The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  It was also significant that the Encyclopédie collapsed differences between learned and artisanal traditions. The authors believed that artisans, despite their low status and minimal education, knew how to do remarkable things and deserved respect and attention. Detailed engravings showed ordinary people at work; in the volume dedicated to the marine, or naval affairs, the workers construct ships, make sails, manipulate wind direction, navigate, and give signals at sea. These tasks were explained to the literate and—because illustrated—even to illiterate persons, such as children.

  Encyclopedias made knowledge accessible, compact, and economical, which in turn made these volumes infinitely attractive to Franklin. He began to trade in and collect compendia. He bought “the best edition” of Chambers for himself in 1749 and would order two different editions of the Description des arts et métiers in 1763. Later, in 1769, the Library Company would ask Franklin to procure copies of all European learned societies’ published transactions. He discovered that this would cost £300 sterling, far too much. He had already told them that the company should simply get a copy of the Encyclopédie, noting that it probably “contains Extracts of the most material Parts of all of them.” The company agreed and directed him to purchase the latest edition.43

  And so, Franklin’s social progress continued. In the Junto, he had been a young worker who read; in the Library Company, he was a gentleman who read about workers, a man of letters, indeed. As they sat in the library and leafed through books, he and others from the Junto could catch glimpses of their earlier selves.

  Franklin was edging his way into the “republic of letters.” This was another kind of club, but an invisible one. A cosmopolitan and mostly elite network, its genteel or even aristocratic members agreed to consider each other equal citizens while snubbing ordinary, provincial people. This was the central paradox of knowledge as people in Franklin’s era conceived of it: knowledge was sociable and collaborative, but not everyone could contribute to it. Franklin could not have hoped to barge into the real centers of learning, back in Europe. But by creating colonial versions of European learned societies, he could hope—not unrealistically—to become a corresponding member, someone who wrote actual letters to learned people abroad. To achieve that, he would need a bit more polish, a few more accomplishments, and greater wealth.44

  IN LATE 1732, Franklin began to publish an almanac under a pseudonym, Richard Saunders—the indelible “author” of Poor Richard’s Almanac. The Pennsylvania Gazette had advertised almanacs among the books Franklin had sold, so he knew there was a ready market. And he needed the extra income. He inaugurated his almanac shortly after the birth of his and Deborah’s first child, Francis: a growing family needed growing income. Deborah may have encouraged the project, and Franklin may have immortalized her appeal to him. Consider that the first edition of Poor Richard introduced, alongside Richard Saunders, his voluble wife, Bridget. She tells her feckless, mathematical husband to “make some profitable Use” of his “Books and Rattling-Traps (as she calls my Instruments)” by producing an almanac. Was Franklin directly quoting Deborah or merely paraphrasing her? Did she appreciate or resent the joke? At the least, “Poor Richard” had increased her workload; Deborah was the one who folded and stitched together the pages of the almanacs.45

  Poor Richard was, in many ways, conventional—Franklin had studied his potential audience shrewdly and knew they would recoil from blatant innovation. Unlike modern almanacs, which are the size of paperback books, colonial almanacs were pamphlet-sized. Highly salable and compact little wonders, they were printed on cheap paper and had no real binding. They were meant for daily use, and surviving examples are often blotched, scribbled in, or torn apart. The almanac was essentially a calendar. It devoted a page or two to each month; within each month’s section, the almanac’s author gave a compressed, day-by-day description of the main astronomical events (the position of moon and sun, information on the tides) in each month. This layout was exactly what Franklin used.46

  Even the title of Franklin’s product echoed a contemporary example, the Poor Robin’s Almanac that his brother James published in Rhode Island. And the name “Richard Saunder” belonged to a real astrologer and almanac writer in seventeenth-century England. As in other almanacs, astrology was central to Poor Richard; the conventional man of signs illustrated the conventional wisdom that the hu-man body, like all earthly matter, was governed by the motions of the planets. Franklin accepted the premise: the body’s microcosm reflected the macrocosm of the universe.47

  Poor Richard’s man of signs. Poor Richard (1733). ROSENBACH MUSEUM AND LIBRARY.

