by Nick Bunker
In his memoirs Franklin made it all sound rather casual, almost as if he picked up a glass tube one day and began to rub it merely out of curiosity. In fact, in matters of science Colden and Franklin were the least casual of human beings. They read very hard and thought very deeply. They also shared a common vision of what colonial science might be. As time went by, they discovered that their minds worked in different ways—Franklin, always so methodical, had a far more rigorous approach—but they both knew what they wanted from science. Not a pastime, but a profession: and this was something new in America. What had gone before was not enough.
As far back as the 1630s, the colonies had been a home to people fascinated by science, beginning with Puritans in Boston who saw mathematics as an avenue to the mind of God. Later on at Harvard, students were taught Newton’s theories and in 1728 the college appointed a professor of natural philosophy. Beyond its walls, the press ran scientific stories—even Samuel Keimer did that—and there were many keen researchers who hoped to make new discoveries. Almost as soon as it came into being in the 1660s, the Royal Society had begun to publish reports from correspondents in America. The most famous was Cotton Mather, a man in love with astronomy and medicine, who became one of the society’s fellows. By the 1730s, up and down the seaboard there were pastors, lawyers, and physicians gazing at the stars, taking notes on meteorology, collecting specimens, and doing small experiments. But in all of this two elements had been lacking.24
One of them was urgency, and the other was originality. With his concept of a philosophical society, Franklin was calling—as a matter of necessity—for what amounted to a national scientific endeavor. It had to be unified and disciplined, with the aim of raising the American game to new heights of achievement. No one had said this before. Colden shared his sense of urgency, but also something else: he wanted to see colonial scientists produce a body of original work fit to stand up to scrutiny from the most brilliant minds in Europe. In the course of his exchanges with Cadwallader Colden, Franklin would begin to see what form his originality might take.
*1 In 1757 Captain Sibbald was one of the witnesses of Franklin’s will.
*2 In his autobiography Franklin says that he first saw Spencer’s displays of electricity in 1746. As the Harvard historian of science I. Bernard Cohen showed in the 1940s, this was a lapse of memory by Franklin: their first meeting was definitely in 1743.
Chapter Eighteen
COLDEN, FRANKLIN, AND THE TWO FRONTIERS
They could not have chosen a better time to meet. On his farm in the Hudson valley, seventy miles upriver from the Bronx, Colden often felt like a castaway in the wilderness. He was yearning for new friends who shared his passion for science. Seven months before he met Franklin, he poured out his frustration in a long letter to Peter Collinson, with whom he had just begun to correspond. “The encouragement to a mere scholar is very small in any part of North America,” Colden wrote. “We are very poor in knowledge and very needy of assistance.”1
Hence his excitement when Franklin told him about his manifesto. Nearly twenty years earlier Colden had suggested something of the kind, “a voluntary society for the advancing of knowledge” to be based in Boston, but the scheme had never come to fruition. After their meeting in the summer of 1743, Colden wrote to Franklin with a message of support for his more ambitious version of the same idea. “I long very much to hear what you have done,” he wrote. Soon he was describing his new acquaintance as “a printer the most ingenious in his way…of any in America.”
That autumn Franklin replied with a charming letter—“I cannot but be fond of engaging in a correspondence so advantageous,” he wrote—and their friendship was sealed. It came to extend beyond philosophy and science and into politics, because Colden, like Franklin, was a man of many parts. They shared the same concerns about the military threat from France. In the defense of America the two men would find another unifying purpose.2
When Colden called himself “a mere scholar,” he was being rather modest. Long ago, as a trainee doctor in the London of Queen Anne, he had studied Newton’s treatise on optics and met Edmund Halley, the astronomer who gave his name to a comet. Moving to America, he tried and failed to make a medical career in Philadelphia. But he met James Logan, who for a while regarded Colden as perhaps the cleverest person in the colonies. In New York in the 1720s he became a trusted aide of Governor Burnet, carrying out enormous surveys of the Hudson and the Mohawk. In the process Colden became an expert on the Iroquois, people who filled him with a mixture of admiration and alarm.
