The First Scientific American
Page 10
Men of letters both, Strahan and Franklin did not share an interest in natural science. Franklin, having discovered an audience for developments in the sciences, would delve into them himself; Strahan never bothered. Only one of them would become a household name.
FRANKLIN had his first portrait painted around 1746. He was forty and in his prime and ready to commemorate his successes. Robert Feke, a mariner who became a self-taught artist, put Franklin on canvas. The image is, in some ways, disappointingly formulaic: here is a gentleman from the provinces, dressed in respectable black with good linen at neck and wrists, and finished off with a stiff and formal wig. The background is even duller, composed of a brown wall and a murky landscape with clouds, hills, and water. But Franklin probably wanted his portrait to be conventional, the better to emphasize that he had become indistinguishable from the bland burghers whose ranks he had joined. The Boston chandler’s son had become a club-man, Freemason, printer and clerk to the Pennsylvania House of Assembly, civic improver, and man of letters. The portrait marks Franklin’s ascent into the ranks of the literate and propertied.
But one accomplishment still eluded him, even as he celebrated his ascent to gentility. Note in the portrait his extended hand and pointing finger. It is an empty gesture. It was meant to be—it indicated that the gentleman in question did not have to do anything, least of all work, with his hands. But in later portraits, Franklin’s hands and especially a pointing finger would become significant as indicators of nature and of natural properties. Paradoxically, it was only when he had finally achieved status as a natural philosopher that Franklin, the upstart gentleman, could afford to admit that he worked with his hands.
A gentleman at last. Robert Feke, Benjamin Franklin (c. 1746). HARVARD UNIVERSITY PORTRAIT COLLECTION.
Chapter 4
EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS
COURTEOUS READER,” Franklin greeted anyone who opened his Poor Richard for 1747, one year after he sat for his portrait: “This is the 15th Time I have entertain’d thee with my annual Productions; I hope to thy Profit as well as mine.” His words were a sly reference to his success. Poor Richard had turned Franklin many a profit. Its annual circulation had reached around 10,000, which indicated an audience extending beyond Pennsylvania and well into other mid-Atlantic colonies. His almanac and newspaper earned Franklin thousands of pounds each year. So he could afford to have Feke paint his portrait.1
Yet this success was not enough for him. Almanacs “have their daily Use indeed while the Year continues, but then become of no Value,” Franklin observed, admitting the limits of his enterprise. Poor Richard and the Pennsylvania Gazette were ephemera, publications tied to the events of the time and destined to become outdated. The witty, moralizing phrases added a bit of life to the almanac because they survived in readers’ memories “when both almanack and Almanack-maker have been long thrown by and forgotten.” Indeed, it is striking that no collector or library today owns a full run of Poor Richards, which are, individually, quite rare. Franklin was right: his clients tended to use up his publications and throw them away.2
The Feke portrait of 1746 reflected Franklin’s success as a printer; the Poor Richard for 1747 spoke to what Franklin had yet to achieve. He must have asked himself, Why not try something new, or to use a word rich with meanings, why not experiment? Indeed, by 1747, Franklin was experimenting in two fields—public affairs and natural philosophy. Each effort was a bold move for Franklin, but it was the philosophy that would ultimately earn him the most attention.
