Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  “I wish it were in my power to return him any part of the joy he has given me,” said Franklin. Over the years, as he revised The Seasons, so Thomson had included more and more allusions to the latest scientific theories: about biology, astronomy, the phenomena of light and heat, and—a favorite Thomson subject, as it was for Franklin—the origins of thunder and lightning. Binding poetry and physics ever more closely together, Thomson was the poet laureate of British science. With his writings he fed the mood of intellectual excitement in London. An eloquent spokesman for patriotism as well, especially when displayed by the Royal Navy, James Thomson also wrote the words for “Rule Britannia.” In every way he appealed to Franklin—scientist and patriot—whose work in both domains Thomson helped to inspire.6

  ANIMAL SPIRITS

  At some point in 1745, Cadwallader Colden sent Franklin his essay about what he called the “animal economy.” It was a curious piece, in which the Scotsman tried to argue that the human body works its miracles partly by way of Newton’s laws of motion, and partly thanks to something chemical that he called “fermentation.” Somehow or other, deep in the capillaries or in the liver, this strange process occurred. As a result, said Mr. Colden, “the animal juices gain their greatest perfection, and produce the fluids called animal spirits.”7

  The essay was very odd indeed; but in the summer Franklin carefully read what Colden had to say. It was very hot in Philadelphia, plagued by mosquitoes—Franklin complained to Colden about them—but he persevered with “animal economy.” Franklin even tried to build a model, fashioned out of glass tubes and siphons, to test the truth of Colden’s strange theories. Thrilled by the victory at Louisbourg, Franklin felt he could do anything.

  At the American Philosophical Society, his comrades were failing to do their bit: they preferred the coffeehouse to chemistry. But Franklin persisted. He told Colden of some plans to launch a new scientific magazine. He would have so much material: Colden on animal spirits and “fluxions” and “the different species of matter,” Mitchell on yellow fever, and himself on whatever “matters of invention” he might choose. And in this same mood of euphoria, Franklin put pen to paper with something in very bad taste.

  On June 25, while the siege of Louisbourg was still under way, Franklin wrote a crude, misogynistic piece about the bodies of women. Not made the least bit public until 1885—and even then only in a limited edition, which very few people saw—his article was titled “Old Mistresses Apologue.” Those who wish to read the witty sketch in full can find it in the Yale edition of Franklin’s papers, freely available online.

  The gist of it is this: if a young man feels in need and does not wish to marry, he should seek his pleasure with an old woman. Why? Because she will be discreet and undemanding. While her face, neck, and arms will be wrinkled, in bed her other parts can still perform their function: even in the dark, which will be required because she is so ugly. The best of it will be that an old woman will be “so grateful!!” So we are told in the “Apologue.”

  In idle moments or in drink, a man might think or say such things: but why should Franklin write them down, seeing that they were never to be published? And why should he date the article so precisely? And at such a time, when he was so busy with the war and The Pennsylvania Gazette? Another odd thing is this: the “Apologue” survives in two manuscripts. One is in Franklin’s handwriting and the other is a copy by somebody else with Franklin’s revisions. In other words: he was proud of it and he meant the piece for private circulation among his friends.

  You may make of this what you will. Twenty years earlier The New-England Courant had dealt in the same kind of stuff, but why should Franklin do so at the age of thirty-nine? Given its timing, simultaneous with Louisbourg, when he was feeling so fired up for the war, most likely Franklin wrote the “Apologue” in a mood of masculine bravado, to be shared for a laugh with his new friend David Hall. And then—one suspects—Franklin kept the sketch as something to be read out for amusement over a bottle of wine or a few at clubby meetings of the Junto or the masons, to which women were not admitted. But whatever the circumstances, the lesson of the “Apologue” is surely this. It was high time for Franklin to get on with something more serious.

