by Nick Bunker
If this kind of exercise sounds austere and demanding, that is because it was. It was with this kind of work that Franklin would make his contribution to physics. For experimental research, he had all the necessary qualities. As a player of chess, he was used to being cool and disciplined. As a writer and a thinker, he was methodical. As a printer, Franklin was a patient man, with the habits of “regularity” that had won him well-paid work in the London of the 1720s. He was also the offspring of a family of craftsmen, blacksmiths and dyers, men who could work with the wrist and the hand as well as with the mind. And he had studied the literature, the textbooks from London and the items in the press. Franklin also had the scientific benefit of his long friendship with James Logan.
As yet—we are talking about the spring and summer of 1746—Franklin did not have enough information about the Leiden jar to begin any electrical work of his own. He probably saw the item in The Boston Post-Boy, but it was brief and sketchy. Nor did he have the apparatus. The making of glass jars and tubes was not quite yet an American activity. For the time being, items such as this had to come from England, though Franklin would soon do his best to get his fellow colonists into the business of blowing glass. He was also still a little in awe of Cadwallader Colden, whose influence in matters scientific was something Franklin had to overcome.
HIS ELECTRICAL MOMENT
In June, a parcel of books arrived in Philadelphia from New York, copies of Mr. Colden’s treatise in which he hoped to solve the mysteries of gravity and matter. Franklin shared the book with the Junto, with James Logan and with many others: lawyers, officials, and what he called “merchants and ingenious men.” They found it a very hard read. In the middle of October Franklin wrote to Colden again, telling them what had transpired. “All I can learn of their sentiments concerning it is, that they say they cannot understand it,” he said. With his usual diplomacy he tried to break the news gently.
“People do not seem to suppose that you write unintelligibly,” Franklin wrote, “but charge all to the abstruseness of the subject, and their own want of capacity.” Franklin was being very generous, because Colden’s book really was nonsense. At its heart there lay the idea that “matter” existed in three varieties: “resisting matter,” which did nothing, but remained inert; “moving matter”—light and heat, for example—which had the power of motion; and “elastic matter,” which communicated motion by way of something he called “momentaneous vibration.” From the interaction of all three, Cadwallader Colden proposed to explain the inner secrets of Sir Isaac Newton’s cosmos.18
As they puzzled over Colden’s strange theories, Franklin and his friends found themselves debating another book on a similar subject. It was a gift from yet one more Scot, Archibald Home, a government official in New Jersey whom Franklin had recruited for the American Philosophical Society. A lover of literature and a talented poet, Home had presented the Library Company with a work of philosophy from Edinburgh, written by one Andrew Baxter and published in 1737. It purported to prove the immortality of souls and the existence of God by way of some dubious reflections on Newtonian physics.19
Armed with Baxter’s Enquiry, to give the book an abbreviated title, some of Franklin’s friends tried to produce their own account of the fundamentals of the universe. At this point—in the autumn of 1746—it seems that at last Franklin lost his cool. One evening, when his friends were singing the praises of Andrew Baxter, Franklin made it clear that he thought the book was absurd. Asked to justify himself, Franklin wrote a pungent little essay pointing out the flaws in Baxter’s arguments.
Deeply irritated by Baxter’s style and by what he had to say—and even more so by the way his feeble book was admired in Philadelphia—Franklin tore the book to pieces. The Enquiry was vague, convoluted, and full of non sequiturs. With a heavy dose of sarcasm, Franklin exposed them for what they were: egregious errors by an author addicted to metaphysics. In London twenty years earlier, Franklin had tried his hand at just such a thing, when he wrote and published his Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity. He had decided that it was an exercise in futility.
It was market day in Philadelphia, and the street outside was filled with noise. This made him feel all the more frustrated. Franklin had always had to work for his living. With only his few leisure hours available for study, he was always being distracted from the pursuit of learning that he knew was rightfully his. It was profoundly annoying to be asked to defer to an author so ridiculous.
