The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (34 page)

Franklin’s view was evident in his pamphlet describing the fireplace. The pamphlet was an advertisement only incidentally; its heart was a scientific treatise on the theory of combustion and on practical applications to domestic heating. He cited authorities classical (supplying one long source in Latin) and exotic (quoting, in translation, from a Chinese work). He explained the various means by which heat is transmitted (paying particular attention to convection, overlooked or misapplied in most fireplace designs). He contended, with evidence, that rooms heated with the new fireplace were more healthful than rooms heated conventionally, for the heat permeated the rooms more evenly. He included a schematic rendering of the fireplace, together with instructions as to how it ought to be installed (including a hint to mix rum with water in the paste used to seal the joints). Being Franklin, he closed with a verse of the sort Richard Saunders regularly penned, extolling the fireplace as a second sun:

Another sun!—’tis true—but not the same.
Alike, I own, in warmth and genial flame.
But more obliging than his elder brother,
This will not scorch in summer, like the other, Nor, when sharp Boreas chills our shivering limbs
Will this sun leave us for more southern climes;
Or, in long winter nights, forsake us here,
To cheer new friends in t’other hemisphere;
But, faithful still to us, this new sun’s fire,
Warms when we please, and just as we desire.

It was
characteristic of Franklin to combine theory and application in his pamphlet on the fireplace, for just as he did not have the heart of a modern capitalist, neither was he what the modern age would call a true intellectual. He had an inquisitive mind—ceaselessly inquisitive, in fact, as his whole life attested. But he found knowledge for knowledge’s sake to be an unsatisfying formula. The kind of knowledge he prized was that which made life easier, more productive, or happier. In this regard his view of science mirrored his view of religion. Where faith was sterile if it failed to produced good works, so science was sterile—even if interesting—if it failed to produce good inventions.

In May 1743 Franklin printed
A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America.
Others had bruited the idea before, chiefly John Bartram of Philadelphia and Cadwallader Colden of New York. But neither of them was a printer, which in this as in many of his other projects gave Franklin a crucial advantage. Bartram and Colden might—and did—communicate between themselves and with a small circle of correspondents, but Franklin could reach hundreds or thousands through his printing press. How many copies he produced of his broadside
Promoting Useful Knowledge
is unknown, but without doubt it spread the idea among a wider audience than had heard any such notion theretofore.

“The first drudgery of settling new colonies, which confines the attention of people to mere necessaries, is now pretty well over,” Franklin wrote. “And there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the stock of knowledge.” To such as were of a philosophical turn of mind, curiosity and insight must from time to time produce discoveries “to the advantage of some or all of the British plantations, or to the benefit of mankind in general.”

They would, at any rate, if properly encouraged and communicated. This was the purpose of Franklin’s publication. He proposed “that one society be formed of Virtuosi or ingenious men residing in the several
colonies, to be called
The American Philosophical Society.”
The society would be centered at Philadelphia, the city closest to the center of the colonies, where the post roads converged and where they intersected the sea-lanes to the settlements in the West Indies. In addition, Philadelphia already possessed a respectable and growing library, essential to any such endeavor.

At Philadelphia would reside the core of the society, consisting of a physician, a botanist, a mathematician, a chemist, a “mechanician,” a geographer, and a natural philosopher of broad interests and expertise. The society’s president, treasurer, and secretary would also be based in Franklin’s home city. The group would meet at least once a month, and would discuss their own latest findings and those transmitted to them by members in other cities and colonies. A principal function of the Philadelphia nucleus would be to facilitate the flow of information among members with common interests but no common meeting ground. To this end the society would sponsor publication of the most noteworthy findings and hypotheses.

Topics suitable for investigation covered the range of human interests and needs. “All new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, &c., their virtues, uses, &c., methods of propagating them…. Improvements of vegetable juices, as ciders, wines &c. New methods of curing or preventing disease. All new-discovered fossils in different countries, as mines, minerals, quarries, &c. New and useful improvements in any branch of mathematics. New discoveries in chemistry, such as improvements in distillation, brewing, assaying of ores, &c. New mechanical inventions for saving labour, as mills, carriages, &c.” And so on, through geography, geology, animal husbandry, and more horticulture, and concluding with “all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life.”

Franklin released this manifesto—characteristically, a roster of questions rather than of answers—to the world in May 1743. The reaction was slow but promising. Cadwallader Colden wrote from New York, “I long very much to hear what you have done in your scheme of erecting a society at Philadelphia for promoting of useful arts and sciences in America. If you think any thing in my power whereby I can promote so useful an undertaking I will with much pleasure receive your instructions for that end.”

This response encouraged Franklin, especially as it came from one as distinguished as Colden. A physician by training, Colden was surveyor general of New York, and a man almost as catholic in his interests as Franklin would become. Colden refused to be intimidated by the awesome reputation of Isaac Newton, convincing himself that Newton had
erred on certain important points. He devoted much of his adult life to correcting the mistakes. Yet the effort hardly exhausted him. He found time to write a history of the Indian tribes in and around the colony of New York, a taxonomy of the flora near his Orange County home (which he rendered in Latin and sent to the Swedish patriarch of plant science and Latin nomenclature, Linneaus, who duly published it), assorted treatises on moral philosophy, medical accounts of major diseases and lesser distempers, and a translation of Cicero’s letters.

