Startled, Ben pushed away from the table as scratchy static came through the headphones. “Nolan, your device seems to be functioning again.”
I looked at Ben curiously.
The static in the headphones grew louder. First, random pops and crackles. Then the noise seemed to form words. Through the static, I thought I heard the word “home.”
“What’s happening?” asked Olive. She stumbled sleepily into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes.
The glow from the crystal radio shone on her face.
“Oh, my gosh, is it on?” Her eyes widened. “It’s on!”
We gathered around the radio, staring down stupidly.
It was Olive who finally sprang into action. “Why are we just standing here? We have to send Ben home. Quick, before that thing turns itself off again.”
She didn’t have to say it twice.
Snatching up his letter, Ben hurried to his place in the doorway.
I put on the headphones.
And Olive reached for the dial. Then—
“Wait!” she cried. She dashed into the family room.
The headphones grew louder, the static more insistent, the word “home” repeated over and over in the whirl of sound.
Ben and I looked at each other.
“Hurry up!” I cried.
Ben looked worried.
At last, she raced back. She was holding the toy fire hat in her hand. “You can’t forget this,” she said. She shoved it at him and reached for the dial.
“Bye, Benny,” she called.
“Good-bye, Ben,” I said.
“I shall always remember you, dear children,” said Ben, his voice already garbled and sputtering with static.
Click…click…click.
The world dissolved, the room once again melting into a blur. Then…
POP!
The room seemed to snap back like a rubber band and returned to focus.
And Ben was gone.
We stared at the empty space for what seemed like forever. I thought about Ben spinning through time to Philadelphia. “I hope he got home all right.”
“He did,” said Olive. She pulled out a piece of paper. “I printed this out when I was on the computer. After I talked to Daddy.”
It was a picture from E-Cylopedia—a painting of Ben proudly wearing his toy fire hat.
I grinned. He looked dorky in two centuries. And I realized why Olive insisted he take the hat. So we’d have proof. So we’d know he’d gotten home safe.
I looked at the radio. Once again, it had gone dark and silent.
I stated the obvious. “This is our secret, Olive. We can’t tell anyone about the radio.”
Olive nodded slowly. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
“Just you and me, Olive,” I said.
“No kidding,” she said.
“And never mess around with it again.”
“Never?” Olive frowned. “That’s no fun.”
Outside the window, a twig snapped.
Olive and I looked at each other.
“We should have kissed him harder,” she said.
I thought of the electrostatic machine sitting in the garage, where we’d parked the wagon. “Forget it,” I said.
“Party pooper,” grumbled Olive.
And I hollered through the closed curtains, “Good night, Tommy.”
The only answer was the soft pat of footsteps moving away.
With a relieved sigh, I reached over and closed the radio’s lid. I felt the gold block letters that read PROPERTY OF H.H. It made my fingers tingle.
“Maybe ‘H.H.’ stands for ‘home is where the heart is,’ ” she said seriously.
I laughed. And suddenly, I thought I understood why the radio had activated; why at that very moment it had come back to life. I repeated what my teacher, Mr. Druff, had said last year: “We learn from the past how to live in the present.” Then I grinned and added, “And vice versa.”
I was still thinking about it all as I carried the radio into my bedroom.
“Don’t play with it without me,” said Olive from her doorway.
“I told you. We’re not playing with it ever again.”
“You’re not going to throw it away, are you?”
I shook my head. “It was sent to me for a reason, and I have to find out what that reason is. But I’ll put it away so no one can touch it. Got it?”
Just in case, I hid the radio deep in my closet, buried in a box of building blocks. So many strange things had happened. It would take a while to figure them out.
I yawned. I’d never felt so tired. But there was one more thing I needed to do before I could sleep. I glanced at the bedside clock. It was morning in London. Plucking my laptop off my desk, I tapped some keys.
“Nolan?”
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“COME ON, NOLAN. WE’RE going to be late to my party.” Olive careened into my bedroom, wearing a pink sequined mermaid princess Aquamarina bathing suit. On her back flashed a brand-new Shimmer and Sparkle backpack. Both were birthday presents from Dad.
“You’ll be the best-dressed mermaid at your pool party,” he said when we all video chatted last night.
“And the only one who can scull and flutter,” added Olive.
I have to admit, she was pretty excited about her birthday. “Pizza, cake, and mermaid swimming,” she had told Mom to write on the invitations.
“Mermaid swimming?” Mom had asked.