He and Franklin had many things in common. Both had been raised as Presbyterians; indeed Colden was a minister’s son, from a Scottish country parish near the English border, but both men had long since abandoned any Calvinist beliefs. Instead Mr. Colden had come to adopt the liberal creed of Francis Hutcheson, the Glasgow philosopher, that Franklin also found so appealing. Like Franklin the mason, Colden believed in what he called “that general benevolence of mankind, which is the true principle of virtue.” Like Franklin he loved to read Paradise Lost, and especially Milton’s account of the Garden of Eden.3
There Colden found—as Franklin did—a poetic kind of faith which, when combined with scientific knowledge, could be used to replace old Bible doctrines. If they wished to find God, he wrote, people should begin with what Milton had described: in Colden’s words, “the infinite variety and beauty of the works of the creator.” And so he studied botany as well, making collections of the flora of New York. This was how he came to swap letters with Collinson, the London Quaker, who gave him an introduction to John Bartram. While on a field trip to the Catskills in 1742, the explorer had stayed at Colden’s farm by the Hudson.
At this point in his life, Colden was not yet an embittered old Tory. On the contrary, he was a Whig like Franklin, and Bartram found him “ye most facetious agreeable gentleman I ever met with.” He was brimming with ideas and eager to share them. Like Franklin with his fireplace, he saw himself as a promoter of “useful knowledge,” an inventor or an engineer. And so Colden designed a new, improved version of the portable quadrant, to help surveyors such as himself, and he sent the details off to London in search of an expert opinion from instrument makers. Colden also devised a new method of printing, using metal plates rather than movable characters, writing it up in a paper that he sent to Franklin.4
On a bluff above the Schuylkill River four miles from downtown Philadelphia, the house and garden of Franklin’s friend John Bartram, the farmer and botanist, begun in 1728 and then gradually added to until his death in 1777.
Once again Franklin had to use his powers of diplomacy. Colden’s invention had no future—the method had been tried before, wrote a London printer, and it was “expensive and inconvenient”—but Franklin did not wish to offend his new friend. He replied to Colden in November, always his busiest period with the new Poor Richard in production, but the fall of 1743 was all the more hurried because his summer trip to Boston had left him behind with his work. Even so Franklin was very polite. He was “much pleased” with the invention, he wrote. “I shall consider it very attentively…and in a post or two send you some observations.” It seems that Franklin never got around to doing so.5
Soon afterward word arrived from England that Mr. Colden’s quadrant was equally impractical. Clever and hardworking though he was, Colden had a tendency to stray out of his depth. On his farm, he was living close to the Indian frontier but he also saw himself as a man at the very boundary of knowledge. He saw it as his duty to try to push back both frontiers, the territorial and the scientific, but in doing so he was often far too ambitious. And yet—in a way—this was his most valuable contribution. In the 1740s, science in America stood in need of overreachers, people who were ready to be bold and take the risk of wasting time or looking foolish. The important thing about Cadwallader Colden was this: because he was so daring he made other people think, including
Benjamin Franklin.
When they met, Colden was surveying the boundary line of New York and Connecticut, but in his leisure hours he was working on perhaps his most audacious project. Or rather his most foolhardy. Having read so much of Newton’s physics, Colden believed—as Sir Isaac had himself—that scientists stood on the shore of a vast ocean of knowledge, awaiting new voyages of exploration. And so Colden decided to plunge in headfirst. What had been Newton’s two most important discoveries? Universal gravitation and the calculus. As yet, nobody had explained why they had the power that they possessed. In the Hudson valley, Colden meant to be the man who did so.
