, using misdirection and sleight of hand, just like the Old Conjurer.
Franklin believed everything should circulate freely: air, water, blood, money—and information. To hoard information was to kill it. So he published instructions for constructing a lightning rod in the 1753 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. Was it a bit premature? Probably, but it saved lives, possibly including that of Thomas Jefferson, who erected a Franklin Rod at Monticello. “If it hadn’t been for that Franklin the whole house would have gone,” Jefferson was heard saying. The lightning rod on the tower of the old Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) was most likely the first Franklin Rod attached to a building. It protected the historic structure for more than two hundred years, with only one recorded instance of lightning damage.
Franklin’s invention and electrical experiments earned him worldwide fame. Europeans in particular were enthralled. Immanuel Kant called him a “modern Prometheus,” the gutsy Greek who stole fire from the gods. The French statesman Turgot went a step further, proclaiming that Franklin had “snatched the lightning from the skies, the scepter from tyrants.” Comments like that incensed John Adams, who griped that it “is universally believed in France, England and all Europe, that [Franklin’s] electric wand has accomplished all this revolution.”
Sorry, John, but in a way, it did. As tensions between Britain and her colonies spiked, Franklin’s electrical theories became an apt metaphor and rallying cry for the American cause. It was a metaphor deployed by friend and foe alike. The British solicitor general publicly chastised Franklin, calling him the “prime conductor” of the troubles between Britain and its colonies. He meant to diminish Franklin, but his comments had the opposite effect. It reminded those in attendance just how much Franklin of Philadelphia had accomplished.
Franklin’s electrical career was relatively short. After six years, he moved on, never to return full time to his electrical experiments. Historians find this puzzling. Was he bored? Did he, as Isabel suggested, suffer from ADHD? I don’t think so. The themes raised by the new science of electricity—unity, fluidity, conservation—continued to occupy his fertile mind for many years to come. Their usefulness shifted fields, from science to public service.
As much as Franklin loved his laboratory and his experiments, he recognized a higher calling. When his friend Cadwallader Colden said he was considering retiring so he too could dabble in natural philosophy, Franklin advised him to reconsider and not to forsake his other obligations. Had Isaac Newton abandoned the helm of a ship during an hour of danger, that lapse would erase all the good accrued by his scientific discoveries. Given a choice between science and public service, it was, as far as Benjamin Franklin was concerned, no contest.
Electricity, long feared, was also thought to have therapeutic benefits. The ancient Romans used electric rays to treat people suffering from paralysis, epilepsy, and other ailments. In the Middle Ages, Avicenna, a Persian physician, used electric fish to treat headaches, vertigo, and even melancholy. So it wasn’t surprising that when word of Franklin’s electrical discoveries spread, people hoped they could cure what ailed them. People suffering from partial paralysis and other ailments approached Franklin, asking to be shocked. He obliged but remained skeptical. Patients did show some signs of improvement, but this lasted only a few days. Franklin suspected any therapeutic benefit was due to the power of suggestion.
There was one exception. A twenty-four-year-old woman known as C.B. had suffered from severe convulsions for ten years, apparently due to a condition known at the time as “hysterical paralysis.” She asked Franklin if he could help. He agreed, administering four electrical shocks each morning and evening. Franklin then gave her a Leyden jar so she could treat herself at home. Her symptoms gradually decreased “’til at length they entirely left me,” she said. She went on to live a long and useful life, dying at age seventy-nine. It would be many years later, in the 1780s, when Franklin proposed using electric shocks to treat severely depressed patients.
Fast-forward 240 years to my Philadelphia hotel room around the corner from Franklin Court. It is morning. I make my coffee before doing anything else. Once sufficiently caffeinated, I reach into my backpack and remove a small device, about the size of a deck of playing cards. I attach four tiny cotton pads to a set of electrodes, then pour an aqua green liquid onto the pads. I clip the electrodes to my ears and push a button on the device. A surge of electricity—not nearly enough to kill a turkey, let alone a man—seeps into my brain. It is followed by lightheadedness, a not unpleasant sensation of vertigo, and, incredibly, a sense of equilibrium, a peace of mind, that otherwise eludes me.
The device is called an Alpha-Stim. I use it to treat my stubborn depression. I mainly like it for what it is not. It is not a pill. I’ve had enough of those. It is not a therapist. I’ve had enough of those as well. And it works. It keeps the black dog at bay just long enough for me to make it through another day. I don’t know how it works and, to be honest, my doctor doesn’t either. That’s okay. Truth is what works. The device is useful, and it wouldn’t exist had a curious forty-two-year-old printer with an analogous mind not embarked on a series of daring experiments in Philadelphia a long time ago. As I unclip the electrodes from my ears, my twenty-minute session complete, I say softly, “Thank you, Ben.”
A beam of light dances across the museum floor. Isabel is wielding a flashlight, shining it here and there, searching for her lost hearing aid, a Franklinian invention if ever there were one. She’s frustrated but not defeated and, in true Ben fashion, has retained her sense of humor. “That’s what I get for saying nasty things about Franklin,” she says.
I feel the urge to help, to be useful. I ask myself, What would Ben do? He’d organize a search party or start a volunteer organization devoted to solving such crises, a sort of fire department for lost things. He might even invent a hearing aid locator. I do not do any of this, but I do help search. I get down on all fours and shine my phone’s flashlight under Franklin’s portable chess set, in between the Leyden jars, behind The Philosophy of Earthquakes.
Others help too. Someone suggests a kid took it, not knowing what it was. That strikes me as the kind of blame game Franklin wouldn’t play. He was more interested in lending a hand than pointing fingers.
Isabel is upset but resigned to the loss, which, she points out, in the hierarchy of losses, ranks quite low. That strikes me as a healthy, useful mindset.
I’ve been loitering in this museum for hours now. It is time to leave. I say farewell to Isabel, still searching for her lost hearing aid, then walk down the short flight of stairs to Fifth Street and a sunny eighty-degree day. It is late October. That’s odd, I think, then drop the thought. Franklin wouldn’t drop it. He would turn it over in his mind. He would engage in analogous thinking. He would investigate, and wouldn’t stop until he found an answer.