“It’s a long story,” I’d said.
Mom was smiling a lot these days, now that her book—Bun Franklin and the Pursuit of Hoppiness—was done. Her editor was even calling it a “sunny, funny, punny, bunny masterpiece.”
I finished tying my shoes. “I’m ready, already.”
POP!
A bright light shot out from under my closet door. It grew white…whiter…crystal white. From within its depths came the sounds of static and faint voices. “This is no ordinary…khhhhh…time…khhhhh…You must do…khhhhh…the thing you think you cannot do….”
“It’s Ben!” whooped Olive. “He’s come back for my birthday!”
She raced to the closet.
“Wait, Olive…”
She flung open the door.
And screamed.
And slammed the door shut again. Pressing her back against it, she stretched her arms wide. “That,” she panted, “is definitely not Ben Franklin.”
“Hulloooo!” came a woman’s quavering voice. “FD? Is that you? Let me out, won’t you? I seem to have gotten trapped in the closet.”
A few days after Ben went home, I stopped by the library. I wanted to check out a couple of Captain Blood graphic novels. I also wanted to check out Ben’s stories and see if they were true. Not that I thought he was lying or anything, but come on…stunt swimming? With a little help from Mrs. Bustamante, here’s what I found out:
STORY #1: BEN AND ELECTRICITY
Back in Ben’s day, no one understood what electricity was or what it could do. Ben’s experiments were all about trying to figure out electricity’s mysteries. And while he went about it pretty scientifically—setting up careful experiments, observing closely, and writing down every step—he liked to have fun, too. Like one time, he made a fake spider. It had a cork for its body and six pieces of thread for its legs, and was attached to a thin wire. When people visited his laboratory, he liked to prank them by electrifying the wire. This made the spider jump and wiggle across his worktable. While people screamed, Ben giggled.
He did other cool stuff with electricity. He made brass balls glow red, produced bolts of lightning, and made his ring of gray hair stand on end. He liked showing off. Sometimes too much, because he really did almost electrocute himself that time he tried to cook a turkey. Lucky for him, he escaped with just a couple of bruises.
Which goes to show how dangerous it was to experiment with electricity. Probably the bravest or stupidest experiment he ever did—depending on how you look at it—was flying a
kite in the middle of a thunderstorm. He wanted to prove that lightning was electricity. So he asked his son William to run back and forth across a field in the rain until the kite took flight. Then Ben, who had been standing all dry and cozy in a farmer’s shed, took over. Minutes later, he touched his knuckle to a brass key tied to the end of the kite’s string and got a shock. His hypothesis was true! And he became famous. The Royal Society of London—sort of a club of the best-of-the-best scientists in Europe—gave him their biggest award, called the Copley Medal. Universities like Harvard and Yale gave him honorary degrees. And the king of France sent him a letter of congratulations.
STORY #2: BEN AND THE FIRST LIBRARY
Ben really did start a club in 1727 that he called…
…the Junto. Every Friday night, he and nine of his smartest friends got together at a tavern to talk about books and politics and ways they could improve their city. Word got around about the club. Other people begged to join.
But Ben wanted to keep each club small—no bigger than twelve members. So he suggested that others form their own clubs. Soon Philadelphia had six groups, all of them dedicated to smart talk and helping the community. They formed Philadelphia’s fire department.
And just like Ben said, they established the first library. It’s true. It was his idea. And club members did go around collecting money for it. In just a couple of years the library had more than three hundred books and was open from two to three on Wednesday afternoons, and from ten until four on Saturdays. Only people who paid to use the library could check out the books, one at a time, but anyone could go inside and read.
Some of the original books from the first library are still around. You can see them at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
I know—it’s a weird name for a library. But that’s what Ben called it, and that’s what it’s still called.
STORY #3: BEN AND SWIM FINS
In Ben’s time, hardly anyone knew how to swim. But Ben loved the water, and he taught himself when he was just seven years old. By reading a book called The Art of Swimming, he learned how to dive, how to swim holding one foot, and even how to clip his nails underwater.
Ben did invent swim fins when he was eleven years old. They were his very first invention, but they weren’t his last. During his lifetime he invented all kinds of cool and useful things like bifocals, the odometer, the Franklin stove, the library chair, the glass armonica…
…daylight saving time, and a phonic alphabet. And he kept on swimming.
