The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  Newton made nature seem regular and rational, more accessible to human comprehension. It was self-evident. By designating mathematically defined laws that predicted physical action in all parts of the cosmos, he set new standards for the sciences: observation (as with telescopes), calculation, and reexamination of old principles.

  Newton, premier natural philosopher. Charles Jervas, Isaac Newton (1717). THE ROYAL SOCIETY.

  These practices had an amazing impact on the reading public’s ideas of nature. Popularized versions of Newton existed for everyone. John Newbury, under the pseudonym “Tom Telescope,” wrote The Newtonian System of Philosophy, Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, meaning children. There were accounts of upper-class women who refused to marry or even get dressed in the morning lest they lose time for their astronomy and mathematics. Newton became a public figure, a near celebrity. When he died, Alexander Pope composed an epitaph: “Nature and nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” God had created the natural world; Newton had decoded it—the epitaph was endlessly reused.60

  No wonder that an ambitious young man such as Franklin gravitated toward Newton. Franklin eagerly noted the prospect “of seeing Sir Isaac Newton, of which I was extreamly desirous; but this never happened,” much to his regret (and that of his biographers). Would he have had anything to say to Newton? Was Franklin, a provincial youth just shy of his twentieth birthday, overreaching? In fact, all but the most abstract sciences were supposed to be accessible to anyone who could read and took an interest in the affairs of the day—precisely people such as Franklin who hung around coffeehouses reading newspapers, absorbing gossip, and hoping to give Newton a polite bow.61

  Having failed to meet the great man, Franklin laid siege to the learned organization, the Royal Society, of which Newton was president. Franklin had known about the Royal Society at least since Boston’s inoculation controversy. The society was formally closed to Franklin; its fellows were elected only if they were deemed to have made some significant contribution to knowledge. Moreover, it was a gentleman’s club. Tradesmen, even if they had made discoveries, never became fellows. But the society’s journal of record, the Philosophical Transactions, was available to the reading public, and events at the society and reports of its fellows were published in newspapers and elsewhere. Most promising for Franklin, the society solicited information. Its members studied some of the trade-based knowledge that working people had to offer, and they welcomed news from foreign and colonial correspondents.62

  That was how Franklin wedged his foot in the Royal Society’s door. Just before he left London in 1726, he wrote to Hans Sloane, the society’s secretary (and then, succeeding Newton in 1727, its president). Franklin probably knew that Sloane had visited and described the natural history of the West Indies; he could be expected to take an interest in colonial specimens. In his studiously offhand letter to Sloane, Franklin tried to pass himself off as a gentleman traveler, Sloane’s equal. “Having lately been in the No[r]thern Parts of America,” he began, “I have brought from thence” several items made of asbestos, “call’d by the Inhabitants, Salamander Cotton.” Franklin evidently wanted Sloane to think he had merely visited the “Inhabitants” of the northern colonies. Moreover, he implied that he had an English country residence or friends who did. In a grand postscript, he added, “I expect to be out of Town in 2 or 3 Days, and therefore beg an immediate Answer.” It was a nice try, but Franklin was unable to sustain the conceit. He faltered by offering Sloane the chance to “purchase” his asbestos items, making himself sound more like a tradesman selling wares than one gentleman showing his “Curiosities” to another.63

  Sloane met Franklin and obligingly purchased a small purse woven from “Salamander Cotton.” It is now held in the British Museum, part of the collection Sloane donated, as a gentleman was expected to do, without payment. Franklin must have realized that he had played his part in this drama somewhat shabbily because he remembered it differently when he wrote his autobiography. There, he asserted that he had indeed brought over “Curiosities,” including the asbestos purse, but that “Sir Hans Sloane heard of it, came to see me, and invited me to his House in Bloomsbury Square, where he show’d me all his Curiosities, and persuaded me to let him add that to the Number, for which he paid me handsomely.” In this version, Franklin was Sloane’s social equal—which was true when he wrote the account but not when he had had the encounter.64

  Whatever the transaction was like, it carried Franklin a step further on the path of science. He had learned to make money from books, both as a printer and as a bookseller, as when he had needed cash to leave Boston. Now, specimens allowed him to raise money when he needed it and to gain access to one of the most highly esteemed naturalists of his age. And the asbestos, a substance that resists fire, is the first indication of his long-lasting interest in heat and its effects.

  Franklin also considered making money by turning himself into a curiosity, an American as waterproof as asbestos was fireproof. He had astonished Londoners with his ability to swim well. At one point, he had stripped down and swum in the Thames for a distance of three and a half miles, “performing on the Way many Feats of Activity both upon and under Water.” An eminent political figure, Sir William Wyndham, heard of the demonstration and summoned Franklin. Wyndham advised him to open a “Swimming School,” which would make him “a good deal of Money.” Had he stayed in London, Franklin thought, this school would have been his best prospect. Money was clearly on his mind. He had saved none in London and believed that if he returned to Philadelphia, he would have to take “Leave of Printing” and enter trade. Thomas Denham, the Quaker merchant he had met on the way to London, had offered to take him on as a clerk.65

  BALLAD-SELLER, irreligious printshop worker, runaway, Londoner, pamphleteer, and playgoer—Franklin feared that all his endeavors and adventures were leading him nowhere. He resolved to reform himself and return to Philadelphia, which still needed printers. He left London in July 1726. He must have calculated that he would soon turn twenty-one (in January 1727) and could expect to be his own master at last.

