The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  Franklin would reiterate his beliefs about the press a few years later when he defended a fellow newspaperman, John Peter Zenger. Unlike Benjamin Franklin (but much like James Franklin), Zenger had, in his New-York Weekly Journal, attacked members of his colony’s government. Zenger was accused of seditious libel and taken to trial in 1735. Whatever he might privately have thought of Zenger’s lack of caution, Franklin used his Pennsylvania Gazette to protest the man’s persecution, to reprint pro-Zenger material from London newspapers, and to advertise the sale of Zenger’s own 1736 Narrative of his trial.19

  Most of the Pennsylvania Gazette was, however, uncontroversial. Its primary subject was commerce. Philadelphia was no longer the backward town Franklin had first entered in 1723, nine years before he and Meredith gained their newspaper. The town was well on its way to becoming the second-largest city in the British empire and the most important North American port.20

  Accounts of shipbuilding, trade, transportation, maritime accidents, and warfare all appeared in Franklin’s newspaper. In 1732, for example, the paper recounted the progress of a “Mast Ship” in Casco Bay, New England, which had just loaded “large, fair, and fine Trees for the Supply of his Majesty’s Navy.” In 1741, the Rubie advertised its imports of manufactured goods, including linens, hats, greatcoats, and cutlery, available for “ready Money” or flour, Philadelphia’s main export. Those who wished in turn to ship goods or embark on the Rubie for its run to the West Indies were invited to approach the ship’s master “on board said ship.” In 1748, the paper reported that the Griffin of Philadelphia had been struck by lightning on its way to Jamaica. The next year, the paper carried a notice that the Success, with twenty guns, was stationed in Boston, an ominous portent as Anglo-French conflict mounted.21

  The newspaper was awash in advertisements, Franklin’s most substantial source of revenue. People paid him to place ads for everything imaginable. They wanted to sell goods or laborers, to advertise their services, to solicit customers for their businesses, to request assistance for various projects, to demand that debtors pay up, to plead for the return of lost items, to threaten legal action, to notify the public about runaway slaves or servants or kinfolk, or simply to declare something about themselves. In the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette, husbands demanded the return of runaway wives, wives retorted that their husbands’ abuse had made them flee, merchants listed imported wares, gentlemen wondered where their pocket-watches had gone to, widows advertised their peerless medical remedies, tutors solicited students, and masters complained that escaped slaves had packed up several sets of clothing as disguises and as easily shed capital. These fragments of lives—happy, despairing, prosperous, boring, inventive, or about to end badly—were bread and butter for their printer.22

  The advertisements, more to the point, tell us a great deal about Franklin’s willingness to conform to his neighbors’ expectations. That he profited from slavery is abundantly clear in the many Pennsylvania Gazette notices about the sale of human laborers or rewards for the recapture of runaways. Thus, the former bonded apprentice and runaway who had freed himself because he knew how to set type now used that skill to secure the bondage of others. At this stage of his life, Franklin comfortably accepted this aspect of his world.23

  To increase his profits, he also sold a variety of goods at his printing office—he had become a merchant after all. He showcased his own printed items but would also, over the course of his career as printer, sell everything from linseed oil to “Very Good COFFEE.” He even sold “superfine CROWN SOAP,” the Franklin family’s characteristic green soap stamped with a crown to indicate its quality. “It is cut in exact and equal Cakes, neatly put up, and sold at the New Printing-Office,” declared one advertisement. Sometimes, Franklin distributed printed products for free. A complimentary pamphlet might entice a customer into his shop (where something else might catch the eye) and draw attention to his many projects and products. As well, the gazette did double duty—readers could buy it and also find in its pages other things to purchase.24

