Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  The nations and cities that lagged behind were eager to catch up, and none more so than the military state of Prussia. And so Franklin had a counterpart in Berlin, a man as keen as he was to improve his country and to climb the hill of knowledge. Six years Franklin’s junior, King Frederick of Prussia held sway over a chain of provinces from the Rhine to the Baltic that, like Pennsylvania, were rich in grain. Unlike the Quaker colonists, he had his army too, which Frederick unleashed against the Austrians. In 1740 he annexed the Habsburg province of Silesia, a lawless incident of theft by force of arms that helped to bring about the wider war between Great Britain and France. What Prussia did not possess was industry, technology, or prestige in the world of learning.

  And so, in the year when his troops plundered the Silesians, Frederick the Great revived the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which had become entirely moribund, offering salaries and honors to the eminent philosophers he hoped to recruit. “I wish my capital to become the temple of great men,” he wrote to his friend Voltaire. With his improved academy, the Prussian king meant to reach or to surpass, as soon as he could, the level of knowledge that existed in London and Paris. Though conceived on a much grander scale, it was a project with aims identical to those of Franklin’s new society in Philadelphia. Here were two visionaries, who felt adrift on the periphery of culture and did not wish to remain so.25

  To the south of Prussia lay the kingdom of Saxony, which had fine universities at Wittenberg and Halle but also saw itself as a nation with unrealized potential. Here the visionary was a politician, Ernst Christoph, Graf von Manteuffel. As his country’s envoy in Berlin he had shared ideas with Frederick over endless cups of coffee. The count created a club of his own that even more closely resembled Franklin’s, calling it the Societas Aletho-Philorum, the society for the lovers of truth. All he and the Prussians required was an interlude of peace in which to concentrate on the pursuit of wisdom. In 1741 and 1742, Frederick defeated the Austrian army, a treaty was signed, and in the two years that followed, Germany became the electrical heart of Europe.

  At Halle and Wittenberg, Manteuffel urged the professors into action. Rather than making new theories, the Germans strove for technical advances that could enhance the power of electricity. In London in the early 1700s, Newton’s assistant Francis Hauksbee had used a whirling globe of glass to produce his flashing lights and dancing threads of brass. However, in their later work in the 1730s in London and Paris the electricians had preferred to make do with a glass tube rubbed by hand. At Wittenberg in 1743, Georg Matthias Bose returned to the earlier British technique, building a new electrical machine using a glass sphere attached to a system of pulleys and a wheel that could be turned at high speed. The word “conductor” had already come into use, coined by Desaguliers. Bose’s “prime conductor” consisted of a long iron rod or gun barrel, suspended by silken threads and brought up close to the sphere.26

  Making a host of technical improvements—for example, by reducing the quantity of potash used in making the glass, or by oiling its surface—the Germans found that they could amplify the effects Du Fay had produced. Bose charged up a dinner table, so that when the guests sat down, sparks flashed from the cutlery and gave them a hefty shock. He sat a man in a seat and created an electric halo around his head, calling the experiment “the chair of beatification.” One of his colleagues electrified a lady’s whalebone corset so that it could send forth “flashes of pure lightning.”

  Most dramatic of all was the event that took place at the Berlin Academy in January 1744. With Frederick looking on, the scientists filled a tank with a mixture of alcohol and sulfuric acid and brought the prime conductor to bear. They accomplished what Du Fay had failed to do: the liquid exploded in a ball of flame. Eager to spread the word, Manteuffel arranged electrical shows for the princes and nobility of the German states, including Hanover, where George II spent his summer vacation. There “the ladies of quality did yet more,” it was reported. “They procured machines, tried the experiments themselves, and electricity took the place of quadrille.”27

  From a German point of view, electricity made an ideal subject for research: a field where the British and the French had struck a dead end, giving their competitors across the Rhine the opportunity they needed to take the lead in physics. As yet, Herr Bose and his colleagues did not have a theory to make sense of their findings, but they could at least confirm that thinkers such as Madame du Châtelet had been looking for the secret of “Fire” in the correct location. It did indeed appear that light, heat, electricity, and magnetism were—in some strange way—all variations on a common theme. The effects of electricity were startling and powerful enough to make it what the marquise thought it was: the path to the center of the labyrinth of nature.

