236 years ago today, the most extraordinary American who ever lived died in his bed in Philadelphia at the age of 84. He had been a candle maker's apprentice, a runaway teenager, a printer, a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat, a philosopher, a Founding Father, and the man who talked France into helping America win its independence. Twenty thousand people came to his funeral. The French National Assembly went into mourning for three days. 🎖️🇺🇸
His name was Benjamin Franklin.
Born January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts — the fifteenth of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, a candle and soap maker who had emigrated from England, and Abiah Folger, a woman of Nantucket. The family was poor. Benjamin had two years of formal schooling — just two years — before his father pulled him out because he could not afford the fees.
At ten years old he was working in his father's candle shop. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer. At fifteen he was secretly writing essays for his brother's newspaper under the pseudonym Silence Dogood — a sharp-tongued, witty, fiercely independent widow who became one of the most popular voices in Boston without anyone knowing she was a twelve-year-old boy.
At seventeen he ran away.
He walked into Philadelphia on a Sunday morning in 1723 carrying everything he owned — hungry, tired, with three rolls of bread, one under each arm and one in his mouth. A girl named Deborah Read watched him from her front doorstep and thought he looked ridiculous. He noticed her. Seven years later they were married.
He spent the next sixty years building one of the most remarkable lives in the history of civilization.
As a printer and publisher he became one of the most influential voices in colonial America. The Pennsylvania Gazette — his newspaper — was the most widely read in the colonies. Poor Richard's Almanack — published every year from 1732 to 1757 under the pen name Richard Saunders — sold nearly ten thousand copies a year and filled American homes with the wit and practical wisdom that still echo in American culture. A penny saved is a penny earned. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise. These were not folk sayings. They were Franklin's.
As a scientist he was the most celebrated in the world. He proved that lightning was electricity — through the kite experiment in 1752, flying a kite with a metal key in a thunderstorm and drawing the electrical charge down a wet string into a Leyden jar. He invented the lightning rod that protected buildings across the world. He invented bifocals. He invented the flexible urinary catheter. He invented the Franklin stove. He invented swim fins. He discovered the Gulf Stream. He invented a musical instrument — the glass armonica — for which Mozart and Beethoven both composed pieces. He did all of this with two years of formal schooling.
He was elected to the Royal Society of London — the most prestigious scientific body in the world — on the strength of his electrical experiments. The French philosopher Kant called him the Prometheus of modern times. David Hume called him America's first great man of letters.
But his greatest work was political.
When the American Revolution came he was already 70 years old — an age at which most men of his era were dead. He had spent years in London arguing the colonies' case to the British Parliament. He had helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He had signed it. Then Congress sent him to France — the most important diplomatic assignment in American history.
He spent nine years in Paris as America's minister to France. He was the most famous American alive and one of the most famous people in the world. The French adored him. He played the role perfectly — the plain Quaker hat, the simple clothes, the wit, the warmth, the total absence of European court pretension. He secured the military alliance with France in 1778 that was absolutely essential to American victory. Without French troops and the French fleet, Washington almost certainly could not have won at Yorktown in 1781.
Without Benjamin Franklin there is no Treaty of Paris. Without the Treaty of Paris there is no United States.
He came home in 1785. He was 79 years old. He served as president of Pennsylvania. At 81 he was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention — carried to the sessions in a sedan chair because he was too frail to walk. He used his enormous prestige to broker the compromises that got the Constitution signed.
His very last public act — signed two months before he died — was a petition to Congress calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.
He died on April 17, 1790, at eleven o'clock at night. His last words, spoken to his daughter who had asked him to shift position in bed so he could breathe more easily, were: A dying man can do nothing easy.
Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. The French National Assembly went into three days of official mourning. George Washington wore black.
In his will he left money to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia — to be held in trust for two hundred years and then used for the public good. When the trusts matured in 1990 they were worth more than six million dollars. They funded trade schools, science museums, scholarships and community projects. He had planned it all before he died. Of course he had.
The candle maker's son who taught the world about lightning. The runaway teenager who helped create a nation. The old man in the sedan chair who used his last breath to say that all men deserved to be free.
Born with nothing. Built everything.
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