The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  He set his sights on John Bartram and James Logan, two Philadelphians who could not have been more different. Both men were interested in the sciences, but Bartram was adept at natural history, which described nature, whereas Logan excelled at the more prestigious branch of natural philosophy, which sought the causes of things within the material world. Their different ambitions reflected their social statuses—Logan was much wealthier and more influential than Bartram, a difference that was not lost on Franklin.

  Bartram was the most gifted botanist in the continental colonies and a boon companion for Franklin. A Quaker and farmer, Bartram had come to the study of plants, the story goes, after pausing in his fields to admire a flower. Thus inspired, he read botany. Several methods of classifying plants and animals existed, but the taxonomy of Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), which sorted plants according to their organs of sexual reproduction, was beginning to win the day. Bartram not only described but also classified American plants. He sent samples and descriptions of them to European naturalists, who were always eager to learn of new world flora. His experimental garden outside Philadelphia would, by the second half of the eighteenth century, become a destination for travelers and cognoscenti as well as the training site for his son, William, also a famous botanist. European arbiters of knowledge marveled at the wisdom of a poor farmer. Linnaeus considered him the era’s best “natural botanist”—a man with copious direct experience with plants but little ability to analyze them theoretically.64

  At least as early as the 1740s (their actual introduction is obscure), Franklin and Bartram became extremely close friends, perhaps closer than Franklin and any of his fellow Junto founders. Each referred to the other as an “intimate,” and Bartram (seven years older) seemed to be the only person outside Franklin’s family to refer to him, in writing, as “Benjamin,” as if addressing a younger brother. The friendship was also, in a small way, a business connection. In 1741, Franklin published Bartram’s description of “the true INDIAN PHYSICK” in Poor Richard, and a year later, he printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette Bartram’s call for subscribers to underwrite his work collecting specimens. That move was daring—it would be a real test of Franklin’s ability to serve as a patron of the sciences in Pennsylvania. Bartram was also useful to Franklin for his array of friends. Through him, Franklin would establish another and far more formal relationship with James Logan.65

  Almost thirty years older than Franklin, Logan had more money and influence than Benjamin and Bartram combined. Logan had retired from land speculation and the fur trade with wealth enough to enter politics and pursue learning. He was well established among the gentlemen who supported Philadelphia’s proprietors, which won him their favor but also the ire of their opponents. Though he was crippled by a fall in 1728 and further incapacitated by a stroke in 1740, his mind remained unimpaired, and he steadily built an enormous library that focused particularly on classical learning and natural science. Logan seems to have been the first to import Newton’s Principia to the colonies, and he had many other volumes that were rare in America, including a copy of George Adams’s Micrographia Illustrata that Franklin might have consulted. Logan was also extremely well connected in and beyond Pennsylvania. When Sheik Shedid Allhazar of Beirut toured the British colonies, he arrived in Philadelphia in 1737 with a letter of introduction to Logan. (Franklin covered the sheik’s visit in the Pennsylvania Gazette.)66

  Logan wrote on an impressive range of subjects, including botany, optics, astronomy, mathematics, and numismatics. Unlike Bartram, who only collected and described plants, Logan offered analysis. In an important contribution to Linnaean botany, Logan described the sexual organs in maize that were necessary to pollenation. It was the first study that experimentally demonstrated the function of plant organs for sexual reproduction. The essay appeared in the Philosophical Transactions for 1736, as did Logan’s pieces on why the sun and moon appeared larger at the horizon than at their zeniths and why lightning’s angular appearance resulted from its refraction at different densities of air. If European men of science respected Bartram for his natural knowledge, they respected Logan for explaining how nature worked. It also did not hurt that he was a man of high social status. Confident of his position in the republic of letters, Logan corresponded with Linnaeus and with Sir Hans Sloane, to whom he sent a rare coin with Hebrew inscription—quite a contrast to Franklin’s asbestos trinkets.67

