Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume 2 (of 2)

The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favour, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.

The same spirit gives life to the following observations too in his essay on "The Internal State of America": "The Agriculture and Fisheries of the United States are the great Sources of our Encreasing Wealth. He that puts a Seed into the Earth is recompens'd, perhaps, by receiving twenty out of it; and he who draws a Fish out of our Waters, draws up a Piece of Silver."

In Franklin's time as now there was a feeling that the farmer did not receive his full share of the blessings of organized society. In his Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor, he makes a farmer say, "I am one of that class of people, that feeds you all, and at present is abused by you all. In short I am a farmer."

Franklin's views about punishment were also conspicuously worthy of his kind heart and sound sense. His letter to Benjamin Vaughan on the Criminal Laws is one of his best essays, and merited the honor conferred on it by Samuel Romilly, when he added it in the form of an appendix to his own observations on Dr. Madan's Thoughts on Executive Justice. In the course of his feeling exposures of existing fallacies with respect to the philosophy of punishment, Franklin, who did not scruple to say that there would be less crime, if there were no criminal laws, asked these searching questions:

I see, in the last Newspaper from London, that a Woman is capitally convicted at the Old Bailey, for privately stealing out of a Shop some Gauze, value 14 Shillings and three pence; is there any Proportion between the Injury done by a Theft, value 14/3, and the Punishment of a human Creature, by Death, on a Gibbet? Might not that Woman, by her Labour, have made the Reparation ordain'd by God, in paying fourfold? Is not all Punishment inflicted beyond the Merit of the Offence, so much Punishment of Innocence? In this light, how vast is the annual Quantity of not only injured, but suffering Innocence, in almost all the civilized States of Europe!

That Franklin was opposed to imprisonment for debt it is hardly necessary to say. His sense of humor, if nothing else, was sufficient to point out to him the absurdity of depriving a debtor of all means of earning money until he earned enough to satisfy his creditors. John Baynes, in his Journal, informs us that, in a conversation with him, Franklin expressed his disapprobation of "this usage" in very strong terms. He said he could not compare any sum of money with imprisonment – they were not commensurable quantities.

Both slavery and the slave trade were held by Franklin in just reprobation, but his views on these subjects, it must be confessed, would be weightier, if he had not trafficked at one time in slaves himself. As it is, he occupies somewhat the same equivocal position as that which inspired Thomas Moore to pen the blackguard lines in which he pictured the American slaveholding patriot as dreaming of Freedom in his bondmaid's arms.49 The economic truth, however, of what he had to say about Slave Labor in his essay on "The Increase of Mankind" is undeniable.

Tis an ill-grounded Opinion [he declared] that by the Labour of slaves, America may possibly vie in Cheapness of Manufactures with Britain. The Labour of Slaves here can never be so cheap here as the Labour of working Men is in Britain. Anyone may compute it. Interest of Money is in the Colonies from 6 to 10 per Cent. Slaves one with another cost 30£ Sterling per Head. Reckon then the Interest of the first Purchase of a Slave, the Insurance or Risque on his Life, his Cloathing and Diet, Expences in his Sickness and Loss of Time, Loss by his Neglect of Business (Neglect is natural to the Man who is not to be benefited by his own Care or Diligence), Expence of a Driver to keep him at Work, and his Pilfering from Time to Time, almost every Slave being by Nature a Thief, and compare the whole Amount with the Wages of a Manufacturer of Iron or Wool in England, you will see that Labour is much cheaper there than it ever can be by Negroes here.

In this essay, the introduction of slaves is enumerated as one of the causes that diminish the growth of white population.

The Negroes brought into the English Sugar Islands [he says] have greatly diminish'd the Whites there; the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habit of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain'd 100. The Whites who have Slaves, not labouring, are enfeebled, and therefore not so generally prolific; the Slaves being work'd too hard, and ill fed, their Constitutions are broken, and the Deaths among them are more than the Births; so that a continual Supply is needed from Africa. The Northern Colonies, having few Slaves, increase in Whites. Slaves also pejorate the Families that use them; the white Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.50