STORY #4: BEN AND WILLIAM
Ben had three kids—Frances Folger (called Franky) born in 1732; Sarah (known as Sally) born in 1743; and his oldest son, William, born in late 1730 or early 1731. Ben and William were very close, especially after little Franky died of smallpox. William went to the best schools, and his books and toys were specially ordered from London. He even had his own pony.
Ben and William did everything together. So of course when Ben traveled to London in 1757, William went with him. William was twenty-six by then, and he met the richest, most powerful men in England. Ben was happy about it. He wanted King George III to appoint William as royal Governor of New Jersey. And in 1763 the king did!
William took his job and all of its responsibilities seriously. Even when his father and others began grumbling about how badly the American colonies were being treated by the British government, William stayed loyal to the king. Then revolution broke out and colonists had to choose a side—fight for independence, or fight for Britain. William thought his father would understand when he stuck by the king. But Ben didn’t. He told William how he felt: “Nothing has ever hurt me so much…and to find myself deserted in my old age by my own son.”
William felt deserted, too. Colonists eventually arrested William for being an enemy of the country and threw him in jail. Ben could have gotten him out, seeing as how he was a member of the Continental Congress. He’d even been on the committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence. But Ben let William sit in a cell for two whole years. When he was finally released, William moved to London. His dad didn’t even say good-bye.
The two didn’t meet again until July 1785. The revolution was over, and Ben—who’d been a diplomat in France for the past nine years—was sailing home to Philadelphia. When his ship made a stop in England, William hurried to meet it. He couldn’t wait to see his dad. He wanted to be close again.
But it didn’t work out that way. William felt awkward and uncomfortable. Ben was still boiling mad. Two days later, when Ben sailed for America, they still hadn’t made up. They never saw each other again.
William did write to him, but I don’t think Ben wrote back. If so, he didn’t mail the letter. William never heard another word from him.
So that’s it. Every last thing Ben told us was true. I guess honesty is the best policy.
Here’s a list of the books I used to fact-check Ben, otherwise known as my:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barretta, Gene. Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Ben Franklin. New York: Square Fish, 2008.
Byrd, Robert. Electric Ben: The Amazing Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Dial, 2012.
Fleming, Candace. Ben Franklin’s Almanac: Being a True Account of the Good Gentleman’s Life. New York: Atheneum, 2003.
Giblin, James Cross. The Amazing Life of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Scholastic Press, 2006.
Krull, Kathleen. Benjamin Franklin (Giants of Science). New York: Puffin Books, 2014.
Olson, Kay Melchisedech. Benjamin Franklin: An American Genius. North Mankato, MN: Capstone Press, 2006.
Rockliff, Mara. Mesmerized: How Benjamin Franklin Solved a Mystery that Baffled All of France. Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2015.
Mr. Druff would be impressed, huh?
There are a gazillion websites about Ben, but these two are my favorites:
pbs.org/benfranklin
This has a super-fun Explore section, where you can visit Ben’s hometown, or travel with him around the world, or learn to make a kite based on his design. Best of all, there’s an interactive electrical experience. You can make a spark, build a lightning rod, or fly a kite in a thunderstorm.
ushistory.org/franklin/info
There’s a pretty good biography on this website, as well as essays and stories and a list of Ben quotations. What I liked most, though, were the games, puzzles, and experiments. I even played checkers with Ben…and won!
Candace Fleming is the author of the funny middle-grade novels The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary and The Fabled Fifth Graders of Aesop Elementary, as well as the incredibly interesting nonfiction books The Great and Only Barnum, about showman P. T. Barnum, and Amelia Lost, about the aviatrix Amelia Earhart. She also wrote a biography about Ben Franklin called Ben Franklin’s Almanac. She loves Ben so much that, on his 296th birthday on January 17, she baked him a cake. Her sons refused to sing “Happy Birthday” to a “dead guy,” so Candace ended up singing by herself. Like Nolan and Olive, Candace lives in Illinois, but you can visit her on the Web at candacefleming.com.
Mark Fearing always thought Ben Franklin would have made a great president. In fact, on a test in third grade, he may have said Ben Franklin was a president. Mistakes happen. Mark has illustrated more than a dozen picture books, including Chicken Story Time by Sandy Asher and Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot by Margaret McNamara, and has written and illustrated cool graphic novels, including Earthling! He lives with his wife, daughter, and dog in Oregon—which wasn’t even a state when Ben Franklin was alive. Visit Mark on the Web at markfearing.com.
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Ben Franklin's in My Bathroom! Page 8