  His new sense of seriousness was apparent in “the Plan” he “formed at Sea, for regulating my future Conduct in Life.” In the plan, he confessed that he had “never fixed a regular design in life; by which means it has been a confused variety of different scenes.” Henceforth, Franklin resolved on a plan of frugality, truth, industry, and goodwill toward others. At the end of his life, he congratulated himself that the plan was all “the more remarkable, as being form’d when I was so young, and yet being pretty faithfully adhered to quite thro’ to old Age.” Like the entertainingly censorious Silence Dogood, the earnest and improvement-minded Benjamin Franklin was born at sea.66

  The journal that he kept during his 1726 voyage on the Berkshire, on the way back to Philadelphia, revealed his new solemnity and industriousness. He made forays into different areas of learning and experimented with different types of writing. The text contained sentimental prose that Franklin would wisely abjure in his adult writing. (“Albion, farewell!” he penned when his ship set out, and, even worse, “my eyes were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy” at the sight of America.) To a remarkable extent, however, the journal was the progenitor of all Franklin’s work in the sciences. It was his first extended inquiry into the natural world—indeed, the first sign that he thought he had something to say about it.67

  He began modestly, with descriptions of nature. His daily entries followed the conventions of sea logs: “Wednesday, August 10 / Wind N. W. Course S. W. about four knots. By observation in latitude 48o 50’. Nothing remarkable happened”—a dull day for science and perhaps for the passengers. Franklin also studied the weather and the heavens: “Saturday, October 1 / These South-Wests are hot damp winds, and bring abundance of rain and dirty weather.” Two eclipses, one solar and one lunar, enlivened the voyage. The lunar eclipse, predicted in London almanacs
, encouraged Franklin to stay on deck all night to see when it would begin “with us” at sea and how it would help determine longitude, which was still a problem for navigators.68

  Franklin also observed marine life. He noted the dolphins and sharks around the ship; the sharks discouraged his own swimming. He pitied “a poor little bird” that came aboard “almost tired to death.” The ship was about 200 leagues from land, and the bird was desperate to put down somewhere. (The ship’s cat had “destroyed” an earlier refugee.) Even better was a “Tropic bird” that must have been, like the weary temperate birds, blown off course by the winds. Franklin was therefore interested not only in the presence of animals at sea but also in the question of whether they belonged where he saw them. How did climate and weather patterns indicate the proper places for different creatures?69

  His interest in what we might call habitat led him to investigate the crabs and seaweed that coexisted in the North Atlantic. On September 28, he wrote: “This afternoon we took up several branches of gulf weed (with which the sea is spread all over from the Western Isles to the coast of America); but one of these branches had something peculiar in it.” The peculiarity was “a small shell-fish like a heart,” appearing as “embrios” and as fully formed crabs. From these fragments—weed, embryo, adult crab—Franklin postulated a small, interconnected world. The crab was “a native of the branch” of the seaweed and had perhaps just developed out of “the same condition with the rest of those little embrios.” To prove this “conjecture,” he “resolved to keep the weed in salt water . . . by this experiment to see whether any more crabs will be produced or not in this manner.” Two days later, Franklin gathered more gulfweed with the boat hook. This sample had more crabs, “each less than the nail of my little finger,” and one with a vestigial piece of embryonic shell that supported his idea that the crabs must grow while latched onto the marine plant.70

  He decided to save some of the seaweed and the partly developed crab in a glass container “to preserve the curiosity till I come on shore.” Just as his asbestos items indicated an emerging interest in heat, so the crabs hinted at his similarly long-lived fascination with reproduction. The gulf-related phenomena were, as well, the start of Franklin’s investigations into the circulation of the Atlantic waters.71

  It is interesting that Franklin thought the crab in the gulfweed was the curiosity, not the weed itself. Indeed, using the term gulf to describe Atlantic phenomena had become a commonplace. The word had first described maritime things in and around the Gulf of Mexico and was undoubtedly derived from Spanish use, which might have started as early as the sixteenth century. Much later, the word began to describe Atlantic things more generally. The first printed evidence in English of this broader usage appeared in 1674, when John Josselyn traveled from England to New England and referred to the “gulf weed” that spread over certain parts of the Atlantic, presumably from the warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Franklin had made his first encounter with the Gulf Stream, though that phrase would not be used in print until the 1740s.72

  His journal notations may be juvenilia, but they are remarkable ones. Franklin had clearly absorbed the plain style of writing and the focus on visible evidence that characterized the era’s sciences. And he had taken up some of the sciences’ most important topics: astronomy, climate, and the generation of life. This kind of narrative description of nature would become common, but it was not in the 1720s—certainly not for a self-trained man in his twenties. Franklin’s determination to “preserve a curiosity” bespeaks his ambition, a desire to retain specimens to impress fellow naturalists. He had also learned about the collaborative nature of the sciences—he used plural pronouns to describe his activities: “we see Tropic birds every day,” the sun was “hid from our eyes,” “we took up several branches of gulf weed,” the eclipse “began with us,” “we have had abundance of dolphins.” Indeed, he must have had collaborators aboard the ship; he would have needed permission to use the boat hook to collect seaweed.73

  What kind of collaboration was it? It is all too easy to imagine the young Franklin bouncing about the ship, generally getting in the way, and assuming that he, veteran of one earlier Atlantic crossing, had opinions worth the notice of mariners. But he and the sailors needed desperately, if for rather different reasons, to keep busy.

