by H. W. Brands
The following week Franklin’s Gazette ran a notice of something strikingly similar. The General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, for All the British Plantations in America would examine politics local and imperial, literature American and British, and sundry occurrences noteworthy and merely curious. Published monthly beginning in January, it would cost subscribers ninepence Pennsylvanian (or sixpence British sterling) per issue—that is, nine shillings per year.
To the reading public, Franklin appeared a shameless imitator. In fact he was an aggrieved originator, whose idea had been stolen—albeit through his own carelessness, which added anger at himself to his feeling of injury. And what made him even angrier at himself was that his mistake recapitulated his error of a dozen years earlier when he was planning to start his newspaper. Seeking assistance with the magazine project, he had revealed his plan to a person who, unsatisfied with Franklin’s terms, took the idea to his competitor.
In his anger Franklin struck out. The person to whom he had tipped his hand was John Webbe, a lawyer and sometime contributor to the Gazette. Convinced that Webbe was behind Bradford’s proposed magazine, Franklin—without explicitly naming Webbe—published a statement alleging breach of confidence and theft of ideas.
This provoked Webbe to identify himself, doubtless as Franklin intended. Webbe protested his innocence, saying Franklin was the wrongdoer. By making false, yet veiled, charges, Franklin practiced “the most mischievous kind of lying; for the strokes being oblique and indirect, a man cannot so easily defend himself against them.” Webbe’s complaint presaged many Franklin would hear in the future about his style of attack: that there was something “more mean and dastardly in the character of an indirect liar than a direct one. This has the audacity of a highwayman, that the slyness of a pickpocket. Both indeed rob you of your purse, and both deserve a gibbet; but, were I obliged to pardon either, I could sooner forgive the bold wickedness of the one, than the sneaking villainy of the other.”
The exchange did not cover Franklin in glory. His own indiscretion—not some betrayal by Webbe—was the cause of his preemption. But the nasty back-and-forth had the effect, as Franklin certainly anticipated, of drawing attention to his new magazine.
With the battle joined, both publishers pushed forward their initial issues. Franklin lost the race to Bradford by three days in February 1741. Yet being a step behind had its advantages, for it allowed Franklin to throw rocks at Bradford from the rear. Bradford advertised his magazine in the Mercury most elaborately; Franklin responded in the Gazette with ridicule. With the partial exception of the title—“Teague’s Advertisement,” likening Bradford to the infamous pirate—this lampoon was one of Franklin’s less inspired offerings. He attempted to mimic the dialect of someone presumably German, but the result left confusion on that point. The wit fell short of the best of Richard Saunders—who in fact acquitted himself better in the contest against Bradford. “If you would keep your secret from an enemy,” reminded the edition of Poor Richard appearing about this time, “tell it not to a friend.”
As it turned out, all the sniping was wasted—or perhaps it was too effective. Bradford’s magazine expired before its third month; Franklin’s lasted but half a year. The competition between the two, by splitting the audience, may have contributed to the demise of both; more likely, Franklin (and Bradford, imitating Franklin) simply misjudged the market. For now—and for a long time—America lacked a literary culture like that which supported the successful Gentleman’s Magazine of London, which served as the model for Franklin’s General Magazine. (Gentleman’s also served, to some extent, as Franklin’s competition, as it was brought over the Atlantic and distributed by booksellers in America.) Perhaps the attention span of busy Americans was shorter than that of their English counterparts. Americans would read newspapers and almanacs, but not magazines.
Another part of Franklin’s problem was that he was starting to stretch himself thin. The reason he approached John Webbe in the first place was that he lacked the time to produce the magazine himself. His basic business was better than ever. In 1742 he sponsored James Parker in a printing venture in New York. There was a certain historical symmetry here—although Andrew Bradford and his father might have taken it as additional evidence of Franklin’s ingratitude. The young Parker had fled an apprenticeship with William Bradford in much the way Franklin had fled his commitment to James Franklin. Just as the elder Bradford had assisted the struggling Ben Franklin to find work, so Franklin took in James Parker and gave him a job as a journeyman. In February 1742 Franklin sent Parker, then about twenty-seven, back to New York to enter competition with William Bradford. Franklin would provide the press and letters and one-third of expenses; in return he would receive one-third of proceeds. At the end of six years Parker would have the option to purchase the press and letters and terminate the partnership.
This arrangement proved even more successful than the earlier one with Thomas Whitemarsh—succeeded by Lewis Timothy—in South Carolina. Franklin may have guessed that William Bradford was on the verge of retirement (Bradford was approaching eighty); he may have calculated that a nudge from Parker might push him over the edge. As events transpired, Bradford—perhaps unwilling to take on such an energetic rival as Franklin—did indeed put down his composition stick, leaving the best of the New York market to the Franklin-Parker combine. Parker succeeded Bradford as official printer of the colony of New York, and he started a newspaper that subsequently assumed the name and the small readership of Bradford’s venerable but struggling New York Gazette.
