DR: You’ve written a book, The Innovators, which talks about the rise of the Internet and personal computers and so forth. In it, you talk about a lot of geniuses. One you have a fair bit on is Bill Gates. How do you compare Gates to Steve Jobs? Who was smarter?
WI: In the Steve Jobs book I have a chapter on that. They’re both born in 1955. They intertwine often. In the 1970s, when the Apple II comes out, the software writer who does the most for the Apple II is Bill Gates. So they intersected quite a bit. They were the type of friend-rival combination that you see in business.
And they had totally different minds. Bill Gates was smarter than Steve Jobs in a conventional sense. He had more mental-processing power. He could look at two different computer screens with four different flows of information and process things in an analytical-processing-power way that was awesome.
But Steve was more of a genius. Steve had an intuitive imaginative ability to just see around corners, to know what we wanted before we did, and to have a feel for beauty. In the end, Bill Gates creates the Zune. Steve creates the iPod. He’s the creative genius.
DR: In The Innovators, you talk about the history, over several hundred years, of the development of the computer. Is it your view that computers, the Internet, and smartphones came about because of geniuses sitting in their own rooms, or was it because of some other process?
WI: We biographers know deep inside that we distort history a little bit. We make it sound like there’s a guy or a gal who’s a genius sitting in a garage or a garret and they have a lightbulb moment and, boom, innovation happens, an invention is born.
In fact, in the digital age in particular, most people wouldn’t even know—with all due respect to Al Gore—who invented the Internet, who invented the computer or the microchip. The reason is because innovation was done collaboratively.
Bell Labs was a great example. To develop the transistor, they’ve got a quantum theorist like John Bardeen. They have really great physicists like William Shockley. They have deft experimentalists such as Walter Brattain, who knows how to take a piece of silicon and dope the surface of it with boron, so it becomes a semiconductor, and put a paper clip through it and make a transistor based on the theories. You have Claude Shannon—who juggled balls on a unicycle in the Bell Labs corridors—because he’s this great information theorist.
But you also had people with grease under their fingernails who would climb telephone poles and knew how to amplify a signal. It takes a team to put something together. That’s what I wanted to show in The Innovators.
DR: One last question before we get to Benjamin Franklin. How do you actually have time to write these books? You are the president of the Aspen Institute, which is a very active organization. That’s a big day job. When do you write these books?
WI: When I was writing Benjamin Franklin, I was running CNN—which is harder than running the Aspen Institute. But I like to write at night. To me, writing is fun. It’s an escape, because you get to meet people in your mind and do things.
I work from 9 p.m. until 1 or 2 in the morning. Cathy, my wife, is always indulgent. The smart move is that if you’re a night person, you should marry a morning person. Cathy gets up at 6. I like to get up at about 8:30 or 9.
The good thing about the Aspen Institute too is that it’s a think tank. I discovered that nobody ever had a good idea before 9 a.m., so we don’t start that early.
DR: Who will be the next genius you’re going to write about? There are some rumors that you’re thinking about Leonardo.
WI: Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate genius. You look at his notebooks and realize that everything that I’ve tried to write about, when it comes to creativity, comes from the ability to connect the humanities to the sciences. I know that seems odd—“I’m a humanist. I don’t need the sciences,” and vice versa.
But Ben Franklin flying the kite in the rain, that wasn’t some doddering old dude. He’s a humanist. He knows how to put together humans and science.
The Vitruvian Man, the great drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, is the ultimate symbol of the connection of the sciences to the humanities. So I would love to take on Leonardo, not just as an artist. [Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci appeared in 2017.]
When he applies for a job with Ludovico il Moro who in 1494 becomes the Duke of Milan, Leonardo writes a twelve-paragraph letter—eleven paragraphs on “here’s my engineering skills, here’s how I helped build a dome on a church, here’s my military skills, everything else.” And the last paragraph is: “I can paint and sculpt if you need me to as well.” So he does the Mona Lisa while he’s there in Milan, but he considers it all one thing, not like “I’m an artist on one day and an engineer the next.”
DR: Let’s talk about Franklin.
WI: I wrote about Benjamin Franklin at first because I’d done Henry Kissinger, and I realized that the great balance-of-power diplomat we had in our history was Ben Franklin. Most people write about him as a writer, as a newspaper editor who writes wonderful essays. I realized he was a great diplomat.
But then I realized he was also a great scientist. That, to me, was sort of the revelation—that if you’re going to be an Enlightenment thinker, if you’re going to work for the balance of power as a diplomat or the balances that we see in the Constitution, it helps to know Newtonian mechanics, which he loved. That’s what got me very excited about a person who could do science and engineering as well as the humanities and art.
DR: Franklin wasn’t educated to be a scientist. In fact, he only went to school for two years. He was born in Boston, then came to Philadelphia. How did that come about?