CHAPTER IV

Franklin as a Man of Science

Franklin, as we have said, was primarily a man of action. If we do not always think of him as deeply involved in what Goethe calls "being's ocean, action's storm," it is only because he moved from appointed task to appointed task with such frictionless self-command and ease. But, throughout his life, his mind was quick to make excursions into the domain of philosophical speculation and experiment, whenever business cares or political responsibilities allowed it to do so. Poor Richard would seem to have little in common with Prometheus, but Prometheus, if Condorcet is to be believed, as well as Poor Richard, Franklin was; to say nothing of other transmigrations. That his interest in natural phenomena began at a very early age, is disclosed by his Journal of a Voyage from London to Philadelphia in 1726, when he was in his twenty-first year. Throughout the course of this voyage, his faculties were intently concentrated upon all the marvels of the sea and its setting. With sedulous minuteness, he registers the state of the winds each day, and records the impression made on him by every object with a secret at its heart, to be plucked out by an inquisitive mind. A lunar rainbow, an eclipse of the sun, which darkened ten twelfths of his disk, an eclipse of the moon, which spread over six digits of her surface, dolphins in their bright mail of mixed green, silver and gold, a shark moving around the ship in a slow, majestic manner, and attended by an obsequious retinue of pilot fish, schools of harried flying fish, groups of young crabs, clinging to seaweeds, with indented leaves about three quarters of an inch long, and small yellow berries filled with nothing but wind, a white, tropical bird, said never to be seen further north than latitude 40, and marked by short wings and a single tail feather, other birds, too near the western continent not to be Americans, are among the things that the open-eyed and thoughtful youth jotted down in his Journal in terms that plainly enough indicated not only the eager curiosity but the exactitude of a future man of science. As almost always, the child was but the father of the man. Upon each of his subsequent six voyages across the Atlantic, Franklin exhibited the same, though severer, and more practised, vigilance in observing everything that the ocean, including the instruments of commerce afloat on it, have for a penetrating and suggestive intelligence. How essentially he was a man of science, is demonstrated by the fact that, whenever he was on the element, where alone he could hope for exemption from the political demands of his countrymen, his intellect turned at once with ardor to the study of Nature. Old and feeble as he was, he wrote no less than three valuable dissertations on his last voyage across the Atlantic, one on the causes and cure of smoky chimneys, one on his smoke-consuming stove, and a third, distinguished by an extraordinary wealth of knowledge and observation, on the construction, equipment and provisioning of ships, and the winds, currents and temperature of the sea; which was accompanied by valuable thermometric tables, based upon observations made by him during three of his transatlantic voyages. The maritime essay was written with the closest regard to detail, and contains such a mass of information and luminous comment as has rarely been condensed into the same space. It makes up some thirty-four quarto pages of Smyth's edition of Franklin's works, exclusive of the thermometric notes. The other two essays occupy some forty-nine pages more. All three are elucidated by numerous explanatory charts and illustrations, and are marked by the mastery of scientific principles, which no mere artificer or artisan could have displayed in discussing such topics; but, at the same time, they could not have been more intensely practical, as respects minutiæ of construction, if Franklin had been a professional sailor, mason or stove-maker. The maritime observations range from the Chinese method of dividing the hulls of vessels into separate compartments, which is now regarded as one of the most efficient devices for securing the safety of ocean greyhounds, to an inquiry into the reason why fowls served up at sea are usually too tough to be readily masticated and the best means of dishing soup on a rolling and pitching vessel.

After his return in his youth from London to Philadelphia, Franklin was for a long time too much immersed in business and civic projects to give much attention to natural phenomena. "Why does the flame of a candle tend upward in a spire?", "whence comes the dew, that stands on the outside of a tankard that has cold water in it in the summer time?", are among the few questions of a scientific nature that he appears to have framed for the discussions of the Junto; and they are elementary enough. But with the coming of pecuniary ease, the natural bent of his mind soon asserted itself. While in Boston in 1746, he happened to see some electrical experiments performed by a Dr. Spence, who had recently arrived from Scotland. They were clumsily conducted, but crude as they were, they filled his mind with mixed sensations of surprise and delight; so much so that, when, shortly after his return to Philadelphia from Boston, the Library Company found itself the owner of a glass tube, for the production of electricity by friction, given to it by Peter Collinson, then a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, with instructions for its use, he eagerly availed himself of Collinson's generosity to repeat the experiments that he had witnessed at Boston, and, by continuous practice, became very expert in making them as well as others. Indeed, his house was soon overrun to such an extent with eager visitors that he was compelled in self-defence to relieve it of its congestion by supplying some of his friends with similar tubes blown at the Philadelphia glass-house. One of these friends was his ingenious neighbor, Kinnersley, who chanced at the time to be out of business. Franklin advised him to exhibit the experiments for profit, and followed up the advice by preparing two lectures for him, in which the details of the experiments were clearly set forth. Kinnersley himself employed skilled workmen to make the necessary electrical apparatus for him, modelled upon the rough agencies designed by Franklin for himself, and used in his own exhibitions. The lectures, when delivered by him in Philadelphia, were so well attended that he made a tour of all the chief towns of the Colonies with a considerable degree of pecuniary success. Some years later, similar instructions given by Franklin to Domien, a Greek priest, proved so useful to him on a long tramp that he wrote to his benefactor that he had lived eight hundred miles upon electricity, and that it had been meat, drink and clothing to him. When Franklin last heard from him, he was contemplating a journey from Havana to Vera Cruz, thence through Mexico to Acapulco, on its western coast, and from Acapulco to Manila, and from Manila through China, India, Persia and Turkey to his home in Transylvania; all with electricity as his main viaticum.