  Franklin was hardly Logan’s social equal, but he became his intellectual peer as well as his client, something that would never have happened had Franklin not become both a property holder and a man of letters whom Logan could take seriously. Franklin was among the few to whom Logan showed manuscript works for criticism. Around 1737, in relation to Logan’s analysis of virtue, Franklin offered that there was “some Incorrectness of Sentiment” in the discussion of “Temperance.” He also printed Logan’s work, as with his translation of Cicero’s Cato Major, or His Discourse of Old-Age (1744). Franklin solicitously printed the book in large type so that elderly readers (beyond the help even of spectacles) “may not, in Reading, by the Pain small Letters give the Eyes, feel the Pleasure of the Mind in the least allayed.” He claimed in his preface that Logan’s was the “first Translation of a Classic in this Western World” (never mind that Spanish Americans had already done this). He expressed his hope that the Philadelphia publication was a “happy Omen, that Philadelphia shall become the Seat of the American Muses.”68

  By his thirties, after a decade in business in Philadelphia, Franklin was more than a printer. He had a reputation for learning and for particular expertise in astronomy and other sciences. He had undertaken plans to make Philadelphia an important site within the republic of letters. He had friends, especially James Logan, who valued his learning. He was about to become a man of public affairs. But Franklin was also about to learn that though he could study nature, he could not always control it.

  In 1735, Franklin suffered a relapse of the pleurisy that had nearly killed him eight years earlier. This second bout was almost as bad. It lasted most of the spring, summer, and fall, climaxing when an abscess in the left lung ruptured and nearly suffocated Franklin with its discharge. When he published his major work of 1735, Some Observations on the Proceedings against the Rev. Mr. Hemphill—an intervention in a local religious controversy—Franklin made an extraordinary personal aside. In the pamphlet’s preface, he explained that “this Answer might have been published before the Printer was taken sick, whose Illness unexpectedly continuing six or seven Weeks has thus long retarded its Publication.” (When he reprinted a popular medical tract, John Tennent’s Every Man His Own Doctor, in 1736, he inserted a postscript from Tennent’s Essay on Pleurisy.) Getting the paper out had been all that Franklin could do. Given his failing eyesight and persistently weak lungs, he must have wondered, as he turned thirty, whether he was falling apart.69

  He recovered in time to receive another blow. In the autumn of 1736, his four-year-old son, Francis, died of smallpox. Franklin’s sorrow increased when whispered rumors (none ever published) charged him with negligence: he, the great advocate of inoculation, had failed to inoculate his own child. In December, Franklin brought the matter into the open in the Pennsylvania Gazette. “I suppose the Report could only arise from its being my known Opinion, that Inoculation was a safe and beneficial Practice,” he admitted. But the rumors were false. True, Franklin conceded, Francis had not been inoculated. But he had made the decision not to inoculate the boy because when smallpox loomed, his son had been suffering from a flux, or gastrointestinal disorder, and was too weak to be infected with anything else. If some of the later criticisms of Franklin’s writings on matters of science were ad hominem, they would be nothing new and were perhaps never as painful as the first such instance over the death of his son.70

  It was probably no consolation that Francis’s death coincided with his father’s political advance. In mid-October, Franklin was appointed clerk of the Pennsylvania House of Assemb
ly, the colony’s main representative body. This appointment was a logical progression from his earlier role as the assembly’s official printer—he continued to enjoy the favor of those in power. (It was not until 1748, however, that Franklin would gain elective office, as a member of the Philadelphia Common Council.) The clerkship was an important job but not an onerous one. If we could have sneaked up behind Franklin and peered over his shoulder as he kept notes in the assembly, we could have seen him busily doing little arithmetic games known as magic squares. Each such square contained lines of numbers. Each line of numbers (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) could be added up to the same number. Franklin would eventually move on to more complicated magic circles, in which concentric circles had numbers that could be totted up radially.71

  The puzzles (see an example within the illustration on page 149), invented in the Renaissance, showed Franklin’s fascination with numbers. They also revealed his (for the moment) arithmetic grasp of numbers. Mathematics can use numbers to explain phenomena—varying rates of physical motion are one example. Arithmetic simply expresses numerical values in relation to each other. It is a lesser skill, however nimbly executed in Franklin’s magic squares and circles.