  The voyage took much longer than Franklin’s journey to England had, an agonizing eighty-three days. His eastward passage had been, in contrast, roughly forty-nine days. Franklin was painfully aware that the winds were “westerly,” that is, coming from the west, where the ship was trying to go. The command would invariably have been “helm’s a lee,” to point the ship ahead of any promising wind, so the crew swiveled their craft around and around. “The word helm-a-lee is become,” he complained, “almost as disagreeable to our ears as the sentence of a judge to a convicted malefactor.” Food stores ran low. On September 20, after two months at sea, ship biscuit was rationed; the next day, the steward was flogged “for making an extravagant use of flour in the puddings.”74

  It is no wonder that Franklin was busy looking at crabs—he was certainly bored and possibly anxious. He had reveled in big, talkative London and was now, for almost three months, reduced to a small audience of twenty-one people. As when his London coworkers had made him an “excommunicate,” social isolation frightened Franklin. He noted that a fellow passenger on the Berkshire who had cheated at cards was likewise excommunicated—denied any company until he paid a fine. “Man is a sociable being,” Franklin commented; being “excluded from society” was “the worst of punishments.” He was elated when, at the end of September, the Berkshire encountered a ship bound for New York from Dublin. “There is really something strangely cheering to the spirits,” he confessed to his journal, “in the meeting of a ship at sea, containing a society of creatures of the same species and in the same circumstances with ourselves.” “My heart fluttered in my breast with joy,” he continued (with some of that awful sentimentality he was still trying out), “when I saw so many human countenances.”75

  After a few days, the other ship fell off, and the Berkshire was again alone. At that point, Franklin and the others must not only have been bored at sea but also fearful they might not spot land before their stores gave out. Franklin admitted that all the conversation was now focused on the destination, Philadelphia. On September 27, he laid a bet, “a bowl of punch,” that they would arrive a week from the upcoming Saturday.76

  He was desperate to confirm the ship’s proximity to land. The gulfweed and the eclipse were probably his attempts to determine a rough position. And on Sunday, October 2, he wrote, “I cannot help fancying the water is changed a little as is usual when a ship comes within soundings,” meaning over shallow ground, sign of coastline. Still, he wondered whether appearances were deceiving: “’Tis probable I am mistaken; for there is but one besides myself of my opinion.” Precisely because only one other person saw what Franklin did, he labeled his perception a mere “opinion,” something that fell short of universal acceptance. But the next day, he emphatically noted that “the water is now very visibly changed to the eyes of all except the Captain and Mate, and they will by no means allow it; I suppose because they did not see it first.”77

  One senses that the officers might have been a bit tired of Franklin and his curiosity—and that he recognized their annoyance with him. Still, his relationships with the crew had not broken down completely. For the rest of the voyage, he continued to write down observations that he could not have obtained alone. He noted, for instance, the depth of the water and the distance of the ship from land during the last four days of the journey. Obviously, the crew had not entirely excommunicated Franklin—someone was still talking to him.78

  The 1726 journal offers an excellent record of Franklin’s early engagement with the sciences. In it, he revealed his interest in a broad range of phenomena. He had learned that inquiry into the natural world was a sociable and collaborative endeavor. And he con
sulted relevant trade groups about their knowledge.

  Above all, Franklin recorded his ambition: he wanted to discover new things that would get noticed and get him noticed—hence his curiosity about the timing of eclipses at sea and about the way in which animal life was generated. The same ambition surfaced in Franklin’s assessment of what he had accomplished during his year and a half in London. “I had by no means improv’d my Fortune,” he wrote, “but I had pick’d up some very ingenious Acquaintance whose Conversation was of great Advantage to me, and I had read considerably.” Franklin remained penniless, but he had gained capital in the form of knowledge and could, as a printer, disseminate both his opinions and his knowledge. Head and hands were serving him well. His encounter with Hans Sloane and his near encounter with Isaac Newton were especially promising. Franklin had discovered that some forms of knowledge could blur the boundary between a workingman and a gentleman, even if the worker lacked formal education.79

  Chapter 3

  MAN OF LETTERS

  ON HIS RETURN to Philadelphia, Franklin began his new life quite dramatically—by nearly dying. He arrived in America in poor health. “The voyage had [so] much weakened us,” he noted, that he and some other passengers did not have the strength to get off at Chester, Pennsylvania, the first port, and continue overland. Instead, they lingered aboard the Berkshire until it made Philadelphia in October 1726. Franklin then began clerking for merchant Thomas Denham, part owner of the Berkshire, who had advanced Franklin the cost of his passage against future wages.1