“The din of the market increases upon me,” Franklin wrote. As he ripped Baxter’s book to shreds, he also made it clear that he rejected entirely the kind of speculation for which Baxter stood. Metaphysics had to go, said Franklin. “The great uncertainty I have found in that science; the wide contradictions and endless disputes it affords; and the horrible errors I led myself into when a young man, by drawing a chain of plain consequences as I thought them, from true principles”—he meant the Dissertation, and his period in London with James Ralph—“have given me a disgust to what I was once extremely fond of.”
The moment had arrived for Franklin to pick up the threads of experimental science that Newton had left dangling behind him. If not now, when? He may not have known this proverb from the Jewish rabbis, but it was what he must have been thinking. For twenty-five years, since he was a boy in Boston reading John Locke, Franklin had been training his intellect, studying the best things he could find, and thinking hard about what he read. His body was strong, and his mind was clear. He had also acquired a vast store of knowledge.
Franklin was forty; he had built a thriving business, and found a likely successor in David Hall; and he had a son old enough to be off at the war. In short, he was a gentleman. And that is how Franklin is depicted in the first authentic image we have of him, the portrait in oils that hangs in the art museum at Harvard. Commissioned by his brother John, and probably painted in 1746 by the artist Robert Feke, it shows us a prosperous Franklin, solid and secure, with white starched linen and a long brown wig. The Franklin it portrays is also a man who, by the usual standards of his era, was more than two thirds of the way through his life. He could not allow the field of inquiry to belong to the likes of Baxter or even to Colden. Instead Franklin had to stake his own claim to scientific originality, and as soon as possible; or it might be too late.
Although he already knew that electricity was one of the two pressing questions of the era—the other one being the polyp, which also invited new theories about the nature of “matter”—no evidence survives from before the autumn of 1746 to indicate that Franklin saw it as his specialty. On the contrary: from his diplomatic letter to Colden, written on October 16, it is plain that he did not, since he made no mention of electrical science. Before the year was out, it would become Franklin’s obsession.
First he had to finish the next year’s edition of Poor Richard. As clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly, Franklin also had to spend a few days taking the minutes of the autumn session. On the 17th the assembly adjourned, not to reconvene until January. That gave him time for another business trip to Boston, Rhode Island, and New York. On October 21 he settled up accounts with his mother-in-law, Mrs. Read, who was still hard at work selling books and almanacs on his behalf. Then Franklin set out for the north, where he was about to find what he required: a vastly better piece of scientific prose, written in Paris by two men who shared his preference for the empirical.
Before he left Philadelphia another gift had arrived, this time from Peter Collinson in London. In the spring of each year, he would assemble a consignment of letters, books, and specimens for his American friends, but this time he also included a piece of apparatus. In April, when Collinson made up a trunk of books for the Library Company, addressed to its secretary, Franklin’s old Junto friend Joseph Breintnall, he put a glass tube in the trunk. At the Royal Society, Collinson had seen the electrical displays by Dr. Watson, and so he sent the Philadelphians what the
y needed to begin experiments of their own.