  Franklin introduced Poor Richard into a crowded market. Pennsylvania already had five almanacs, and he suspected he would have to displace at least one. How could he win readers from the established competitors?

  Wit helped. At the top of each month’s section in the almanac, “Poor Richard” left a verse, something amusing or moralizing or both; the same followed for the daily listings. This proverbial material has made the almanac famous: “Eat to live, and not live to eat”; “He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas”; “Fish and Visitors stink in 3 days”; “Don’t throw stones at your neighbours, if your own windows are glass”; and—yes, Benjamin Franklin did really print it—“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.”48

  Few of these sayings were original to Franklin, but he notably tinkered with their wording to make them pithier. In some cases, he made sly references to his sources. For example, Poor Richard warned people to “make haste slowly”; this little adage had a pedigree. An early and important Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, had adopted as his trademark a dolphin entwined with an anchor: semp sestina tarde, with the dolphin hastening and the anchor always slowing it. Thus, Franklin placed himself within the history of print while giving his neighbors some useful advice.49

  He also differentiated his product from its competitiors by mocking astrology. In his first issue, Franklin mischievously undermined a rival, John Jerman, who published an almanac under the pseudonym Titan Leeds. Poor Richard used his astrological expertise to predict an awful event: the death of Titan Leeds. “He dies, by my Calculation made at his Request, on Oct. 17. 1733·3 ho.29m.P.M.,” Saunders lamented. He allowed that Leeds calculated he would “survive till the 26th of the same Month.” “This small difference between us,” Saunders gossiped, “we have disputed whenever we have met these 9 Years past; but at length he is inclinable to agree with my Judgment.” When the dreadful day arrived, Saunders mourned the loss of his colleague.50

  Surely, Jerman would spot this obvious trip wire? But no, he proceeded to do a pratfall over it. He published a direct and therefore obtuse refutation of his alias’s death and from then on steadily lost readers to Franklin. (William Bradford would take over publication of a local almanac under Titan Leeds’s name, calling it The Dead Man’s Almanack, which might have been a reference to either Leeds or Jerman.) Cleverly undermining yet another printer rival, Franklin also hinted that his readers should value his astronomical information for its practical application, not its astrological mysteries. They should read Poor Richard to figure out when to put a crop in or take a boat out, not to determine when Venus or Mars might improve their fortunes.51

  Indeed, Franklin was among the few colonial almanac writers who did his own astronomical calculations; his early study of almanacs in London and of astronomy on board the Berkshire had paid off. Poor Richard became a how-to guide for backyard astronomers. In 1745, for example, Franklin instructed his readers how “to distinguish [the planets] from the fixed Stars.” The latter maintained position in relation to each other and the horizon. The former were trickier but could be followed because, while they moved, each “had a particular and different Motion.” They also looked different—Venus was brightest, Mars most red, and Saturn quite pale. Having told readers how to distinguish the main planets, Poor Richard next specified the moments of their rising. On January 6,
for instance, shortly after acquiring the annual almanac, its readers could see Mars rise at “35 Minutes after 10 o’Clock at Night.” Thus Franklin championed nature’s regularity and its “glorious” and “beautiful” features—who would not want to be a backyard astronomer?52

  Poor Richard proved successful, and Franklin grew more ambitious. In 1748, he renamed his expanded product Poor Richard Improved. The new version was twelve pages longer than its twenty-four-page predecessor. This expanded size gave greater room for Saunders’s aphorisms but also for Franklin’s publication of new developments in the sciences.53

  He began not with details of natural science but with praise for its modern British practitioners. In his first and second issues of Poor Richard Improved, he restated the commonplace that two English pioneers, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, had defined modern natural science. In 1748, Poor Richard described Newton as “the prince of astronomers and philosophers.” The next year, Boyle appeared in its pages as “one of the greatest philosophers the last age produced. He first brought the machine called an Airpump, into use; by which many of the surprizing properties of that wonderful element [air] were discovered and demonstrated.”54