Franklin knew Colden by reputation and was flattered to hear from him. He replied at once. “I cannot but be fond of engaging in a correspondence so advantageous to me as yours must be,” Franklin said. “I shall always receive your favours as such, and with great pleasure.”

This exchange commenced a correspondence between Franklin and Colden that enlightened and delighted both parties. Colden encouraged Franklin in gathering the “Virtuosi” into his philosophical society. “I long to know what progress you make in forming your society,” he inquired. “If it meet with obstruction from the want of proper encouragement or otherwise, I would have you attempt some other method of proceeding in your design, for I shall be very sorry to have it entirely dropped.”

Franklin reported progress, but less than he would have liked. The charter membership included John Bartram as botanist; the disagreeable but ingenious Thomas Godfrey as mathematician; Thomas Bond, a medical doctor trained in Britain and France, as physician; his brother Phineas Bond as natural-philosopher-at-large; Samuel Rhoads, a master carpenter active in local politics, as mechanician; William Parsons, original member of the Junto, lately librarian of the Library Company, and currently surveyor general of Pennsylvania, as geographer; William Coleman, who underwrote Franklin’s escape from his partnership with Hugh Meredith, as treasurer; and Thomas Hopkinson, a director of the Library Company and former city councilman, as president. Franklin served as secretary. Several meetings took place during the first half of 1744, and out-of-town members were added to the group. But most lacked Franklin’s energy, to his frustration and annoyance. “The members of our Society here are very idle gentlemen,” he complained to Colden. “They will take no pains.”

Franklin
did not guess when he floated the idea of the Philosophical Society that its establishment would mark a turning point in his
life. What he envisioned was a more sophisticated and geographically inclusive version of the Junto: a discussion group that brought together inquiring minds from across the continent rather than across the city. What he got was a network of kindred spirits that spurred him to better and more original work than he knew he had in him. The expansion of Franklin’s universe continued; his world came to include the best minds in America. And those minds came to recognize the preeminence of his.

With the letter to Colden in which he lamented the idleness of his fellow philosophers in Philadelphia, Franklin enclosed speculations on the flow of fluids throughout the human body. He granted that his ideas suffered from lack of opportunity for personal experimentation; he knew only what he had read and could infer therefrom. Yet he hoped to remedy the deficiency. He described an apparatus he had devised to test a hypothesis in hydrodynamics that had direct bearing on the flow of fluids through the human skin. “You shall know the success,” he promised Colden.

In fact the experiment proved inconclusive. Franklin was disappointed but not discouraged. “I intend to try a farther experiment, of which I shall give you an account,” he assured Colden.

Meanwhile the two men communicated on other topics. Franklin puzzled over Colden’s comments on “fluxions,” the infinitesimals devised by Newton as the basis for calculus and the physical theories that grew out of it; Franklin wished for a stronger background in mathematics and promised himself to acquire it. He shared some of Colden’s reservations about current thinking in mechanical dynamics, including a theory of inertia that seemed to imply that a very small force could not move very large objects. Franklin countered this with a thought experiment. “Suppose two globes each equal to the sun and to one another, exactly equipoised in Jove’s balance. Suppose no friction in the center of motion in the beam or elsewhere. If a mosquito then were to light on one of them, would he not give a motion to them both, causing one to descend and the other to rise?”

A more immediately practical problem motivated another letter to Colden. For centuries it had been noted that voyages from the Americas to England took less time than voyages in the opposite direction. Prevailing winds accounted for part of the discrepancy, but not all of it. Franklin wondered whether the rotation of the earth was involved. A ship at the equator was carried eastward by the earth’s rotation faster—in an absolute, although not a longitudinal, sense—than a ship in the latitude of Philadelphia, which in turn was carried faster than a ship at the latitude of London. Was some residue of the rotational speed
responsible for the more rapid transit from southeast to northwest, compared to the reverse? “I have not time to explain my self farther, the post waiting,” Franklin wrote to Colden, “but believe I have said enough for you to comprehend my meaning.” (Although he later would realize that the effect was more complicated than he supposed here, Franklin was definitely onto something, as the French mathematician Coriolis, after whom the effect was named, would make explicit a century later.)

Neither
devoted capitalist nor pure intellectual, Franklin was not a strict scientist either. He accepted the unscientific and irrational for what it was—an inescapable aspect of human nature, and not necessarily ignoble for that. He could give a dozen reasons for restraining human passion but was not in the least surprised that it defied restraint. As a young man he had failed to restrain his own passions, irrational though they were; he fully expected that young men—and not a few older men, as well as women of various ages—would continue to succumb. Such was life; a person would be a fool to deny it.