The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  James Franklin had wanted attention, and he got it—but soon regretted it. The Courant continued to criticize inoculation until Mather ran into James on the street and reproached him. Franklin then published a lengthy defense of his responsibility as a printer to publish material that might interest the public, however much it offended the great and the good. “To anathematize a Printer for publishing the different Opinions of Men,” he protested in November 1721, “is as injudicious as it is wicked.” But the Courant’s editorials and letters on inoculation gradually dropped off, and the controversy died.39

  There is no evidence that James Franklin’s tactic had improved circulation. But the voluble exchange surely impressed Benjamin. He had followed the controversy, meaning he helped print his brother’s side of it. From the whole affair, he learned about debates in the sciences and about printers’ ability to manipulate them. James could label different views of inoculation as mere “Opinions” because they did not elicit agreement; inoculation’s efficacy was not yet a fact (which required near-universal agreement) or even a recognized form of knowledge (which required agreement among experts).

  It is telling that Benjamin Franklin never gave his opinion on the controversy. Indeed, we do not even know when and whether he had smallpox. He was born after Boston’s previous outbreak of 1702. Had he picked up a case in the meantime? Was he one of the 6,000 who caught and survived it in 1721? What about his two younger siblings? James Franklin may have decried Mather, but Josiah Franklin would never have done so. Did the father quietly have his three youngest children, including Benjamin, inoculated, and did James decline to publicize the different opinions within his own family? However it had happened, Benjamin survived smallpox and now wanted to enter the public fray, meaning publish writing that people followed as avidly as they had the inoculation controversy.

  Fearful that James would scoff at his ambition, he wrote fourteen letters under a female alias, Silence Dogood, and left them for his brother to find. James could not resist publishing them, even though they might have been his younger brother’s anonymous digs at him. The name Dogood echoed Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good. But because the character who bore that name was so comical, the younger Franklin might also have intended a rebuke of Mather. In this efficient and arresting way, Benjamin Franklin was able to establish his independence from his master and his master’s adversary.

  “Silence” belied her first name in order to do good, meaning give Boston the benefit of her tart opinions and lively personal history. She related (in the letter in which the anonymous Franklin introduced her) that she was born at sea. Her parents had been passing “from London to N. England” when she was born below decks. Meanwhile, her father died above, swept away by “a merciless Wave” as he was “rejoycing at my Birth.” Any competent writer could have made this scene either profound or comic; the sixteen-year-old Franklin made it both. Dogood irrationally explained her father’s death: “Tho’ I was not then capable of knowing, I shall never be able to forget.”40

  She advised lovesick bachelors. She scolded religious hypocrites. She mocked dim-witted Harvard students. She reproached Boston fashion victims. Dogood was a hit. When she stopped sending letters, one reader wrote her, via James Franklin, begging that she break her silence: “Is your Common-Place Wit all Exhausted, your stock of matter all spent?” James Franklin had probably guessed that Dogood was an alias (but did not suspect his brother’s hand). He too wanted to keep the joke going—and paying—so he placed an advertisement in his paper. He asked for any “Account of Mrs. Silence Dogood, whether Dead or alive, Married or unmarried, in Town or Countrey” and for a way “she may be spoke with, or Letters convey’d to her.”41

  It is amazing that Franklin’s family did not at once spot Dogood as their kin. Yet Josiah Franklin did not see Dogood’s drowned father as himself, a migrant from England to New England, consigned to a watery death in the fantasy of a scribbling boy whose father had thwarted his desire to go to sea. Nor did James Franklin recognize Dogood as the same author who had versified, four years earlier, on shipwreck and piracy. Yet Dogood kept returning to nautical topics, as with her birth and when, on an evening stroll in Boston, she met “a Crowd of Tarpolins and their Doxies, link’d to each other by the Arms, who ran (by their own Account) after the Rate of Six Knots an Hour” until two of them fell over their own feet and “the Company were call’d upon to bring to, for that Jack and Betty were founder’d,” as if a ship foundered on rocks.42