With the war still raging at sea, Collinson took the precaution of dividing his parcels between two ships, the Carolina and the Friendship. In May and early June they made rendezvous in the English Channel with the warships that were to take them out in convoy. The wait was long, the voyages dangerous, but both ships made a safe arrival in Philadelphia: the Carolina on September 25, and the Friendship three weeks later, on the very day when Franklin composed his critique of Andrew Baxter. One or other of these ships carried Mr. Collinson’s glass tube.20
Busy as he was with so many other things, it seems that Franklin had no time to look at the books or the tube before he left for Boston in late October or early November. We know all too little about what Franklin did in Boston or whom he saw; but—as so often with Franklin—his timing was superb. Boston was the place of publication of a monthly journal, The American Magazine, whose October issue was on sale in the town by November 10. It contained an article about electricity, written with the same combination of detail and clarity that Franklin had achieved in his essay on the fireplace.21
The article came from France. In Paris, the experiments made by Nollet the previous year had been witnessed by a young medical doctor, the abbé’s friend Louis-Guillaume Le Monnier. Building his own Leiden jar, he undertook a series of trials in the royal botanical garden and the grounds of the Tuileries Palace. As he began to write them up in a paper, he shared his work with another friend, this time an Englishman: a Catholic priest in exile by the name of John Turberville Needham. A man enchanted by science, equally at home with the polyp and the sparks of electricity, Father Needham made a précis of Le Monnier’s results and sent them to the Royal Society in London early in July 1746. At the end of that month, the précis appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine.22
Over it went to the colonies, avoiding the French privateers, to be reprinted verbatim in Boston in the October American Magazine. “The electrifying glass is an oblong spheroid, its diameter from pole to pole sixteen or seventeen inches”: so Father Needham began. His article went on for two pages of small print. A manual for the electrician, it described to perfection all the things involved: the electrostatic generator, with two men to turn the wheel; the prime conductor; the Leiden jar; and of course the astonishing results that Le Monnier had produced. “At the grand convent of the Carthusians, the whole community formed a line,” it was reported. “And when the two extremities met in contact with the electrified phial, the whole company at the same instant gave a sudden spring, and all equally felt the shock.”
We can be sure that Franklin saw the piece because he held the contract to distribute The American Magazine in Pennsylvania. Throughout his career, Franklin had loved to encounter curiosities, whether they took human form, if they came on the printed page, or if they arrived by way of nature: an odd kind of seaweed, a chunk of asbestos, or a shock that could electrify Carthusians. Here again was ingenuity. Furthermore, it was the very latest ingenuity. Franklin was reading the article from Paris at almost the same time as it was being discussed in London, where the Royal Society heard the paper read on October 23.23
Back he went to Philadelphia, reaching the town no later than December 29, when he took part in a meeting of the Union Fire Company. Six days after that, Franklin wrote to William Strahan with his first letter of 1747, complaining that the British had failed to send a fleet to protect the colonies from a French attempt to recapture Louisbourg. While the French had been defeated it was only, he said, by the hand of God. Meanwhile his friend John Bartram was grumbling about the war in a letter to England. Prevented from traveling by the risk of encountering what he called “ye French Indians,” John Bartram wrote about what he called “these troublesome times…a great hindrance to any curious inquiries.”
But even as Bartram wrote those words in December, Franklin was about to prove him wrong, by beginning in earnest his scientific career. After so many harsh winters, this one was so mild that ships could still come and go in the Delaware. As the ice remained at bay, Franklin was still in an optimistic mood. At some point—we will never know the date exactly—Franklin found the glass tube sent by Collinson and he set to work with a passion to do his own experiments with electricity. In the fall he had been exasperated, and quite rightly so, as he watched his neighbors lose their way in a fog of metaphysics. Now—as he turned forty-one—Franklin discovered his vocation, empirical and ingenious, rubbing up the tube to generate the forces that the Europeans had unleashed.24
He enlisted three friends: from the Junto, Thomas Hopkinson and Philip Syng, the silversmith, and also a Baptist preacher, Ebenezer Kinnersley. With their help Franklin began to repeat the European results with electricity, beginning with the old Hauksbee trick of making a ball spin for hours around an electrified body. As his confidence grew, he wrote to a friend he had made in New Haven urging him to press ahead with plans for a glassworks in Connecticut where Americans could make apparatus of their own. By the time a cold snap set in in the middle of February, Franklin had made so much progress that he was ready to share the results with the demanding Mr. Logan.