  Franklin’s chief commodity was knowledge. Quite early on, he imported and sold books, particularly if they were beyond his means to print (as was true of illustrated works) or if he was trying to gauge demand for something he might eventually print. One long 1734 Pennsylvania Gazette advertisement for imported books gave a good sense of what Franklin expected his customers to read. The list began with books on navigation and science: “Westindia Coasting Pilot. Newhouse’s Navigation. Pattoun’s Navigation. Key of Commerce. Lex Mercatoria. Euclid’s Elements by William Whiston. Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, 2 Vols.” Histories and religious works followed. The advertisement concluded by noting that the printshop also stocked “Quadrants, Forestaffs, Nocturnals, Mariner’s Compasses,” further reminders of Philadelphia’s burgeoning status as an Atlantic port city.25

  Franklin circulated knowledge in other ways, including human form. In 1734, he advertised a buyer for an indentured servant who was “a Scholar, and can teach Children Reading, Writing and Arithmetick.” He also used the paper to facilitate book loans in a network so extensive that he was always losing track of material. The same year he helped sell “a Scholar,” he placed his own gazette advertisement, admitting that he had “Lent at different Times (and forgot to whom) the following [five] Books” that he now wished would be returned “to the Printer of this Paper.” But Franklin had “in his Hands the 2d. Vol of Cowley’s Works in Octavo, of which he does not know the Owner.” Maybe all of these volumes made their way back to their rightful owners; if not, Franklin had, in his readiness to exchange ideas, gained one book at the expense of losing five.26

  Above all, Franklin used his newspaper to circulate knowledge, including discoveries in the sciences. Indeed, the Pennsylvania Gazette is a very good measure of the popularization of natural science at midcentury. Franklin knew better than to fill his paper with learned discussions that the general public would skip or subscribers would resent paying for. So in his discussions of the natural world, he tended to favor a topic that never fails to grab a reader’s attention: death.

  The early editions of the Pennsylvania Gazette published what were then called “bills of mortality”—vital statistics, especially those for Philadelphia. Most large cities published this information in order to notify the public of the growth or decline of the population or of any particularly dangerous conditions. In late 1730, the Gazette listed all Philadelphia burials for the past year: a total of 227, broken down by religion and race. Early the following year, an article pointed out to readers that from the number of deaths (assuming an average year), one could extrapolate Philadelphia’s total population. It also proposed that the number could be compared to tallies in Boston, London, and some other European cities in order to get a comparative sense of the city’s size.27

  While considering death (and health), Franklin paid particular attention to smallpox. Unlike his brother, however, he heralded the efficacy of inoculation and urged its use. In May 1730, he published the description of inoculation from Chambers’s Cyclopedia. That same month, Franklin reported that in cases of smallpox in Boston, of seventy-two people inoculated, only two had died, whereas one in four among the holdouts perished after contracting smallpox the ordinary way. In March of the following year, he reprinted an extract from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that described inoculation in Constantinople, and he rejoiced that “the Practice of Inoculation for the Small-Pox, begins to grow among us.” In July, he was even happier that “the Small-pox has now quite left this City.” Fragments though these may be, they are Franklin’s first publications in natural history and his first printed discussions of matters debated by learned societies.28

  He kept at it. Building on his coverage of smallpox, he next tackled the common cold (which may have interested him because of his struggle with pleurisy a few years earlier). In late 1732, the Gazette reported that “from all Parts of this Province, and even from Maryland, People com
plain of Colds.” The reasons were debated: people either acquired their sneezes and sniffles from a sudden “hard Frost” or because of the disease’s “contagious” nature, “after somewhat the same Manner as the Small-pox or Pestilence.” Franklin conceded that learned men were divided on the subject, and he printed another extract from the Philosophical Transactions to prove the point. The piece, a 1694 description of colds, was a bit old, however.29

  As Franklin expanded his coverage of the sciences, he tended to offer more up-to-date information. In 1737, for instance, the Pennsylvania Gazette gave an account of the recent appearance of the aurora borealis, with a text appended from astronomer Edmond Halley’s description of it in the Philosophical Transactions for 1716.30