Franklin's own experiments fortunately ended in something better than vagabondage, however respectable or profitable. Grateful to Collinson for his timely gifts, he wrote to him several letters, laying before him the results of the Philadelphia experiments. Collinson procured for these letters the privilege of being read before the Royal Society, where they did not excite enough notice to be printed among its Transactions. Another letter, one to Kinnersley, in which Franklin propounded the identity of lightning and electricity, he sent to Dr. Mitchell, an acquaintance of his, and also a member of the Royal Society, who replied by telling him that it had been read before the Society, but had been laughed at by the connoisseurs. Then it was that the happy obstetric suggestion of Dr. Fothergill that the letters were of too much value to be stifled led Collinson to gather them together for publication by Cave in the Gentleman's Magazine. They were not published in this magazine, but Cave did bring them out in pamphlet form with a preface by Dr. Fothergill. The event showed that he and the general public had more acumen than the sages of the Royal Society, for the letters, when subsequently published in a quarto volume, with additions by Franklin, ran through five editions, without the cost of a penny to Cave for copyright. It was from France, however, that they first received the full meed of prompt approbation that they deserved. A copy of them happened to fall into the hands of Buffon, who prevailed upon D'Alibard to translate them into French. Their publication in that language provoked an attack upon them by the Abbé Nollet, Preceptor in Natural Philosophy to the Royal Family, and the author of a popular theory of Electricity. At first, the Abbé could not believe that America was capable of producing such letters, and insisted that they must have been fabricated at Paris for the purpose of discrediting his system. In fact, he even doubted whether there was such a person as Franklin, but, afterwards, being convinced upon that point, he published a volume of letters, mainly addressed to Franklin, in which he defended his own theory, and denied the accuracy of Franklin's experiments and conclusions. Le Roy, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, rejoined on behalf of Franklin, who had decided to let the truth be its own champion, and easily refuted the Abbé. The papers could not have asked for a better advertisement than this controversy. They were further translated into the Italian, German and Latin languages, and Franklin's theory of electricity was so generally adopted by the learned men of Europe, in preference to that of the Abbé, that the latter lived, Franklin tells us, to see himself the last of his sect, except Monsieur B. of Paris, his élève and immediate disciple. It is surprising that even the solitary élève should have been left clinging to his master; for, in the meantime, the most momentous experiment, suggested by Franklin in his letters, had been performed, substantially in the manner outlined by him, with brilliant success, by D'Alibard, on a hill at Marly-la-Ville, where a pointed rod of iron, forty feet high, and planted on an electric stand, had been erected for the purpose of carrying it into execution. When a thundercloud passed over the rod on May 10, 1752, between 2 and 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the persons, set by D'Alibard to watch it, had drawn near "and attracted from it sparks of fire, perceiving the same kind of commotions as in the common electrical experiments." A week later, the fire and crackling sound, elicited by M. de Lor from a rod, erected at his house in Paris on a cake of resin, and electrified by a cloud between 4 and 5 o'clock in the afternoon, told the same story. He had previously performed what he called the "Philadelphia experiments" in the presence of Louis XV., who seems to have been as much delighted with them as if they had been a new mistress. In a short time, they became so popular that we are told by Franklin that "all the curious of Paris flocked to see them." One of the results of the fame acquired by him in France was a letter written by Dr. Wright, an English physician, then in Paris, to a member of the Royal Society, apprising the latter of the excitement that the experiments had created in France, and expressing his astonishment that Franklin's papers had been so little noticed in England. Quickened by Dr. Wright's words, the Society reconsidered the letters which had been read before them, and caused an abstract of them and the other letters on electricity, sent to England by Franklin, to be printed among its Transactions. Afterwards, when several members of the Society had themselves drawn down lightning from the clouds, it elected Franklin a member, and, in view of the fact that the honor had not been sought by him, voted that he "was not to pay anything"; which meant that he was to be liable for neither admission fee nor annual dues, and was even to receive his copy of the Transactions of the Society free of charge. Nor did it stop here. It also awarded to Franklin, for the year 1753, the Copley gold medal, accompanied by an address, in which Lord Macclesfield, its President, endeavored to make full amends to him for its belated recognition of the value of his discoveries.

The suggestion by Franklin, which led to the experiments of D'Alibard and De Lor, is as matter-of-fact as a cooking recipe.