  In these almanacs of 1748 and 1749, Franklin was careful to portray natural science’s affinity with religion. He did so by using the argument from design, especially when he reprinted parts of English poet James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–1730). Three months after Newton’s death, Thomson had produced a valedictory Poem Sacred to the Memory of Isaac Newton (1727) and had begun his longer opus, which described in verse nature’s annual cycle, the four seasons. Franklin made a point of quoting Thomson’s claim that Newton had “Trac’d the boundless works of God, from laws sublimely simple,” and then he cited the famous Alexander Pope epitaph. Thomson was useful again to describe “BOYLE, whose pious search / Amid the dark recesses of his works / The great CREATOR sought.”55

  Having introduced readers to the drama of discovery in the sciences, Franklin followed up with content. In 1751, he included a long description of the microscope, probably taken from a popular text by English author George Adams, Micrographia Illustrata (1746) . (Franklin might have consulted this work at the house of a wealthy and learned Philadelphian, James Logan; the Library Company had owned a microscope since 1741.) He remarked on the “remarkably entertaining Objects” to be seen under “that admirable Instrument the MICROSCOPE.” These objects included “the Globules of the Blood, which are computed to be almost a two thousandth Part of an Inch in Diameter,” each with six even tinier subglobules. The instrument also revealed, within “various Fluids,” teeming “Animalcules” that outnumbered all “the [human] Inhabitants of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America,” a topic of interest to Franklin, who had earlier examined the tiny crab embryos that bred on gulfweed in the Atlantic.56

  With his microscope, Poor Richard helped make one of the grandest claims about the new sciences: they made visible the invisible. Galileo Galilei’s telescope and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope had let the human eye see distant or tiny parts of the universe. These devices relied on the paradoxical nature of glass: it was itself invisible, but when ground into lenses or made into instruments, it allowed the eye to see all the better. Glass devices had enabled the seminal experiments of the late seventeenth century. Through them, experimenters had seen the visible effects of invisible materials. No one had actually seen air, but, using an air pump with glass receiver, Boyle had made it an observable material. The device demonstrated that air had “spring,” or pressure, a force that could be measured. And Newton had revealed the visible spectrum. He let sunlight through an aperture in a shutter and into a darkened room. There, he directed the beam of light through glass prisms, which refracted it. The light he saw was not unified but heterogeneous, with differently colored parts.57

  Focused observation, use of instruments to assist the eye, and ingenious experimentation all revealed what might otherwise escape human sight. If Newton achieved fame because of his mathematically dense Principia (which Franklin never read), it was his carefully named Opticks (which Franklin did read) that put the human eye at the center of the sciences. As well, the invitingly speculative tone of the Opticks, which concluded with its chatty “Quaeries” soliciting new experiments, welcomed general readers. The Newton of the Opticks insisted, quite unlike the author of the far less accessible Principia, that all disciplined observers could learn to see critically. And if their eyesight was naturally poor or had deteriorated with age, “their Sight is mended by Spectacles. For those Convex glasses supply the defect of plumpness in the Eye” that allowed an accurate refraction of light.58

  It was a provincial education: Newton was on the high end, and popular texts on microscopy were on the low. Much is missing—Franklin seemed never to read Robert Hooke’s important Micrographia (1665), for instance. Yet out of his scattered readings on nature and optical instruments, he managed to invent bifocals. Later in life, he would reveal that he had devised and perhaps begun wearing his trademark bifocals in the late 1730s or early 1740s, just as he was expanding his almanac. Eyeglasses of any sort were, at the time, classified alongside the specialized equipment of science, as they were in advertisements in colonial newspapers. Franklin could have bought an early, monofocal pair from Andrew Bradford, whose American Weekly Mercury sold a variety of imported instruments, among them “black Lead Pencils silver’d with Caps and Cases, Super-fine Spectacles with Steel Bows and Joints, either with Fish-skin Cases or without, with several other sorts [made] of Horn or Leather; also Reading and Burning Glasses, Pocket Compasses with Dials.”59