  Perhaps there was some fundamental force, or indeed some fundamental form of matter, the underlying stuff of the universe, of which heat, light, and electricity were all manifestations. But if this was so, how did it square with the system left behind by Sir Isaac Newton? Mostly, he had seemed to think of matter as something passive and inert, doing nothing by itself without the action of some external force. Or at least that was one way to read what Newton had written; in fact, in his later work, the subtle Sir Isaac had been far less categorical. Be that as it may, when Manteuffel and his friends thought about the new phenomenon of electricity, it did not seem to them that “matter” was inert. On the contrary, it seemed to be dynamic, full of something like the vigor of a living creature.

  It was all very confusing. It was also very exhilarating. And all the more so, when the sister science of biology produced what seemed to be another refutation of Newton. In the summer of 1743, Manteuffel exchanged a series of animated letters with the eminence of German philosophy, Christian Wolff. Their letters dealt with two subjects: not only the new electrical displays, but also the bizarre behavior of the polyp, a tiny aquatic creature, living in ponds, which looked like a plant but squirmed and crawled about like an insect or an animal.28

  First identified three years earlier by a Swiss scientist, Abraham Trembley, the polyp was as strange as electric fire. Cut a polyp in half, and it would not die. Instead it would regenerate, to produce two wriggling creatures where only one had existed before. For Wolff and for Manteuffel, the polyp seemed to be the lively proof that Newton had been wrong about the properties of “matter.” Leaping to more than a few conclusions, Professor Wolff began to revive the concept of “spontaneous generation,” to the effect that life could emerge unbidden from a primal soup of mud and water. Nearly twenty years earlier, on his voyage home from London, Franklin had pondered the same kind of notion when he peered at the mysterious Sargassum.*

  Suddenly it seemed that science was ready to escape from Newton’s shadow, with a host of new things to be seen and new theories to be proposed. In 1743 and 1744, these two sets of results—the German work with electricity, and Trembley’s investigation of the polyp—came together to produce the sense of excitement that Peter Collinson transmitted on to America. Since the death of Desaguliers, in London the Royal Society had been through a rather dormant phase. After learning of these new discoveries, the membership sprang back into motion.

  Hearing about the polyp, they scoured the countryside in the outskirts of London, where they found some patriotic English polypi in residence in a pond in Hackney. In November 1743 they gave Mr. Trembley their highest award, the Copley Medal; and eighteen months later, when full reports came in from Germany about the electrical shows, the Royal Society were equally receptive. On March 14, 1745, they listened to a long account of the German experiments, including Professor Bose’s “chair of beatification.” In its April issue, The Gentleman’s Magazine published the story in full.29

  On March 30, Collinson wrote an ecstatic letter to New York telling Cadwallader Colden of what he had seen and heard. “The surprising phenomena of the polypus entertained the curious for a year or two past,” h
e wrote. “But now the virtuosi…are taken up in electrical experiments.” Collinson too had been among a group of gentlemen who saw a spark of electricity detonate a charge of gunpowder. In the new discoveries he found what he called “an inexhaustible fund of enquiry…of very great moment no doubt to the system of the universe.” If only Sir Isaac were still alive, said Collinson: “Had these great discoveries happened in that great man’s time, his illuminated mind would have applied them to wonderful purposes.” It would fall to Franklin to be the new genius they required.

  In the meantime there was still a war to be fought. In the summer of 1744, Frederick the Great had sent his army to attack the Austrians in Bohemia, with Saxony also drawn into the fighting. In alliance with France he was about to win more victories. The following year, the Americans would teach the French a painful lesson of the same military kind; but for Franklin, it began with melancholy news that he had been expecting to arrive.