  The war against the French, for example: a war in which so many of his acquaintances were involved. In the letter he sent to William Strahan in February, Franklin had asked after his old friend from the London of the 1720s, John Wygate, whose career had been checkered. After setting up as a printer on his own, Wygate had suffered the fate of so many others in the same trade. He became a bankrupt. When his mother died in 1737, leaving him a modest legacy, Wygate had put himself back on his feet, done some more printing, and then found a new career at sea. He took a job as a clerk on a warship, the Furnace, bound for the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage.

  This Franklin knew from accounts of the expedition written by its leader, Christopher Middleton, that Strahan had sent to Philadelphia. He also knew that the voyage had ended in failure; that John Wygate had become a witness against Middleton in an unseemly inquiry that followed; and that his old friend had gone to sea again, as the purser of a naval sloop, the Hind. William Strahan had told him so. What Franklin could not know was that HMS Hind had put out to the West Indies. She arrived in Antigua in March, just as Warren was about to speed away to Canada.8

  At the time John Wygate and the Hind were busy patrolling in the Caribbean, taking two French ships off Curaçao; and indeed in one way or another, in 1745 almost every one of Franklin’s friends, new or old, from England, the Junto, or his philosophical society, were caught up in the conflict with the Spanish and the French. Pursers or privateers or makers of maps, people of letters like Richard Peters, soldiers like Captain Rutherfurd or strategic thinkers like Cadwallader Colden: each one had his role to play.

  In the second half of the year, Franklin did his own patriotic duty by bringing to a climax his coverage of privateering. Every issue of the Gazette contained fresh news of the naval war, whose tide was starting to turn. While in Flanders the British had suffered a reverse at the battle of Fontenoy, soon to be followed in August by the Jacobite landing in Scotland, the war in the Atlantic became a matter of attrition that the Bourbons could not win. Deprived of Louisbourg, and up against the British navy and the mercantile marine of Britain and America combined, the French and the Spanish gradually conceded defeat.

  In the closing weeks of 1745, Franklin felt that he was winning too. Across the ocean, the Jacobite Prince Charles had marched with his small, ragged army from Scotland into England; but after the victory at Louisbourg, Franklin did not feel unduly worried. He and his landlord, Mr. Grace, signed a new lease, to run for fourteen years, on the premises on Market Street where Franklin had his home, his printing works, and his shop. Nobody in business does that unless he or she feels confident about the future. And in 1746—as Franklin approached the age of forty-one—at last he would make that future take the form of a vocation rather than a trade.9

  GRAND ENTERPRISES

  Up in New York the frontier war went on, a matter of scalping raids by the French and their Indian allies against the fringes of the colony. In the autumn of 1745 the French had come down the Hudson and plundered the small British post at Saratoga: a modest reprisal for the loss of Cape Breton. At Albany Major Rutherfurd—he had been promoted—waited for reinforcements. New orders had arrived from England calling for an invasion of Canada, to be achieved by marching up the Hudson and taking the French fort at Crown Point while the British sent a fleet and an army into the St. Lawrence. And so in the new year he and Cadwallader Colden and James Alexander did what they could to gather the troops this would require.

  They were now trusted advisers of the royal governor of New York, George Clinton. Before any such invasion could be mounted, they would need not only more soldiers but also a firm alliance with the Iroquois, whose language Colden spoke
. To that end he went upriver to Albany in the middle of 1746 with Clinton, there to hold talks with the tribes. Meanwhile Clinton and his fellow governors in the other colonies called for volunteers for a new American army to be concentrated in the Hudson valley. Franklin would do the very most he could to help his friends: he sent his only son.