  With its blend of news, editorials, advertisements, and natural knowledge, the Pennsylvania Gazette expanded and flourished. In short order, Franklin set up an independent business, dissolving his partnership with Meredith in mid-1730 and establishing himself as an important tradesman and property owner in Philadelphia. This improved situation allowed him, in late 1730, to take a wife, Deborah Read Rogers, and to set up a respectable household to which he could bring his illegitimate son William, who was born around the time of the marriage. The bastard child made the publicly acknowledged union crucial. Yet Franklin managed to keep his private life just that; we still do not know who William Franklin’s mother was.31

  Franklin’s marriage reflected his principle of religious toleration. He may have been a deist, but Deborah Franklin belonged to the Church of England, and all the Franklin children would be raised in that faith. A Pennsylvania Gazette advertisement of 1737 notified readers that “a Common Prayer Book, bound in Red, gilt, and letter’d DF on each Corner” had disappeared from a pew in Christ Church. “The Person who took it, is desir’d to open it and read the Eighth Commandment” and put it back. Either Philadelphia was small enough or the Franklins were well known enough that readers knew immediately that “DF” was Mrs. Benjamin Franklin. Thus, Franklin economically advertised his wife’s missing book, his household’s general piety, and his services as advertiser.32

  IN EARLY 1731, Franklin joined another club, the St. John’s Lodge of Philadelphia. It was America’s first Masonic lodge. His membership represented his initial attempt at a cosmopolitan status, one no longer linked to his provincial setting.

  Freemasonry seems to have emerged in seventeenth-century Scotland, with a supposed ancestry in the ancient skill of stonemasonry. Like all trade guilds, stonemasons had long maintained rituals that conferred trade solidarity and protected secrets. As the guild structure declined at the end of the Middle Ages, its secrets and rituals reappeared in, of all places, social clubs for the elite and middle ranks. So-called Freemasons, or “Speculative Masons,” people who could not have worked with stone to save their lives, relished exclusiveness and mystery in their clubs. The contrast between the working-class origins of Freemasonry and its attraction for propertied men meant that a Masonic lodge was a perfect place for Franklin.33

  Their secrecy made Freemasons exciting and mysterious. Before learning Masonic mysteries, an initiate would have to swear never to “Write them, Print them, Mark them, Carve them or Engrave them” lest he then “have [his] Throat cut, [his] Tongue taken from the Roof of [his] Mouth, [his] Heart pluck’d from under [his] Left Breast,” and so forth. Freemasons also referred to themselves, with a wink, as “the Craft” and claimed to possess knowledge descended from ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, or Greek traditions. While celebrating workers’ culture, Freemasons rejected actual working people. In their ceremonies, speculative Masons employed silver trowels, silk gloves, and taffeta or lambskin aprons to mimic a working mason’s iron tools, leather gloves, and apron.34

  At the start of Franklin’s Masonic affiliation, American lodges were exclusive and expensive. Philadelphia’s lodge charged £5 for initiation, more than an ordinary worker earned in a month and probably a strain even for Franklin, however flushed with his new success. Gentlemen, merchants, and other men of property dominated the lodges. For example, sea captains and shipowners were Masons—but not ordinary sailors. But if real artisans, let alone workers, were not welcome in Freemasonry’s ersatz guilds, Franklin was—as usual—the exception. He was made a Mason a mere year after the St. John’s Lodge formed. More astonishing, he became grand master three years later, in 1734. The honor registered Franklin’s material success. He resembled other Freemasons who practiced trades, such as printing, that required literacy and numeracy. Printers were also handy to Freemasons, as when Franklin printed material for his lodge.35

  He was making brisk progress from workshop to drawing room. He still worked in his printshop and joined his fellow “leather aprons” at the Junto. But by joining the Masons, he had inched closer to gentility. He sometimes betrayed sympathy for workers, as when he said of Masons, “Their Grand Secret is, That they have no Secret at all.” But Franklin placed increasing value on book learning as opposed to manual labor. In 1732, his lodge noted a plan to buy “the best Books of Architecture, suitable Mathematical Instruments, &c.” in order to teach members “the excellent Science of Geometry and Architecture . . . so much recommended in our ancient Constitutions.” 36