To determine the question [he said in a letter to Peter Collinson] whether the clouds that contain lightning are electrified or not, I would propose an experiment to be try'd where it may be done conveniently. On the top of some high tower or steeple, place a kind of centry box… big enough to contain a man and an electrical stand. From the middle of the stand let an iron rod rise and pass bending out of the door, and then upright 20 or 30 feet, pointed very sharp at the end. If the electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a man standing on it when such clouds are passing low, might be electrified and afford sparks, the rod drawing fire to him from a cloud. If any danger to the man should be apprehended (though I think there would be none), let him stand on the floor of his box, and now and then bring near to the rod the loop of a wire that has one end fastened to the leads, he holding it by a wax handle; so the sparks, if the rod is electrified, will strike from the rod to the wire, and not affect him.

Before the news of the success achieved by D'Alibard and De Lor reached Franklin, he himself had conducted a similar experiment "though made in a different and more easy manner." This experiment has become one of the veriest commonplaces of physical science. It was performed, when a thunder gust was coming on, in a field near Philadelphia, with such simple materials as a silk kite, topped off with a foot or more of sharp pointed wire, and controlled by a twine string, equipped with a key for casting off the electric sparks, and ending in a silk ribbon to secure the safety of the hand that held it. The whole construction is set out in a letter written to Collinson by Franklin shortly after the incident, in which, with his usual modesty, the latter describes the kite as if he had had nothing to do with it. Something like the feelings of Sir Isaac Newton, when the falling apple brought to his ear the real music of the spheres, must have been those of Franklin, when the loose filaments of twine bristled up stiffly, as if stirred by some violated instinct of wild freedom, and the stream of sparks from the key told him that he was right in supposing that the mysterious and appalling agency, which had for centuries been associated in the human mind with the resistless wrath of Omnipotence, was but the same subtle fluid that had so often lit up his electrical apparatus with its playful corruscations.

The letters to Collinson contained another suggestion almost equally pregnant. Speaking of the power of pointed conductors to draw off electricity noiselessly and harmlessly, Franklin asked,

May not the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships, &c. from the stroke of lightning, by directing us to fix on the highest parts of those edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle, and gilt to prevent rusting, and from the foot of those rods a wire down the outside of the building into the ground, or down round one of the shrouds of a ship, and down her side till it reaches the water? 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 suggestion was but slowly adopted, not in Europe, indeed, at all, until the efficacy of the lightning rod in protecting buildings had been generally recognized in America. In time, however, the device came into use both in Great Britain and on the Continent; Voltaire being one of the first persons in Geneva to erect one, and, wherever it was erected, it helped to confirm the fame of Franklin by its silent effect upon the human imagination. In recent years, the lightning rod, once in almost universal use in America, has fallen into neglect, but the explanation of this fact is to be found not in any just doubts about its utility, when properly constructed, affixed and grounded, but in the growth of fire insurance, and the inutility, or danger, of such rods, if carelessly set in place.51

The domestication of lightning and the invention of the lightning rod were the two things to which Franklin was principally indebted for his brilliant reputation as a philosopher. At this day, the application of electricity to common uses is so familiar to us that it is hard, without a little reflection, to realize how well calculated his electrical achievements were to send a thrill of astonishment and awe through the human mind. Of all the manifestations of the physical world, lightning with its inscrutable, swift, and all but irresistible, stroke, followed by the sublime detonations of thunder, is the one most suggestive of supernatural influence exerted by an all-powerful deity. The mythological dreams of the Greeks, the visions of the Old Testament, the simple emotions of the savage had all paid their homage of dread to the fearful force – like a madman pitilessly destructive, and yet like a madman diverted from its rage by the barest trifle – which had clothed Jove with the greater part of his grandeur, licked up even the water that was in the trench about the altar, built by Elijah in the name of the Lord, and filled the breast of the Indian with superstitious terror. Discovery, that laid bare the real nature and destructive limits of this force, could not fail to excite an extraordinary degree of attention everywhere. It was the singular fortune of Franklin, though a practical, sober-minded denizen of the earth, if ever man was, to have enjoyed in his day a reputation not unlike that of a divinity of the upper ether.52 It so happens that the atmosphere was, in one way or another, the home of all the scientific problems which engaged his interest most deeply. His philosophical Pegasus, so little akin to the humble brute bestrid by Poor Richard, was "a beast for Perseus – pure air and fire"; and especially, it is needless to say, was this true of his relations to the lightning. When the fact became known throughout the civilized world that human ingenuity had succeeded in even snaring it, Franklin was exalted for a time to a seat on Olympus. All the literature of the period, as well as that of a much later period, bears out the statement that rarely has any single, peaceful incident ever so fired the human imagination.53 For many years, the natural background for a portrait of Franklin might have been a bank of cloud lit up by the incessant play of summer lightning. Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis, was but the mightiest of the electrical discharges that flattery poured upon him. Turn where we may to the poetry of the latter half of the eighteenth century, and of the earlier part of the nineteenth, whether epigram or otherwise, we are likely to come upon some imprint left upon the thought of those periods by the subjugation of lightning.