WI: Well, he was the tenth son of a Puritan immigrant. As the tenth son, he was going to be his father’s tithe to the Lord. They were going to send him to Harvard to study for the ministry. It was a long time ago, when Harvard knew how to train ministers.
Ben Franklin wasn’t exactly cut out for the cloth. At one point, they’re salting the provisions at his house in Boston, and he was tired of the fact that they had to say grace every night. So he asked his father if he could say grace when they put the provisions away and they could get it done with once and for all for the entire year. His father realizes, “Man, this guy is never going to be a minister,” and doesn’t send him to Harvard.
He gets the next-best education, which is as a newspaper reporter. He’s apprenticed to his brother James. He writes the wonderful Silence Dogood essays—fourteen humorous essays he did for his brother’s paper—about what a waste of money it is to go to Harvard. He says, “Harvard knows only how to turn out dunces and blockheads who can enter a room genteelly, something they could have learned less expensively at dancing school.”
If you were a printer and a newspaper publisher, you were also a bookseller. And so Franklin would take, late at night, all the books from the shelf without his brother knowing it, and he would read Addison and Steele. [Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s witty newspaper the Spectator appeared in 1710–11 and was highly influential in the early eighteenth century.]
Daniel Defoe was one of his favorites, Bunyan’s [The] Pilgrim’s Progress, Cotton Mather’s Essays to Do Good, other things you and I were reading when we were fifteen. He sort of becomes a scientist because Cotton Mather and others were too.
DR: So he’s working for his brother, who is a printer in Boston. And then around age seventeen he decides to run away. He goes to Philadelphia. How does he manage to make himself a living in Philadelphia?
WI: He runs away, arrives in Philadelphia—in the most famous scene in autobiographical literature—with three coins in his pocket. Tips the boatman very generously because he says—here’s something you wouldn’t understand—“When you’re really poor, you’re more generous than when you’re really rich because you don’t want people to think you’re poor.”
DR: I’ve been poor.
WI: Okay, okay. And then he buys the three puffy rolls [another famous scene in Franklin’s Autobiography] and he decides to
become a printer. Now, this is really cool. There are about seven newspapers in Philadelphia, a town of three thousand. He says, “I’ll start another newspaper.” These were the good old days for newspapers. He starts a very funny, spunky newspaper, and he’s really good as a media mogul.
Instead of printing the Bible at his printshop and making that one of the books he sells, he says, “People only buy a Bible once a year.” So he invents Poor Richard’s Almanack, so you have to buy it every year.
Then he helps start the colonial postal system because he wanted to make sure that he could sort of franchise his printshops up and down the East Coast, and he would get preferred carriage in the colonial postal system.
DR: So as he’s building this printing business—
WI: And becomes incredibly wealthy.
DR: On the side, he experiments with various scientific things. Let’s go through some of the things he supposedly invented. Bifocals?
WI: Absolutely. He was not only a good theorist, he was a good engineer. When he would ride in the carriages on the postal inspection tours he took, he loved to read. Then he would look up and see the scenery, and it was hard for him. He had to switch glasses.
DR: So he did bifocals. What about the famous Franklin stove?
WI: It was actually not as successful as it should have been. One of the problems in that period was smoky stoves and waste of heat. So he invents an enclosed stove that recirculates the air, and he starts making money off of it, but it doesn’t succeed too well, because it was so efficient that the smoke didn’t go up the chimney much and it smoked up houses.
DR: What about electricity? Did he actually discover it?
Among Franklin’s many inventions: bifocals, sketched here in a letter to George Whatley, May 23, 1785.
WI: He comes close. Up until then, electricity was some parlor trick where people would take little balls of amber and put cloth on them and sparks would come out. [Rubbing the amber with the cloth produced static electricity.] People couldn’t figure out what electricity was. So Franklin does the great electricity experiments in the 1740s.
DR: Did he actually go out with a kite, or is that apocryphal?
WI: He did. Totally true.
DR: Isn’t that kind of dangerous?
WI: It was very dangerous. He said one of the great things about the electricity experiments and the kite experiments was that you kept getting shocked and knocked down. He said it was useful because it made a vain man humble. He was always trying to pretend to be more humble.
DR: He discovered that lightning was electricity?
WI: There are three things he discovers that are incredibly important. The first is called the conservation of charge, which even Newton hadn’t discovered. If you read I. Bernard Cohen’s Revolution in Science textbook, this is the most important discovery of that period.
They used to think that electricity was two fluids. Franklin discovered that it’s not two fluids. You’re just taking one charge and another charge and then when you put them back together it’s called the conservation of charge. He even invents terms—positive and negative—and a word, battery, to describe putting Leyden jars together so he can store a charge. [Leyden jars were an early kind of capacitor for storing electrical charges.]