  * Franklin ran a story about the polyp in The Pennsylvania Gazette on March 31, 1743.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A CALLING FOUND

  Sir Robert Walpole was a dying man, and his last years were blighted with the agony of kidney stones. He shared at least that measure of equality with Josiah Franklin, who suffered from the same complaint. Franklin wrote to his parents, suggesting drugs, promising to speak to Bartram about herbal remedies, and also advising a mixture of honey and molasses. It might help Josiah’s urine flow more freely with less gravel. Meanwhile Jane Mecom nursed him with devotion. “Dear sister,” wrote Franklin, “I love you tenderly for your care of our father in his sickness.”1

  On January 16, 1745, Josiah passed away at the age of eighty-seven. He had been sixty-one years in America, his life mostly quiet and his habits sober and industrious. Again—as with his brother Benjamin—when his obituary appeared in the Boston press, praising Josiah as a man who had always displayed “the strictest piety and virtue,” from its brief and stylized contents no one could have guessed that here was an Englishman, one of the earliest Whigs, who remembered the distant London of Titus Oates and the Popish Plot. And yet the conflicts of that era remained unresolved. The Jacobites were still at large, with a new leader, Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of the old King James of the 1680s. In March, Walpole died as well; and as the statesman breathed his last, with his diplomacy in ruins, it was feared that the Jacobites were poised to swoop on England, carried to the beaches by an invasion fleet from France.

  Which was close to the truth; although when the Jacobite invasion came later that year, it was routed through the Scottish Highlands, and the French army were noticeably absent. At Versailles the officials were never really sure about the Jacobites, and still less about the young Prince Charles. In Massachusetts, it seemed to be time to come to England’s aid by opening another front in the war. Up in Nova Scotia—or more precisely on Cape Breton Island—the French had their fortified naval base at Louisbourg. If it could be taken, not only would the French privateers lose a depot for supplies. The way might also be made clear for a British and American assault on Canada.

  And so in Boston the governor, William Shirley, drew up a plan to strike at Louisbourg. It was something he had been discussing for years with his friend Peter Warren, a naval officer from Britain whose squadron of ships were based in the Bay Colony. Early in 1745 Commodore Warren and his little fleet were off in the West Indies, guarding the sugar islands. But if they broke away and made a dash for the north, and if New England raised an army of its own, perhaps they might catch Louisbourg by surprise.2

  Never before had a British colony conceived a plan so daring; and no one was more eager than Franklin to see it succeed. At his desk in the State House in Philadelphia, he seethed with anger as he listened late in February while the assembly debated the question of the hour: should Pennsylvania join the expedition to Cape Breton? As the assembly clerk, Franklin was supposed to keep the minutes and be neutral. However, among his papers there survives a fragmentary document—meant it seems for his eyes only—that records his feelings about the affair.

  He was furious with Governor Thomas, for calling on the members to help in the attack on Louisbourg, while knowing all the time that Speaker Kinsey and the Quaker-led majority would refuse his request. Franklin was only a little less angry with the Quakers. In the summer just gone, a French privateer from Cape Breton had taken four ships from Philadelphia at the mouth of the Delaware: but the Quakers were content to turn the other cheek. “In short the governor and the assembly have been only acting a farce,” he wrote, “playing tricks to amuse the world.”3

  What could Franklin do? For one thing he had the power of the press; but to use it to best effect he needed news. On March 24 the militia set sail from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, blessed on their way to war with a homily by George Whitefield, who had somehow forgotten the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. The preacher had reappeared in America, where he sought to widen his appeal by adding a dose of patriotic fervor. Eager for more information, Franklin sent a letter to his brother John. “Our people are extremely impatient to hear of your success at Cape Breton,” he wrote. “My shop is filled with thirty inquiries at the coming in of every post.” His only fear was this: that America’s lack of trained engineers might doom the assault to failure.4