On February 22, Bartram rode up through the frost to Logan’s house at Stenton, to tell their mentor what Franklin was up to with electricity. Fragile though he was, and now seventy-two years old, James Logan could still rejoice to see Americans carrying on the work of Newton. What Bartram told him—tales of spinning balls, sparks and fire, attraction and repulsion—filled him with enthusiasm. Logan knew about the trials with the Leiden jar in Paris, since Collinson had sent him the same paper that Franklin had read. He felt sure that his protégé, the ingenious printer, was already doing even better. Bartram left, and next day Logan sent Franklin a letter full of warmth and admiration, urging him to come out to Stenton to give a demonstration.25
“Your experiments exceed them all,” he wrote. And there we leave them both, James Logan to his books and his memories, and Franklin to his science: a calling found at last.
Epilogue
AN UNEASY SPIRIT
He is a dangerous man and I should be glad he inhabited any other country….However, as he is a sort of tribune of the people, he must be treated with regard.
—DESCRIPTION OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BY THOMAS PENN, PROPRIETOR OF PENNSYLVANIA, 17481
So many of his friends disappeared before their time. While Benjamin Franklin had four decades still ahead of him, so that he would survive beyond the storming of the Bastille and to see George Washington as president, the people to whom he was closest had begun to fall away even before his work with electricity began. The saddest case was that of Joseph Breintnall, who never received the glass tube and the trunk of books from London. In March of 1746 his body washed up on the Jersey shore of the Delaware, apparently a suicide. By then John Wygate had passed away as well, in the fever hospital on Antigua, his death recorded with a line in the log of his ship and a little item in the English press.
The next of Franklin’s friends to die, in 1751, were James Logan and Thomas Hopkinson, the latter at the age of only forty-two. Six years later it was the turn of William Parsons; and then John Rutherfurd fell in action against the French at Ticonderoga. Robert Grace was gone by the end of 1766 and William Coleman died in 1768, as did the English benefactor Peter Collinson. Six years after that Deborah Franklin died too. They laid her to rest in the Christ Church cemetery while her husband, hated by the British, was preparing to sail home from England to join the Revolution.
All the time Franklin went from strength to strength. While his siblings had died away so that by 1767 only he and Jane Mecom remained, Franklin kept forging ahead, a prophet of a kind, with the vigor and longevity that prophets are supposed to command. Never ceasing to make new friends, neither could he stop writing: so many letters and private memoranda, but also satirical sketches, political pamphlets, and scientific papers. Until his own death in 1790, Franklin
retained his love of curiosities, especially when they were eccentric human beings. When people turned up at his door with crackpot schemes, unpublished books they wanted him to read, or simply to touch the hem of his garment, he was mostly inclined to give them an audience.
After all: there had been so many chance encounters in Franklin’s life that had proved to be worthwhile. Who could say what gifts of ingenuity a stranger might possess? This was one of Franklin’s most attractive features, and one of his most valuable assets: his passion for “variety,” that quality of being that the eighteenth century prized so highly. He always wanted to find something new, and better still to do new things. The finest example of this was his work with electricity, the scientific core around which Franklin built the second half of his life.2
Like a stone tossed into the Schuylkill, Franklin’s electrical experiments sent an ever-widening circle of vibrations through the life of his time. The details of his work are not the subject of this book. Like every author I have to stop somewhere; but the gist of his achievement was this. By 1749, Franklin had developed a new theory of electricity far simpler and more accurate than anything his predecessors had suggested, so that for most practical, everyday requirements his ideas are still quite sufficient.
With his little team of collaborators, Franklin examined the mysteries of the Leiden jar. With patience and precision, he identified the effect of each element of the procedure: the glass, the liquid in the bottle, the wire dangling into it, the metal jacket on the outside, and their interaction with the prime conductor and the electrician. The craftsman Philip Syng created an electrical machine, a better version of the ones that Hauksbee and the Germans had developed, with a glass sphere made to spin around like a lathe. With that, Franklin and his team had the powerful generator they required. They devised a set of eleven experiments whose results, when taken together, gave Franklin his new concept of electricity.