Exactly what was gravity? Colden thought he knew. And how could it be that a science as abstract as mathematics could predict the workings of the universe? In other words: what grounding could be found for Newton’s equations in the realities of nature? To supply the answer to these questions, Colden began to write two treatises. One was to be titled An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter, and of the Cause of Gravitation. The other was an essay on the calculus, which Colden still referred to as “fluxions,” using Sir Isaac’s terminology.
He had not the slightest chance of success. As James Logan pointed out when he saw the manuscripts, Colden made some glaring errors in his mathematics, suggesting that he never grasped the calculus at all. However, the hours he devoted to the project proved to be worthwhile, albeit indirectly, because Colden’s speculations became a talking point for like-minded people from Boston down to Virginia. As his ideas passed to and fro, his network of contacts grew larger, to encompass people that Franklin hoped to recruit for his American Philosophical Society. And so the study of physics gathered a new momentum in the colonies, helped along by Dr. Spencer’s lectures and also, as things turned out, by the war with France that was just about to begin.
To help him refine his thinking, Colden had another new friend, a young Scottish soldier named Captain John Rutherfurd. A man in his early thirties, Rutherfurd had already served as a member of Parliament in London, but like so many members of the Scottish landed gentry he was deeply in debt. Desperate to find a salary, Rutherfurd obtained a commission in the British Army. The only command he could find was in New York. In 1742, he had arrived at Albany to lead the garrison: four companies of fusiliers, ill-equipped and understrength. And there, in the long winter evenings, the captain pored over Mr. Colden’s ideas.6
An educated fellow, Rutherfurd counted among his relations some of the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment. He too had studied the authors—the Dutchmen Boerhaave and ’s Gravesande—whose books had meant so much to Franklin. Colden admired them too; and so he and the captain discussed the deepest secrets of nature. “The search of truths has something in it so soothing,” wrote Rutherfurd, “that I dare say you’ll never repent your labor you bestow in it.” They worried away at the questions that the Dutch had posed about the phenomenon of “Fire.” What was it? What was heat? What was light? What was electricity? Were they all the same? Did they emanate from the sun, as a stream of particles? Or were they intrinsic to every piece of matter in the earth and in the planets? Rutherfurd stood up for Newton, while Colden saw defects in Sir Isaac’s theories.7
Back and forth the letters went, with the captain reading drafts of Mr. Colden’s Explication. Rutherfurd also went down to Philadelphia, where he met John Bartram, just before he left for Onondaga. There the captain mingled with the Scottish merchants of the town. His brother, William Rutherfurd, had recently arrived to join the firm of one James Mackey, an importer of British hardware, whom Franklin knew well. Mackey had served for eleven years first as the doorkeeper and then as the sergeant at arms of the General Assembly where Franklin was the clerk.8
And so, by the end of 1743, there had come into existence a new network of people, spanning the Atlantic and united by bonds of friendship, by ties of commerce, and by a zeal for science. In New York there were Rutherfurd and Colden, who also had correspondents in Boston; in Philadelphia, there were Bartram, James Logan, and Franklin; and by way of him the network spread out to embrace the Library Company and the other members of the Junto.
Over in London there was Peter Collinson, who played an essential role as an intermediary. As far back as 1737, Collinson had read to the Royal Society a long letter from Joseph Breintnall of the Junto about the zoology of rattlesnakes. It was only the first of many letters from Breintnall, Bartram, and Colden, describing earthquakes, meteors, wasp’s nests, plagues of locusts, and much else that Collinson took to his colleagues. Although they aroused little interest, Collinson had at least created a channel of communication between the leading scientists in London and the most ingenious minds in the colonies.9
All of this took place at a time when, as Franklin had put it in the Gazette, the affairs of Europe were descending into an era of “infernal discord.” In his early manhood, the peaceful conditions in the Atlantic had helped to create the environment in which he could flourish, as he grew his business in a stable and relatively prosperous economy. This era of equilibrium was now at an end. But—paradoxically—Franklin was about to become the beneficiary of war. While the flow of trade and news would be disrupted, many ships would still get through; and the war had the effect of deepening the ties of friendship between the people who belonged to Franklin’s circle of allies.