  There it was again, the thing that had so often troubled Franklin: the shortage of craftsmen in the colonies. On this occasion his anxieties were misplaced. In April Warren’s ships hurried north from Antigua, making rendezvous with the volunteer marines from New England. On May Day they landed five miles from the fortress, three thousand strong, dragging their cannon on sledges. While Warren kept French warships at bay, the siege of Louisbourg began. It lasted seven hard-fought weeks, with the Americans bringing their batteries ever closer to the walls. On June 17, seeing that their defenses were about to be breached, the French had no choice: the garrison surrendered.

  Greeted with exultation in Britain and America alike, the fall of Louisbourg had many consequences. For the first time in colonial history, news from the western side of the Atlantic became the principal talking point in London; and so in future, Walpole’s successors would have to pay more heed to the dispatches they received, and think more deeply about their American strategy. Wiping out the stain of the disasters at Cartagena and Guantánamo Bay, the victory led to a surge of confidence in Boston and the other towns along the seaboard.

  It even helped heal some of the wounds left by the Great Awakening. In the summer of 1745, Whitefield and his opponents in the clergy could unite in rejoicing at the defeat of the Papists. For some time Whitefield had been toning down his sermons, making them less divisive, and in January he had come close to issuing an apology to his opponents among the Harvard ministers in New England. Even so, it was only after Louisbourg that he and Franklin became personal friends as opposed to business contacts. For Franklin the Cape Breton campaign had also been a professional triumph.

  When Franklin’s journalism is discussed, his talents are usually seen to lie in the quality of his prose: Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, The Way to Wealth, and the hoaxes and satires he went on writing until the 1770s. But nothing beats news in a newspaper. Working at long distance, but with his wide array of contacts to help him—privateers, merchants, and politicians—Franklin broke fresh ground in his coverage of Louisbourg. It was detailed, it was sustained, combining hard news with analysis, and it was fast.

  On May 23, for example, while the Americans were still in the trenches, he ran a column in The Pennsylvania Gazette explaining the significance of Louisbourg, putting it in its context, economic and military, and setting out the origins of Franco-British rivalry. On June 6 he did still better, with vivid eyewitness accounts of the landings and the first nine days of fighting onshore. In the same issue, Franklin printed a gem of the newsman’s art: a detailed plan of Louisbourg and its defenses, with each point carefully numbered and explaine
d in notes beneath the map.

  Franklin apologized for the quality—“rough as it is, for want of good engravers here”—but no one in America had printed the like before. And when Louisbourg fell, the news reaching Boston on July 8, it took only ten more days for Franklin to get a full report—from three different sources, two officers and an army chaplain—into the Gazette. It filled the front page and spilled over onto the second. Below it he ran more news from the Wilmington privateer.

  After twenty-five years in the business, more or less, Franklin had nothing left to learn about editing a newspaper. A journalist on top of his trade, he was in a cheerful, even ebullient mood that year, despite his father’s death and his irritation with Governor Thomas and the Quakers. The success of his fireplace pamphlet, his philosophical society, his ever widening circle of friends, his little daughter, and even young William, who was mostly shaping up well: Franklin had many reasons to be happy. David Hall was turning out to be a treasure. This must have helped to make the Louisbourg coverage go so splendidly for the Gazette.

  In the middle of February, Franklin had written a lively letter to William Strahan that takes us into his buoyant frame of mind. Praising David Hall to the skies, Franklin was eager to hear all the latest news and to see the latest books from London. “Let me have everything, good or bad, that makes a noise and has a run,” he wrote to Strahan. “For I have friends here of different tastes to oblige with the sight of them.” In particular he asked for poetry by Alexander Pope and by his beloved James Thomson. Although Pope had passed away the previous year, Thomson was still in full flood. He had recently brought out a new, enlarged edition of The Seasons.5