  The Pennsylvania Gazette also contained advertisements for spectacles, as well as other optical devices; Franklin instructed readers of his almanac how to use the devices. An elaborate chart from the 1753 Poor Richard Improved gave a schedule, down to the minute, for following that year’s transit of Mercury over the sun. Readers could take the almanac out into their gardens and follow the planet’s two-day progress for themselves. At half past seven in the morning on May 6, 1753, “if you get up betimes, and put on your Spectacles, you will see Mercury rise in the Sun, and will appear like a small black Patch in a Lady’s Face.” Poor Richard might have been describing his author, famous for wearing spectacles (and for admiring ladies). And the description of the transit of Mercury assumed that at least some readers were active observers—they possessed accurate timepieces (and corrective eyewear), rose at the crack of dawn to practice astronomy, and wanted the very latest in learning.60

  Franklin balanced his serious discussion of the sciences with entertaining puzzles. Predicting eclipses for 1734, he had punned that “since the Eclipses take up so little space, I have room to comply with the new Fashion, and propose a Mathematical Question to the Sons of Art.” The inaugural puzzle read: “A certain rich Man had 100 Orchards, in each Orchard was 100 Appletrees, under each Appletree was 100 Hogsties, in each Hogstie was 100 Sows, and each Sow had 100 Pigs. Question, How many Sow-Pigs were there among them?” Saunders warned, “The Answer to this Question won’t be accepted without the Solution.” In other words, no lucky guesses were allowed—the multiplication mattered.61

  The annual puzzles got more complicated, as with 1757’s teaser. Imagine three ships, each occupied independently by Christians, Jews, or Muslims. Each vessel leaves the same place but travels a different route under its religiously distinct crew. All return to the original port, where “they shall differ so [much] with respect to real and apparent Time, that they all shall keep their Sabbath on one and the same Day of the Week, and yet each of them separately shall believe that he keeps his Sabbath on the Day of the Week his religion requires.” What had happened? To circumnavigate the globe meant losing or gaining a day of the week, depending on the direction of travel. In the case of Poor Richard’s three ships, some had gained or lost a critical day, creating a momentary Muslim-Christian-Jewish agreement over the Sabbath. Safe and dry at home, Philadelphia’s readers could see, in their lo
cal almanac, just how capacious the world was.62

  More than a diversion, the puzzle reflected Franklin’s broader philosophy. Richard Saunders showed that the globe’s rotation relative to the sun exemplified the wonder of the physical creation, a reminder that the cosmos—and its divine creator—constantly challenged human knowledge. Nature was a powerful reason to tolerate other faiths, all of them brought to unintended similarity by circumnavigation. This philosophy was a challenge to differences among religions but not to religion itself. The larger point, one that exemplified Franklin’s deism and his religious toleration, was that the natural world inspired religious sentiment in everyone. Significantly, Franklin chose a maritime example to make his point. A ship was a conventional microcosm, a segment of the human world cast out on the waves of the great globe, bravely making its way against all storms, real and metaphorical.

  By inserting a steadily increasing amount of material from the sciences into his newspaper and almanac, Franklin had established himself as Philadelphia’s main disseminator of knowledge about the natural world. He even began to compare himself to famous men of science, such as Edmond Halley, the era’s foremost astronomer, after whom the comet is named. Calculating an eclipse in 1756, Franklin would add that “Dr. Halley puts this Conjunction an Hour forwarder than by this calculation.” He challenged Philadelphians, the amateur astronomers he had encouraged to look at things for themselves, to see who was right—London’s learned man or, “Dear Reader, Thy obliged Friend, R. SAUNDERS.”63

  FRANKLIN was becoming quite careful in his choice of friends. At that time, the term friend could indicate not only a social equal but also a patron (or client, as Poor Richard had called himself in relation to his readers). Franklin had spent his twenties with his fellow tradesmen, but in the course of his thirties, he began to choose friends more strategically in order to consolidate his higher status.