  Young William Franklin, who had been so keen to be a privateer, decided to be a soldier instead. At sixteen he was old enough to be a combatant. Even after Louisbourg, and even though the Jacobites were not yet defeated, the Quakers of Pennsylvania still refused to take steps to help defend the colonies. Something had to be done; and so in June Governor Thomas called for four companies of volunteers to march to the north. They left for Albany in September, with William Franklin serving as an ensign in the German company led by Captain Diemer, a surgeon and physician.10

  This time the boy went with his father’s blessing. Franklin was still feeling highly confident, and the fine flow of news that year made him all the more so. The summer of 1746 was filled with disease in New York and Philadelphia—smallpox again—but in April he and Deborah had taken the precaution of having little Sally inoculated. She did not succumb. And then word arrived from Scotland about the defeat of Charles Edward Stuart at the battle of Culloden. Spelling the end of the Jacobites, it made Great Britain safe for the Protestant cause to which the Franklins had always adhered.11

  As William set off for New York with his fellow soldiers, Franklin wrote to Strahan again. Mr. and Mrs. Strahan had sent a gift for Sally, for which she would thank them when she reached an age to do so. “I congratulate you on the defeat of Jacobitism,” Franklin added, “and the restoration of peace and good order.” Franklin wrote those words on September 25. Four weeks earlier George Whitefield had appeared at his meeting house in Philadelphia, so often vacant but now filled to overflowing, to crow over the defeat of the Highland clans. The preacher described Culloden as “the bloody and deserved slaughter of some thousands of the rebels.” In the twenty-first century, there are still some American pastors who regard Mr. Whitefield as the very model of a Christian minister.12

  But while the Jacobites were finished, the king of France was not. In October Franklin heard some troubling news from Albany. With a view to helping in the talks with the tribes the expert negotiator Conrad Weiser had been up the Hudson, met Colden, Major Rutherfurd, and Governor Clinton, and then come back to Philadelphia. Although in August a deal had been struck with the Iroquois, who listened to a long speech from Colden and then agreed to take up the hatchet against the French, the situation had deteriorated. There was little hope of launching a British offensive that year.

  “Our grand enterprise against Canada,” as the major called it, would have to be postponed, but as the troops gathered in Albany, smallpox spread about the billets and the town. Supplies were short; the British had failed to send their fleet and their expeditionary force; and down in Manhattan, the New York assemblymen were almost as reluctant as their counterparts in the Quaker colony to pay for a long campaign.13

  And so the Franklins would have to endure a long and anxious interval before William could return from the front. In the meantime the ideas continued to flow back and forth. Committed though he was to the war effort, Cadwallader Colden also found time for philosophy. In the spring of 1746 his treatise—Of the First Causes of Action in Matter, and Gravitation—had appeared in print in New York, published by Franklin’s partner James Parker. It was prefaced by a letter of dedication to James Alexander, in which Colden gave his modest appraisal of its significance. His findings would, he wrote, open up “a prospect of great improvement in all the useful sciences in human life.” Eager to have it reviewed by his peers, he exchanged more letters with Franklin and his other friends on both sides of the Atlantic.

  “Pray God these wars may soon cease for they are destructive to learning,” Colden wrote to his Dutch acquaintances in Leiden; but despite the fighting, the impetus of science could not be deflected. In the spring the press in London began to publish stories about a new development in the quest for the secrets of electricity. Between them the Germans and the Dutch invented a device, which came to be called the Leiden jar, with the power to deliver electric shocks far more dangerous than any felt before. While the jar might be lethal, it might also help to answer the riddle set by Émilie du Châtelet for her contemporaries. In the right hands—those of the “ingenious philosopher” whose advent she had foretold—the jar would reveal new epiphanies of nature.14

  THE LEIDEN JAR

  For the Prussians, 1745 had been a year of triumph in battle, ending in defeat for Austria and Saxony and a victory parade in Berlin. A few weeks earlier, word had arrived in the city of another bold stroke of Prussian ingenuity. In the eastern province of Pomerania, there lived Ewald Jürgen von Kleist, scion of a Junker family and dean of a Lutheran cathedral. In November, he wrote to the Berlin Academy about an electrical discovery.