  A published author at sixteen, recognized around town (albeit anonymously) for his wit and wisdom, Franklin hoped that he might have a scribbling future. He would, but not with his brother. James Franklin overstepped his bounds in 1722 when he derided Massachusetts officials’ faltering attempts to crack down on pirates. The criticism “gave Offence to the Assembly,” the representative house in Massachusetts. That body ordered James Franklin jailed. James hid. Loyalty to master and craft dictated that the younger brother not give up the older. Indeed, the authorities questioned him but then dismissed Benjamin from their inquiries, “considering me perhaps as an Apprentice who was bound to keep his Master’s Secrets,” including his place of hiding.43

  Forbidden in 1723 to publish the New-England Courant under his own name, James ordered it “printed for the future under the Name of Benjamin Franklin.” This solution required him to release Benjamin from his “Indenture,” or contractual apprenticeship. An apprentice was the creature of his master; a Benjamin Franklin apprenticed to a banned James Franklin could not have published anything. Though Benjamin was legally emancipated, James continued to run the printshop. The arrangement was, Benjamin recalled, a “very flimsy Scheme.” It must have irked him that while his brother jibed at all kinds of authority, he insisted on his own. He “had often beaten me,” the younger brother complained, “which I took extreamly amiss.”44

  After the next squabble with his brother, Benjamin quit the printshop at age seventeen, four years short of becoming a qualified journeyman. Already, a lifetime preference was clear: he hated working for others, and he even had trouble working with others. Not for the last time would he separate himself from a collaborator, which he had been, however oddly and briefly, with his brother.

  Benjamin had to leave Boston: the town was not big enough for two printing Franklins, the assembly regarded both brothers as “a little obnoxious to the governing Party,” and Benjamin had acquired a reputation as an “Infidel or Atheist.” His scoffing about religion, he himself confessed, “began to make me pointed at with Horror by good People.” He seized the opportunity in the fall of 1723 to run away from home—finally.45

  In search of another printshop, Franklin went first to New York. He had discovered that his “Inclinations for the Sea, were by this time worne out.” He now had “a Trade” to keep him busy on land. It was nevertheless quickest to get from Boston to New York by sea, and fittingly, printed matter funded Franklin’s long-awaited first sea voyage: “I sold some of my Books to raise a little Money” for the ship’s passage. Not finding employment in New York, Franklin headed to Philadelphia, taking boat passage via New Jersey. Coastal seafaring had the hazards, if not the excitement, of oceanic voyaging. Franklin’s boat to New Jersey “met with a Squall that tore our rotten Sails to pieces” and was driven to Long Island, where it could not land. Instead, the passengers stayed offshore until morning, tossed by the wind and soaked by the spray. (Franklin’s bad luck would continue. When he returned home from Philadelphia to Boston in 1724, he took a ship that “sprung a Leak” and all aboard “were oblig’d to pump almost continually, at which I took my Turn.”)46

  On Philadephia’s dry land, Franklin found employment but not independence. He was desperate for work. Tired, dirty, and ravenous when he finally walked into the city, he spent some of his little remaining money on bread and gobbled it in the street, to the amusement of a young woman standing in a doorway. (She would later overlook his initial “awkward ridiculous Appearance”
and marry him.)47

  Philadelphia was about thirty years younger than Boston and much smaller—it boasted fewer than 6,000 residents. In a town short on cultural amenities, an underage runaway was welcome if he knew a valuable trade. On Franklin’s arrival, one printer quizzed him with “a few Questions” and handed him “a Composing Stick” to see if he could lay out type. He could, and he was hired. But Franklin was not keen to work for another master in another printshop, the fate he thought he had averted when he escaped from his brother.48