Franklin knew that the sciences posed the biggest questions of the age. And there was significant opportunity for a colonist to help answer them. When Newton had revised his Principia between 1709 and 1713, he explained that “the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same” everywhere. Examples included gravity, “the falling of stones in Europe or America.” Were cause and effect always the same on both sides of the Atlantic? Perhaps experiments in America would answer the question, and perhaps Americans could do the experiments. Franklin seized the opportunity and moved definitively into natural philosophy. He vindicated the curiosity about nature that had in fact begun in his own body, head, hands, and all the rest. His investigation of nature, however, was never just about nature—it was always deeply connected to whatever Franklin wanted to explain about the human world as well.3
“WHEN about 16 Years of Age,” he recalled, “I happen’d to meet with a Book, written by one Tryon, recommending a Vegetable Diet. I determined to go into it.” Franklin was a vegetarian for at least a year, making his young body into an experiment in dietary extremes. 4
The Tryon who converted Franklin to vegetarianism was a well-known English dietary crank. Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness; or, A Discourse of Temperance was first published in 1683. His related works ran through many editions and garnered some famous converts, including the playwright Aphra Behn. Tryon insisted that immoderate eating and drinking inhibited the circulations that maintained health. Water was the best drink, he said, because it “thins the Blood, causing it to circulate freely.” Too much food and alcoholic drink “furs and stops the Passages, generates too much Blood, and thick dull Spirits, which makes the Body heavy and lumpish.” The air necessary for vigor could not penetrate a richly fed body, nor could there be “the free Circulation of the Blood.” The easiest way to maintain temperance and therefore health, Tryon argued, was to adopt “a Vegetable Diet.”5
Justice as well as health motivated Tryon—he despised anything cruel or tyrannous. In the longest section of The Way to Health, “Of Flesh,” he claimed that by slaughtering animals, humans took on a bestial quality that belied their assumption of moral superiority to the creatures they butchered. Why not just eat “Human Flesh”? Consuming meat was emblematic of the many sins Tryon listed in his diatribe: “Hatred, Pride, Malice, Back-biting, Fighting, Killing, Violence and Oppression” of “Man or Beast.” No form of domination was just. “Noble Birth and Blood” did not justify legal privilege, let alone tyranny. All people were “Couzens” and of equal blood or “Pedigree”; all should therefore benefit from the “famous Generosity of the red circling Juice.”6
The emphatic italics indicated that Tryon meant what he said. For example, he criticized enslavement of Africans when few other free, white people did so. Instead, most colonists and Europeans assumed that chattel slavery for Africans was part of an orderly system in which everyone’s status was determined by birth.7
It took time for Tryon’s larger moral program to surface in any of Franklin’s thinking. But at sixteen, Franklin was convinced about the vegetable diet. (Questioned about her meat-abhorring son, Abiah Franklin sighed that he had read and perhaps aspired to be “a mad philosopher.”) Franklin saw vegetarianism as a way to save money “for buying Books,” to reserve time for study by lessening the hours spent at table, and to gain “that greater Clearness of Head and quicker Apprehension which usually attend Temperance in Eating and Drinking.”8
But Franklin lapsed. When he ran away from Boston at seventeen and his ship was becalmed off Rhode Island, his fellow passengers caught cod and fried it up. “When this came hot out of the Frying Pan,” Franklin remembered decades later, “it smelt admirably well.” He was caught “between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs.” That did it. “If you eat one another,” he decided, “I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” Franklin ate the cod, but his conscience pricked him a bit—he wryly reflected on how “convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature,” as it gave one “a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”9
Even after he had resumed eating meat and fish, Franklin remained convinced that the body functioned best with minimal sustenance. Add more fuel to the fire, as it were, and the heat would flare, wasting energy and causing discomfort and illness. As a printer in London, he breakfasted on a gruel famil
iar to the working poor—buttered bread softened in hot water, garnished with pepper and, in his case, with abstemious virtue. He also considered water superior to alcoholic beverages. Few shared the idea; most of his contemporaries believed liquor was an ideal dietary supplement that gave the body warmth and strength.10
Franklin annoyed his fellow printshop workers in London by shunning the beer they tippled throughout the day and by preaching temperance. “The Bodily Strength afforded by Beer,” he told them, “could only be in proportion to the Grain . . . of which it was made”—and bread had more grain than beer. The gruel- and water-powered Franklin proved his strength by easily hefting heavy type up and down stairs in the printshop. The “great Guzzlers of Beer” marveled at “the Water-American” yet wasted their wages on drink: “Thus these poor Devils keep themselves always under.”11
Franklin never thereafter lost an opportunity to extol temperance. In the early days of the Junto, he composed his famous list of thirteen virtues and put “Temperance” first. “Eat not to Dulness. / Drink not to Elevation,” he admonished in his autobiography. Temperance was the key to all other virtues, “as it tends to procure that Coolness and Clearness of Head” necessary to resist “the Force of perpetual Temptations.” Franklin claimed he maintained this virtue all his life, even though he notoriously let his youthful physique deteriorate into the mature “Dr. Fatsides,” as he would later ruefully acknowledge himself to be.12
Fat though he grew, the adult Franklin’s much-noted coolness and detachment may have been the result, at least in part, of his measured consumption of alcohol. His sobriety was striking in an age when people drank steadily—to consume calories, to keep warm, and to avoid tainted water. Tipsiness was so common that it went unnoticed, even in small children, pious clerics, and pregnant women. We might call these individuals drunk, but drunkenness at the time meant an inability even to stand.