The most successful of Franklin’s protégés was David Hall. A native of Edinburgh who had followed the printing craft to London, Hall came to Philadelphia highly recommended by his latest employer, William Strahan. Franklin found the recommendation well warranted. “From the short acquaintance I have had with him,” Franklin wrote Strahan in July 1744, “I am persuaded that he will answer perfectly the character you had given of him.” Franklin hoped to send Hall out on the same kind of commercial colonization scheme as Whitmarsh and Parker—in this case to the West Indies. But a snag arose when Hall developed jaundice, perhaps from hepatitis contracted in the close quarters of the ship from England. Then he and Franklin found themselves at odds over the expense of Hall’s passage west. Briefly it appeared that the partnership might founder before launch. Strahan, however, reassured Hall of Franklin’s good faith. “Trust to his generosity …” Strahan told Hall, “and he will deal honorably by you.” Strahan, who knew Franklin only by correspondence, added, “He seems to me by his manner of writing to have a very good heart, as well as to be a man of honour and good sense.”
Hall eventually agreed, while Franklin learned to value Hall’s talents so highly that he decided to keep him in Philadelphia. Hall became Franklin’s foreman, handling the affairs of the shop with a skill and efficiency that not even the fastidious Franklin could fault. The printing business grew more profitable to its owner, yet he had to devote less time to it than ever.
In the two centuries after his death Franklin would be cited—in praise by some, in scorn by others—as a prototype of the American capitalist. The citation was misleading. Had Franklin possessed the soul of a true capitalist, he would have devoted the time he saved from printing to making money somewhere else. But he did not. For Franklin the getting of money was always a means to an end, never the end itself. No one worked harder at the printing business than Franklin during the years when his printing house had to be established and placed on a sound footing. But once the footing was assured, his interests and increasingly his energies went elsewhere.
The test of his attitude toward money was his handling of what he called the “Pennsylvania fireplace.” For years Franklin had been convinced that fireplaces and stoves might be made more efficient; in hours borrowed from the printing business he tinkered with baffles and fireboxes to produce a better model. By the early 1740s he was satisfied with his design and arranged with Robert Grace, the Junto
iron man, to manufacture and sell the new fireplace.
“In these northern colonies the inhabitants keep fires to sit by, generally seven months in the year,” wrote Franklin in a promotional pamphlet published in 1744. “Wood, our common fuel, which within these 100 years might be had at every man’s door, must now be fetched near 100 miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable article in the expense of families.” Any method for economizing on fuel, by improving fuel efficiency, would benefit private citizens and the public at large. “The NEW FIRE-PLACES are a late invention to that purpose (experienced now three winters by a great number of families in Pennsylvania).”
Governor Thomas was so pleased with Franklin’s innovation that he offered him a patent conferring exclusive rights to sell the fireplace within the province. Had Franklin accepted, he doubtless would have made a good deal of money (and if he had aggressively extended the patent to the other American colonies, he would have made a great deal of money), for the fireplace became very popular. And the colder the climate, the more popular it became. A correspondent to the Boston Evening Post could not speak highly enough of “the new-invented Philadelphia Fire Places, or as they ought to be called, both in justice and gratitude, Mr. Franklin’s stoves.” One cord, or at most one and a half cords, of quality firewood sufficed in Franklin’s invention to warm the common room of an ordinary house the entire winter. The benefit was obvious. “Every body can calculate what a saving this must be in one of the most necessary articles of house-keeping, and I believe all who have experienced the comfort and benefit of them will join with me, that the author of this happy invention merits a statue from his countrymen.”
Franklin would get his statues in time; for now he declined the offer of exclusive rights to his stove. His was not a patenting personality, one that perceived knowledge as the property of its discoverer. Rather he saw philosophy—broadly construed, as it was in those days—as a collective undertaking. What one investigator unearthed ought to become the common property of all. As it applied to patents, he explained, “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”
Franklin’s view was evident in his pamphlet describing the fireplace. The pamphlet was an advertisement only incidentally; its heart was a scientific treatise on the theory of combustion and on practical applications to domestic heating. He cited authorities classical (supplying one long source in Latin) and exotic (quoting, in translation, from a Chinese work). He explained the various means by which heat is transmitted (paying particular attention to convection, overlooked or misapplied in most fireplace designs). He contended, with evidence, that rooms heated with the new fireplace were more healthful than rooms heated conventionally, for the heat permeated the rooms more evenly. He included a schematic rendering of the fireplace, together with instructions as to how it ought to be installed (including a hint to mix rum with water in the paste used to seal the joints). Being Franklin, he closed with a verse of the sort Richard Saunders regularly penned, extolling the fireplace as a second sun:
Another sun!—’tis true—but not the same.
Alike, I own, in warmth and genial flame.