Almost to a man—even John Bartram, despite his Quaker origins—they were as strongly committed to colonial security as they were to science. And this gave them all the more reason to communicate with each other. For many years, Cadwallader Colden had shared Logan’s fears that the colonies would be surrounded by the French. In 1738, Colden had sent his own long memo to London, very similar to Logan’s six years earlier, in which he warned the government about the weakness of New York’s perimeter.10
From Canada the French were reaching out to the Iroquois, seeking to prise them free from British influence. Worse still, they had built a base in the upper reaches of the Hudson, the fortress known later as Crown Point, from which they could launch an invasion of New York. By 1743 this was more than a theoretical risk. The French fort lay only a hundred miles from Albany, where Rutherfurd had fewer than five hundred men. In January he gave Colden his assessment of the situation. “In a week’s time, they can plunder Boston,” he wrote. In the letters they exchanged, military thoughts of such a kind could be found side by side with their debates about Newtonian physics.11
In Philadelphia, for the moment the situation seemed less alarming: because Weiser had returned in diplomatic triumph from his mission to the Iroquois. Making peace between them and the Virginians, he also prepared a new treaty between the Six Nations and Pennsylvania, due to be signed at Lancaster the following year. Meanwhile William Allen was fitting out a new privateer, the Wilmington, to put to sea to attack the Spanish. In the Gazette, Franklin printed more reports from her captain, his friend John Sibbald, about his adventures in the Caribbean. Indeed the reports were so vivid that at about this time William Franklin, at only thirteen or fourteen years old, sneaked out of the family home to join a privateer and his father had to go aboard to fetch him back. “No-one imagined that it was hard usage at home that made him do this,” Franklin wrote to Jane Mecom. “Everyone that knows me thinks I am too indulgent a parent, as well as master.”12
Other than that all was quiet; but the calm was deceptive. Late in June, while Franklin was returning from Boston, at last the shooting war began in Germany. At Dettingen, near Frankfurt, although hostilities had not yet been officially declared the British and the French went into battle, the French were defeated, and with that the die was cast. The peaceful world of Franklin’s youth had disappeared.
FRANKLIN MOVES ON
It must have seemed to Franklin in 1743 that his life was just one Scotsman after another. He reached Philadelphia at the end of June. Deborah was now very pregnant—she would give birth in September to their daughter Sarah, or Sally�
�but Franklin also found waiting for him a message from a Scot named William Strahan. An Edinburgh man, he had built a thriving business as a printer in London. Although Mr. Strahan was only twenty-eight, he was already the printer of choice for the Methodists, running off a stream of tracts and journals by Whitefield, William Seward, and John Wesley. Somehow—perhaps by way of Seward—Strahan had heard of Franklin’s high reputation. He had also met James Read, a cousin of Deborah’s, who had been in England on business. Strahan wrote to Read, who showed his letter to Franklin. It contained a business proposition that Franklin found highly attractive.13
Now that he had three printing houses—his own, and his partnerships in Charleston and New York—Franklin hoped to establish a fourth, but that he could not do until he found the right person. It was the same old colonial problem, a shortage of skilled labor, but Strahan could offer a solution. His letter referred to a fellow Scot, David Hall, eight years younger than Franklin and a trained compositor. Hall had worked for Franklin’s old London employer, John Watts, and then for William Strahan, but he was keen to set up in business by himself.
The young man had a problem of his own—like the young Franklin, he lacked the capital with which to buy equipment—but he was willing to sail to America. Strahan suggested that Franklin might like to take him on. On July 10 Franklin replied, offering Hall the chance to manage a new printing house if he turned out to be “a proper person.” Even if he did not make the grade, he would guarantee a year’s paid work for Hall and meet the cost of his passage back to England. It was one of the best letters Franklin ever sent: not for its style—though as always with him, it was impeccably written—but because David Hall was exactly the person his business required.