  Franklin would stumble, however, when a scandal exposed his indifference to Freemasonry’s genteel creed. In 1737, some Philadelphians duped a young man into thinking they would initiate him into a lodge. They made him take a fake oath and, in a mock initiation ceremony, accidentally set him on fire. Franklin had asked for a copy of the oath, which he thought an excellent parody of Masonic ritual. When the burned youth died, Franklin was accused of complicity. He defended himself, and the scandal blew over. But his actions had revealed his amusement over Freemasonry’s hallowed mysteries and had hinted at his leather apron background. Franklin had endured actual workers’ callous treatment of initiates when his fellow printers in London had hazed him—that part of Freemasonry did make sense to him. He would, in future, be more careful about when and how he revealed his humble origins.37

  This same trend—the growing focus on head rather than hands—was evident in the Junto. As its members prospered, the club generated a library. The original members had already been “clubbing” their “Books to a common Library.” (Thus, Franklin found a way to re-create his experience in London, where he had discovered that wonderful trove of secondhand books.) But somehow, the system broke down, and the Junto members took away their books. So in 1731, Franklin proposed a “Public Subscription Library.” Each of the roughly fifty subscribers paid a fee for admission as well as annual dues. “On this little Fund we began,” Franklin remembered: “The Books were imported.” The result was the Library Company of Philadelphia.38

  We would not recognize this as a public library, yet its founders thought it one. Its subscribers did not need a particular status, occupation, or religion to join. Even nonsubscribers could borrow books if they left a sum proportioned to the volumes’ value. A subscriber or borrower had to have some money but not as much as it would have taken to build a private library of comparable size. In 1741, Franklin praised his scheme because it meant “Knowledge is in this City render’d more cheap and easy to be come at.”39

  In the Library Company, Franklin had helped re-create the two learned institutions—Harvard College and the Royal Society—that he had failed to enter. He rejoiced that the Library Company “afforded me the means of Improvement by constant Study . . . and thus repair’d in some Degree the Loss of the Learned Education my Father once intended for me.” And the Library Company was a small, provincial version of the Royal Society, a learned club with particular interest in the natural sciences. In 1738, for example, it acquired an air pump that allowed members to experiment with the creation and effects of a vacuum, as Robert Boyle had famously done. (The library also bought a full edition of Boyle’s writings and two abridgments, part of a growing collection in the natural sciences.) The company began to sponsor lectures and demonstrations. In 1740, Isaac
Greenwood, who had been first Hollis Professor of Mathematics at Harvard College (until he was sacked for drunkenness), offered lectures by subscription in which he used the library’s air pump.40

  The Library Company also invested in compendia. This genre, essentially the modern reference work, had emerged in the Renaissance. It came of age in the eighteenth century, culminating in the great French and British encyclopedias, versions of which we still consult today (increasingly, on-line). An early British example was Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, first published in 1728 and then in many subsequent editions. (This was the Cyclopedia Samuel Keimer had used in his Universal Instructor, less than a year after the compendium appeared, and that Franklin continued to reprint as well.) Chambers admonished those who jealously guarded secret knowledge or who claimed authorship for personal gain. He emphasized that “to offer a thing to the Publick, and yet pretend a Right reserved therein to one’s self, if it be not absurd, yet it is sordid.”41

  Chambers’s Cyclopedia was the warm-up act—two French projects, the Description des arts et métiers (1761–1788) and the Encyclopédie (1751–1777), were far more comprehensive. Arts et métiers surveyed trades, as England’s Royal Society had once proposed to do before it turned its attention to learned gentlemen. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert originally conceived the Encyclopédie as a translation of Chambers’s book. But they began to write and commission new articles, and the project grew and grew. Seventeen volumes of text appeared from 1751 to 1772, accompanied by eleven volumes of illustrations, the final one published in 1777. This enormous project represented the culmination of the long-term historical trends by which knowledge was published and used to criticize existing institutions and received wisdom. Diderot and d’Alembert courted arrest, for example, when they used their masterwork to launch critiques of the Catholic Church and of France’s ruling orders.42