Secondly, he looks at sparks. He’s making sparks. He looks at lightning, and he has a wonderful notebook entry that says: “Here’s the characteristics of a spark [snaps fingers], a quick thing like that, sulfurous smell, whatever. Here are the characteristics of lightning. They’re all the same.”
And at the very bottom he puts: “Let the experiment be made.” So he goes out and flies a kite.
DR: The value of this experiment, among other things, was it led to the lightning rod. Can you explain what that was?
WI: The lightning rod was the most important invention of the eighteenth century. I was stunned, when I researched this book, at the number of lightning strikes that just totally destroyed things.
DR: All over the place. Houses, churches.
WI: All over Europe. One of the great dangers of that period was lightning. They used to consecrate church bells. They used to pray over the church bells and put them in the steeples so that lightning wouldn’t strike there. And they even sometimes stored gunpowder under the steeples. And yet the lightning kept striking the steeples and everything would blow up.
Franklin, in his wry way, in the same notebook with “Let the experiment be made,” writes: “You would think we would try something different after a while.”
He realizes through the kite experiment that lightning is actually an excess of negative charge in the cloud that suddenly discharges to the ground. The kite with its wet string actually brings the charge down, and he captures it with a key and transfers it into a Leyden jar.
By doing that, he realizes that a pointed, grounded, metal rod will capture the excess electrons, or the negative charge of the cloud, and keep it. When he publishes that in the Pennsylvania Gazette, that summer in Philadelphia, forty-two lightning rods go up, and those buildings no longer get hit by lightning.
They actually do the full experiments [that Franklin proposed on electricity] first in France. He does the kite experiment himself, but he hasn’t heard the fact that they’ve done it in France. But he becomes an unbelievably important international celebrity.
DR: He became the most prominent American in the world. He was better known than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
WI: By far. The French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon has a wonderful epitaph for him—I think it may be on the Houdon bust on display at the Library—which is: “He snatched the scepter from tyrants and lightning from the gods.”
DR: Think about some of the other things he did. He created the first hospital in the United States.
Franklin as scientific investigator: Lightning strikes outside the window as the scientist takes notes during an experiment in this 1763 portrait.
WI: When he was a young newspaper tradesman printer, he started something called the Leather Apron Club, or the Junto. It’s for civic improvement, because he was the ultimate in what you want as a civic leader. He wasn’t looking for big expenditures. He would just get people together and start things.
Every Friday when they met, they said, “What does the town need?” They start, I think, with the Hospital Company of Philadelphia. Then they have a militia, a street-sweeping corps, the Library Company of Philadelphia. On his deathbed, he still has his leather fire bucket from the Union Fire Company [the volunteer fire brigade he helped start], because you’re supposed to sleep with that for safety. Sixty years later, when he’s dying, he still has that.
DR: On the side, he created the university that’s now the University of Pennsylvania.
WI: And you should read the document for it. It’s called Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, and it starts the academy.
It’s a particularly interesting thing because Franklin and Jefferson were really close, but they had separate theories of education. Jefferson believed—and if you read the founding documents of the University of Virginia, you see it—it was to take the best of the best and skim the cream and create what Jefferson calls “a natural aristocracy.”
But Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, which becomes the founding document of what is now the University of Pennsylvania, says this is not just to skim the elite, this is so that every person, whatever their abilities or whatever their station in life, can reach fulfillment by having a better education. I’ll let Jon Meacham come back and defend Jefferson later.
DR: The printing business is a very big business, and so, at the age of forty-two, Franklin says, “I’m done. I’m retired.”
WI: Sort of. He has franchises with all of his apprentices up and down the coast. Something else you would understand—he is getting an equity stake in each one of these but he’s not going to work every day.
DR: He has a deal with his partner where I think
he gets half the profits for eighteen years or something like that.
WI: Not bad.
DR: So now he has time for public affairs. How does he get involved in governmental matters? Why did he actually decide to leave Philadelphia and go to London?
WI: He gets appointed. First of all, he hates the proprietors of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. There’s a complex situation there. It was not a Loyalist colony.
DR: The Penn family owned the state, essentially.
WI: Essentially, although Franklin would not have agreed with that. But the Penn family thought they owned it outright.
Franklin’s newspaper was an independent newspaper, but he becomes involved with the Pennsylvania Assembly, which thinks that you should not be able to tax people, as the Penns were trying to do, without the assembly agreeing to it. Franklin becomes the envoy of the Pennsylvania Assembly to London, to be a lobbyist, basically, to get the ministers to agree to allow the colonies to have their own governance. He also then becomes the envoy for Massachusetts and two others.
“Join, or Die”: Franklin published this famous early example of editorial cartooning in his Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper to encourage the colonies to band together to defend themselves.
DR: So he eventually moves to London. Does he come right back?
WI: No. It’s kind of odd. He loves it, and he brings his illegitimate son, William, who loves it even more and becomes very aristocratic.
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