  When he spared a moment to watch what was going on in the assembly, Franklin gained an education in politics. He did not yet have to involve himself in debate. He could instead watch others do so and learn from their triumphs and humiliations. Later observers would remark on his disinclination to speak in public—and his masterful backroom influence over those who did. Franklin learned these skills through his careful observation of Pennsylvania’s assemblymen during his time as clerk.

  In 1737, Franklin debuted in his most important public role—as colonial postmaster at Philadelphia. Taken for granted now, the circulation of mail was, for the colonies in the early eighteenth century, a confusing, erratic, and even violent affair. Throughout the previous century, colonists had lacked any regular mail service and had to pay or cajole travelers and merchant ships to carry their letters. A mail service within the colonies commenced in 1692; in 1702, packet boats began to cross the Atlantic during King William’s War. This arrangement was very much an imperial effort, in which England threw its weight behind the small fleet in an effort to maintain contact with its colonial possessions. Even so, privateers captured ten of the nineteen total packets. Heavy government subsidies kept the mail arriving until around 1711, when, with the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, official and guarded packets seemed less important.72

  Franklin began his postal career in 1737, when there was only the intercolonial system, no overseas post. A limited transatlantic service recommenced in 1745, as new wars pitted Britain against France and Spain and endangered British shipping. At first, Britain only risked its packets to communicate with the valuable West Indian colonies, but this service was expensive, and it was abandoned in 1749. The West Indian route reopened in 1755 along with a new one to New York. Franklin became deputy postmaster general for North America after 1755; he ordered the local post to and from New York, the continental center of the Atlantic service. It was a nerve-racking business. Postal service was as risky as commercial shipping and paid less. To address both problems, British officials encouraged Atlantic packets to take “prizes,” enemy vessels whose seized cargo enriched the packet crews.73

  Franklin’s postal commission has never been found, so the reason for his selection is unknown. But colonial postal positions often fell to newspaper printers, who, after all, already circulated news. Franklin knew a postal position would complement his printing business by allowing him to send his own materials through the post. Years later, he presented his predecessor, Andrew Bradford, as unworthy of these privileges. Bradford published the American Weekly Mercury, and because he was postmaster, Franklin claimed, “it was imagined he had better Opportunities of obtaining News” and of broadcasting advertisements beyond the boundaries of the city. Franklin stated that he had to bribe postal riders to carry his newspaper outside Philadelphia, “Bradford being unkind enough to forbid it.” He swore he would never serve his competitors so, and he regarded the mails as a public service that should be open to anyone—at least anyone who could pay for postage.74

  Franklin’s appointment to the postal service consolidated his influence over the circulation of information in Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic region generally. He took his new tasks seriously; in 1743, he would criticize the “disorderly” way in which people crowded onto ships to find their letters. He recommended that captains instead deliver all mail to the post office, where clerks could sort and distribute the letters and packages. More ambitiously, Franklin believed that Philadelphia, not New York, should be the center of the colonial postal system. In 1751, he claimed the city’s importance, it “being the Center of the Continent Colonies, and having constant Communication with the West India Islands.” Clearly, he no longer felt that after having left London, he was back on the ragged edge of the world. At least in his own mind, Philadelphia was now “the Center” of the Western Hemisphere.75

  Franklin certainly put Philadelphia at the center of his printing network, which was moving steadily outward. Again, a growing family might have prompted his ambition—daughter Sarah, “Sally,” was born in 1743. Franklin eventually formed partnerships with printers in several other colonial towns, including New York and Charleston. And he was always on the lookout for works he knew readers would buy. When the Reverend George Whitefield, a remarkable Church of England minister, took the colonies by storm with his revivalist preaching in the 1740s, Franklin eagerly printed his sermons.76