  He was flattered when no less than the governor, William Keith, suggested that he open his own printshop. He went home to Boston to consult his father. Josiah Franklin marveled that Pennsylvania’s governor “must be of small Discretion, to think of setting a Boy up in Business who wanted yet 3 Years of being at Man’s Estate.” It was indeed suspicious—Philadelphia was obviously small enough for the governor to know all of the city’s printers, but his interest in the youngest among them hinted that he hoped to make Franklin his tool. Josiah Franklin declined to help his son with the scheme. But Keith kept discussing the plan with the younger Franklin and offered to send him to London to buy equipment and to meet the major printers and booksellers who would become essential business contacts. (James Franklin had done the same early in his career.) So in the same year he arrived in Philadelphia, Franklin headed to London.49

  IT SEEMS too good to be true that Franklin took passage on a ship named the London Hope, and we can only hope the name was a consolation for more seaborne suffering. Franklin enjoyed the ship’s “sociable Company” and became friends with a Quaker merchant, fellow passenger Thomas Denham, who would help him in the future. But Franklin’s first Atlantic voyage “was otherwise not a pleasant one,” for they had “a great deal of bad Weather.”50

  Even worse, he learned on disembarking that his seeming patron, Governor Keith, was as untrustworthy as Josiah Franklin had suspected. Keith had lied to him, failing to furnish the promised letters of introduction and credit to ease his entry into London. Franklin had to fall back on his eminently portable skill of printing, which proved an unintended boon. By practicing his trade in London, the heart of the English book trade, he would learn more about books and printing than he would have been able to do in the colonies, where small and scattered artisanal populations sustained only pale imitations of guild life.51

  Franklin must have already been a good printer when he arrived in London. Underage and without letters of introduction, he was nonetheless hired at two successive printing establishments. The discipline of guild life seemed to settle him down, at least a bit. At a large printer’s establishment, “Watt’s near Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” Franklin had to pay an entry fee to the press room, where the pressmen squeezed together frames of inked type and sheets of paper. Promoted to the composing room, where more-skilled workers laid out the pages, he refused to pay “a new Bienvenu or Sum for Drink” to his fellow compositors. They punished him “by mixing my Sorts, transposing my Pages, breaking my Matter,” and then blandly ascribing the mischief “to the Chapel Ghost.” (Franklin added that “A Printing House is always called a Chappel by the Workmen.”) The compositors also pretended he was not even there, rendering him “an Excommunicate” from their work order. He gave up and paid up.52

  Once Franklin had ingratiated himself, his fellows gave him an extraordinary education in books and their making. They esteemed him as “a pretty good Riggite, that is a jocular verbal Satyrist”—and we thank them for encouraging the lightning wit that ever after flashed through Franklin’s writing. They warned him to protect hands as well as head. Four years before he died, Franklin would recall “an old Workman” in a London printing house warning him against handling lead type when it was warm, lest he absorb the lead and “lose the Use of my Hands by it,” the world’s worst prospect for a working man. Franklin eventually became valuable to his master and his fellow workers and enjoyed his “Consequence in the Society” they formed.53

  Even better were the societies of greater London. The city’s dirty streets, raucous playhouses, disputatious coffeehouses, and busy dockyards—and indeed printshops—all contributed to the metropolis’s intense creativity and productivity. Human energy poured in from the countryside and the empire, not least in the form of young colonists such as Franklin. London had just overtaken Paris as the largest city in Europe, but more people died than were bred there; consequently, migrants were needed for the city’s sustained growth. It was not a place for a timid youth. Londoners were aggressively sociable and thrust themselves into places where they could display their wit and conversation, just as Franklin had learned from the Spectator, whose very title yanked readers from their armchairs and flung them before the public eye.54

  Franklin, who had fled Boston when “good” people stared at him for his religious unorthodoxy, wanted to become someone Londoners would stare at. He became both spectator and spectacle. He later admitted that he spent so much of his “Earnings in going to Plays and other Places of Amusement” that he just barely “rubb’d on from hand to mouth.” He also found a bookseller, with “an immense Collection of second-hand Books,” who, for a small fee, let him borrow and read whatever he pleased—a much broader range of materials than he could have found even in bookish Boston.55