But more obliging than his elder brother,
This will not scorch in summer, like the other, Nor, when sharp Boreas chills our shivering limbs
Will this sun leave us for more southern climes;
Or, in long winter nights, forsake us here,
To cheer new friends in t’other hemisphere;
But, faithful still to us, this new sun’s fire,
Warms when we please, and just as we desire.
It was characteristic of Franklin to combine theory and application in his pamphlet on the fireplace, for just as he did not have the heart of a modern capitalist, neither was he what the modern age would call a true intellectual. He had an inquisitive mind—ceaselessly inquisitive, in fact, as his whole life attested. But he found knowledge for knowledge’s sake to be an unsatisfying formula. The kind of knowledge he prized was that which made life easier, more productive, or happier. In this regard his view of science mirrored his view of religion. Where faith was sterile if it failed to produced good works, so science was sterile—even if interesting—if it failed to produce good inventions.
In May 1743 Franklin printed A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America. Others had bruited the idea before, chiefly John Bartram of Philadelphia and Cadwallader Colden of New York. But neither of them was a printer, which in this as in many of his other projects gave Franklin a crucial advantage. Bartram and Colden might—and did—communicate between themselves and with a small circle of correspondents, but Franklin could reach hundreds or thousands through his printing press. How many copies he produced of his broadside Promoting Useful Knowledge is unknown, but without doubt it spread the idea among a wider audience than had heard any such notion theretofore.
“The first drudgery of settling new colonies, which confines the attention of people to mere necessaries, is now pretty well over,” Franklin wrote. “And there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the stock of knowledge.” To such as were of a philosophical turn of mind, curiosity and insight must from time to time produce discoveries “to the advantage of some or all of the British plantations, or to the benefit of mankind in general.”
They would, at any rate, if properly encouraged and communicated. This was the purpose of Franklin’s publication. He proposed “that one society be formed of Virtuosi or ingenious men residing in the several colonies, to be called The American Philosophical Society.” The society would be centered at Philadelphia, the city closest to the center of the colonies, where the post roads converged and where they intersected the sea-lanes to the settlements in the West Indies. In addition, Philadelphia already possessed a respectable and growing library, essential to any such endeavor.
At Philadelphia would reside the core of the society, consisting of a physician, a botanist, a mathematician, a chemist, a “mechanician,” a geographer, and a natural philosopher of broad interests and expertise. The society’s president, treasurer, and secretary would also be based in Franklin’s home city. The group would meet at least once a month, and would discuss their own latest findings and those transmitted to them by members in other cities and colonies. A principal function of the Philadelphia nucleus would be to facilitate the flow of information among members with common interests but no common meeting ground. To this end the society would sponsor publication of the most noteworthy findings and hypotheses.
Topics suitable for investigation covered the range of human interests and needs. “All new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, &c., their virtues, uses, &c., methods of propagating them…. Improvements of vegetable juices, as ciders, wines &c. New methods of curing or preventing disease. All new-discovered fossils in different countries, as mines, minerals, quarries, &c. New and useful improvements in any branch of mathematics. New discoveries in chemistry, such as improvements in distillation, brewing, assaying of ores, &c. New mechanical inventions for saving labour, as mills, carriages, &c.” And so on, through geography, geology, animal husbandry, and more horticulture, and concluding with “all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life.”
Franklin released this manifesto—characteristically, a roster of questions rather than of answers—to the world in May 1743. The reaction was slow but promising. Cadwallader Colden wrote from New York, “I long very much to hear what you have done in your scheme of erecting a society at Philadelphia for promoting of useful arts and sciences in America. If you think any thing in my power whereby I can promote so useful an undertaking I will with much pleasure receive your instructions for that end.”
This response encouraged Franklin, especially as it came from one as distinguished as Colden. A physician by training, Colden was surveyor general of New York, and a man almost as catholic in his interests as Franklin would become. Colden refused to be intimidated by the awesome reputation of Isaac Newton, convincing himself that Newton had erred on certain important points. He devoted much of his adult life to correcting the mistakes. Yet the effort hardly exhausted him. He found time to write a history of the Indian tribes in and around the colony of New York, a taxonomy of the flora near his Orange County home (which he rendered in Latin and sent to the Swedish patriarch of plant science and Latin nomenclature, Linneaus, who duly published it), assorted treatises on moral philosophy, medical accounts of major diseases and lesser distempers, and a translation of Cicero’s letters.
Franklin knew Colden by reputation and was flattered to hear from him. He replied at once. “I cannot but be fond of engaging in a correspondence so advantageous to me as yours must be,” Franklin said. “I shall always receive your favours as such, and with great pleasure.”
This exchange commenced a correspondence between Franklin and Colden that enlightened and delighted both parties. Colden encouraged Franklin in gathering the “Virtuosi” into his philosophical society. “I long to know what progress you make in forming your society,” he inquired. “If it meet with obstruction from the want of proper encouragement or otherwise, I would have you attempt some other method of proceeding in your design, for I shall be very sorry to have it entirely dropped.”