  Whitefield even inspired in Franklin an interest in the transmission of sound. Franklin performed an experiment on the preacher’s voice, gradually “retiring backwards” as Whitefield addressed a crowd from “the Top of the Court House Steps” in order to determine how far the sound carried. He estimated that Whitefield could project roughly 500 feet. “Imagining then a Semi-Circle, of which my Distance should be the Radius,” he wrote, the minister could be heard by “more than Thirty-Thousand” auditors. Franklin’s geometry was faulty (still), but his interest in the means by which ideas circulated within Philadelphia and beyond was no less keen for that.77

  If Philadelphia were to become a center in the republic of letters, which Franklin wanted, it would need its own learned society and college. He helped create both. In 1743, he published a broadside in which he argued the need for a learned society. He contended that Philadelphia was already “the City nearest the Centre of the Continent-Colonies” and had an active library: it should therefore have a learned society that would establish contacts in the other colonies as well as Europe. His call went unheard for the moment, but it would eventually be one catalyst for the American Philosophical Society (APS). Franklin then proposed an academy for higher education in the fall of 1749. He printed Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (1749) and cunningly distributed copies to “the principal Inhabitants gratis,” meaning that he must have plied men such as Logan with the proposal. In this way, he solicited five-year subscriptions, promising £10 per year himself. His campaign raised £2,000, and the school was built; it opened in early 1751, a progenitor of the University of Pennsylvania.78

  These steps were important ones. The Library Company had consumed knowledge, but a true learned society would produce it. The possibility was all the more likely if more of Pennsylvania’s inhabitants gained a college education. Franklin was moving his town in the same direction as he moved himself. Once, he had circulated material on natural science; now, he itched to produce such knowledge on his own, hence his challenge to Edmond Halley.

  It is not surprising, then, that when he proposed the academy, Franklin recommended that its curriculum include natural science. In his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, he insisted that “Histories of Nature” would be “delightful for Youth.” Characteristically, he recommended materials that extolled the argument f
rom design and listed several works famous for making this point. He believed all young men could study the sciences, whatever careers they later intended. Natural science would provide useful methods for understanding commodities (if they became merchants), physical materials (if artisans), or “Proofs of Divine Providence” (if ministers). Natural history combined with “Excursions” to the countryside would teach students practical information about health, diet, gardening, and agriculture. As a longtime arbiter of learning in Pennsylvania, Franklin had also become a genteel patron of learned establishments that would educate other men’s children in the sciences. He had ascended to the level of the gentlemen he had once served.79

  As significantly, Franklin made his first real friend in the republic of letters overseas. In 1743, London printer William Strahan was looking for a place to send a promising apprentice. One of Deborah Franklin’s relatives, recently in London, told Franklin about Strahan’s dilemma. Franklin quickly wrote Strahan to volunteer his Philadelphia printshop: “If the young Man will venture other hither . . . we can treat about the Affair.” The young man, David Hall, ventured over, liked the arrangement, stayed on to master the business, and would eventually become Franklin’s business partner. And Franklin gained in Strahan an important London contact, as he had surely expected.80

  The Scot Strahan was extremely successful at the printer’s craft. He eventually worked with David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and William Blackstone; he published Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary , among other great eighteenth-century works. Strahan purchased books for Franklin and for the Library Company, and the two men comfortably compared their opinions on authors, printers, texts, and presses. Strahan’s value to Franklin only increased over time. He produced two London newspapers, the Monthly Review (begun in 1749) and the London Chronicle (in 1757), in which he would publish some of Franklin’s political letters. Even as they rose in the world (Strahan became king’s printer in 1770 and was a member of Parliament from 1774 to 1784), the two men would always remember their printshop origins. Promising a visit to Strahan in the 1750s, Franklin warned that “if a fat old Fellow should come to your Printing House and request a little Smouting [part-time work], depend upon it, ’tis Your affectionate Friend and humble Servant B Franklin.” Toward the end of his life, in 1784, Franklin recalled Strahan’s observation, as they sat together in the House of Commons, “that no two Journeymen Printers, within your Knowledge, had met with such Success in the World as ourselves.”81