  Franklin also tried out a new voice as a philosopher. He helped set type for an edition of William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated and, reading as he composed, realized that he disagreed with the author. So Franklin wrote and had printed one hundred copies of a rebuttal, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725). The work went well beyond the timid queries and deist pronouncements that Franklin had made earlier. Contemporaries would have recognized it as libertine, meaning that it renounced conventional religion. Franklin argued that human nature could be explained in secular and deterministic terms, as pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. He did not directly deny God but refused to accept that humanity contained anything mysterious or even especially spiritual; morality was a matter of physical sensation.56

  Even in a city crammed with ambition and argument, Franklin’s deliberate provocation attracted notice. His master, Samuel Palmer, thought the work’s principles “abominable.” Franklin later regretted his foray into “metaphysical” matters that, as with his irreligion in Boston, made him a spectacle for the wrong reasons. But one admirer, Franklin boasted, “introduc’d me to Dr. [Bernard] Man-devil [l]e,” who had written The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits (1714), a book as cynical as Franklin’s own but rendered in verse and far more influential. His notoriety earned Franklin a brief entry into Mandeville’s social club at a tavern called the Horns. His admirer, surgeon Henry Pemberton, also introduced him to a doctor at Batson’s Coffee House near the Royal Exchange, which was frequented by physicians and men of science. Pemberton, who promised to introduce Franklin to none other than Isaac Newton, would edit the third edition of Newton’s masterwork, Principia (1687), and produce a popular guide to Newton’s natural philosophy. 57

  Plays, coffeehouses, clever pamphlets—no renegade puritan and runaway youth could resist them. Franklin never lost his taste for the urban life that had dazzled him during his eighteen months in London, in the course of which he celebrated his nineteenth and twentieth birthdays. And his passing comment about falling in with doctors and men of science revealed a new interest. It is a frustratingly casual notation of an important intellectual shift. We know little about what Franklin was reading in London—he neglected to mention any of the titles he borrowed from his obliging bookseller—but he left a few clues we can follow.

  If he had not already, Franklin could have learned from Ovid’s Metamorphoses the ancient understanding of nature. His first London master, Samuel Palmer, produced a two-volume edition of Ovid in 1724, Franklin’s first year in London. In Ovid’s great poem, anything could change into something else. Women, for instance, grew into shrubs or hardened into rocks. This transformatio
n was possible because material things all shared the same elementary composition. Four basic elements—earth, air, fire, and water—constituted all matter and gave it four qualities—cold, dry, hot, and wet. Although the heavens were perfect and unchanging, everything on earth constantly altered—Ovid’s examples were just particularly dramatic. Analogical connections existed among all things. Thus, the human body was a microcosm of the whole cosmos or macrocosm. Bounded by its thin skin, each body was a leaky, unstable bag containing four fluids, or humors (blood, phlegm, choler, and bile), associated with the four elements and subject to cosmic forces, such as the position of the planets overhead.58

  Franklin’s reference to Newton indicated that he had, by 1726, realized that the old philosophy of nature was subject to dispute, as the Spectator had asserted, without giving much detail. It did not matter that Franklin had not read Newton’s Principia and never did—the Principia was one of the most talked-about unread books of all time. Published in Latin and crammed with mathematics, the work was celebrated—and debated—much more than it was read. In it, Newton attacked the ancient ideas that had been second nature to Ovid. He assumed that heaven and earth operated not analogically (the latter as an imperfect example of the former) but similarly. Newton regarded the planets as physical bodies whose motion explained the construction of the cosmos. He portrayed that construction mathematically, as a set of functions and connections that could be represented by numbers. Above all, Newton proposed a way to understand the unseen connections between objects distant from each other: his theory of universal gravitation represented bodies as suspended in a network of interactive forces that kept heavenly planets in their orbits and earthly objects from flying off into space.59