  Taking a small glass vial of the kind used by apothecaries, with a little mercury or some alcohol in the bottom, he had dangled into the vial a nail or a thick piece of wire so that it touched the liquid. First the dean charged up a prime conductor, and used it to electrify the nail. To his amazement, he found that if he or an onlooker touched the nail with one hand while holding the vial with the other, they received a powerful shock. Kleist refined his technique until he could knock a boy of nine to the ground.15

  Word of his achievement swiftly arrived in Paris and the Netherlands, where scientists pondered this new enigma. The odd thing was this: that the little glass container appeared to magnify the effects of electricity, producing forces far stronger than those seen hitherto. Because Kleist wrote badly, his descriptions being hazy and confusing, his readers had to struggle to repeat his results. In January 1746—to their delight but also to their horror—as they did so the Dutch at Leiden hit upon their famous jar.

  ’S Gravesande had died four years earlier; and so it fell to his successor at the university, Professor van Musschenbroek, to describe its potency. As he was working with a glass bottle in place of the vial, he received a visitor, a lawyer who decided to try the same thing at home. As he was holding the bottle in one hand, with the other he drew a spark from the prime conductor, and he suffered a massive shock. He hurried back to Musschenbroek, who bravely repeated the experiment and described it in a letter to his fellow scientists in Paris.

  To generate his electricity, he used one of the whirling glass spheres of the kind that the Germans had made popular. And then, as Musschenbroek reported, “having suspended an iron cannon horizontally upon silken cords, with one end near the electrical globe, he fastened to the other end a wire, which descended into a bottle half full of water; then holding up the bottle with his right hand, while the cannon was electrifying, he put forth a finger of his left hand toward the piece, in order as usual to draw off a spark; and was struck such a violent blow that he thought his life was at an end.”

  A demonstration of the Leiden jar, with on the right the electrostatic generator, again from the Abbé Nollet’s 1750 essay on electricity.

  His account of the Leiden jar soon made its way to London, where the newspapers printed Musschenbroek’s letter in the final week of March. Eight weeks later the story reached America, where The Boston Post-Boy printed the same thing on May 19. In Paris meanwhile, the French were eager to produce for themselves what the Dutch professor called “a commotion…like a clap of thunder.” By now it had also been discovered that the effects were all the more dramatic if they coated the outside of the jar with a membrane of lead or tinfoil.

  At the Louvre the French king had a scientist in residence, the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet. In April he gave an electrical display in a grand gallery at Versailles, where he arranged in a line no fewer than 180 members of the court, holding each other by the hand. With Louis XV as a spectator, the abbé sent an “electrical commotion” along the human chai
n. A few weeks later and despite the war at sea, news of the show appeared in the press in London, where the Royal Society intended not to be outdone.16

  They had their own Nollet, Dr. William Watson. As he began to work with the Leiden jar, so in England the craze for electricity intensified. Eight books on the subject appeared in London in 1746, including Watson’s first attempt to produce a systematic theory to account for its effects. Like the Dutch Newtonians, he thought of electricity as an elastic species of matter, identical with the phenomenon to which they gave the name of “Fire.” Over in Paris the abbé agreed. He wrote his own treatise to explain the workings of the Leiden jar. Nollet saw them as the product of what he called “electric matter…a very subtle fluid,” distributed throughout the universe, including the human body, and working its effects by way of something he called “double repercussion.” In other words, like Dr. Watson the abbé tried to picture electricity as though it were mechanical: a system of particles, bouncing off each other like pool balls, and causing explosions of the kind that occurred with the jar.17

  It was an interesting theory, but it was premature. Although Watson and the abbé were scientists far more competent than Cadwallader Colden, in this instance they shared his tendency to leap ahead too hastily. If the Leiden jar were ever to be fully understood, what was needed was something else. The necessary thing was this: observation first, theory second, and then more observation to test and to refine the theory. If electricians were to move forward, they had to make a rigorous appraisal of the data—in other words, of the behavior not only of the jar, but also of the techniques used by the experimenter—carried out in such a way as to isolate those features of the procedure and the apparatus that made the shocks appear.