Franklin’s austere regimen was more than an eccentricity. Images of the body as a fleshy machine or furnace, to be stoked with care and minimal expense, showed that comprehension of the human body fit into larger conceptions of human society. Franklin agreed. It is obvious from the way he wrote about vegetarianism and sobriety that he considered them to be moral choices. “Thus these poor Devils keep themselves always under” was a somewhat uncharitable assessment of laboring men who spent their wages on drink. But for a wage earner who wanted to work for himself eventually, it paid to be vigilant about every penny, moment, or mouthful. Franklin was making a virtue out of his poverty. What a man ate was the best measure of his social status. The upper classes ate meat and fripperies and drank rich wines and liquors. Franklin was no gentleman, and he celebrated his inability to eat like one.13
He applied principles of moderation and balance to the whole body, not just its diet. He was deeply influenced by Sanctorius (Santorio Santorio), an Italian physician of the 1600s who studied metabolism or, as it was then called, “animal oeconomy.” In 1612, Sanctorius was evidently the first person to describe the recently invented thermometer’s use in medical analysis. He then performed an extraordinary autoexperiment in which he measured, perhaps for as long as a thirty-year period, the weights of the substances he ingested and those he excreted. Studying these data alongside measurements of his own weight, he discovered a gap: the food always weighed more than the excreta, even when he did not gain weight. (A lovely illustration from the period shows Sanctorius seated in his weighing machine in front of a dining table; as he tucks in, he will—briefly—sink in the balance.) In his Ars Sanctorii Santorii de statica medicina (1614), Sanctorius explained that the difference resulted from “invisible perspiration,” the constant loss of matter through the pores and breath.14
Franklin read an English translation of Sanctorius, Medicina Statica: Being the Aphorisms of Sanctorius (1712), at some point before the 1740s and perhaps as early as the 1720s. It set off his lifelong fascination with perspiration and fluid equilibriums. He would later write that he believed the body capable, in theory, of maintaining a balance between fluids that entered and departed. (His views might have reflected old ideas about humoral balance as well as newer ones about fluid exchanges in the body.) When the runaway Franklin became feverish after tossing overnight in the surf off Long Island, he cured himself with “cold Water [drunk] plentifully,” which caused him to “sweat plentifully.”15
From these rather arcane works by Tryon and Sanctorius, Franklin moved to a famous one by William Harvey, De motu cordis, or the movement of the heart (1628). He would discuss Harvey directly in the 1740s, though his writings suggest he might have come across Harvey’s work as early as the 1720s. In his remarkable studies, Harvey described a pattern, the movement of blood between heart and body, which he named circulation. (Previously, that term had usually described a solid body’s motion, as a planet in the sky.) Harvey’s was no ordinary circulating fluid. Blood was equated with life: no blood, no life—at least for humans and other animals. Blood also signified power: blood money, blood sacrifice, blood oath. And in the way it identified lineage and family ties, blood was the most important and legally recognized determinant of social standing. “Blood will out,” people said, meaning a person could never escape his or her ancestry. Harvey’s work may have demystified blood, but it impressed people precisely because each heartbeat now made them imagine the wonderful substance surging through their bodies.16
After Harvey, much medical work focused on problems of circulation. We may think that temperance in diet is beneficial because it restricts consumption of calories. But Tryon emphasized that temperance allowed better bodily circulation. Too much food and alcohol “furs and stops the Passages, generates too much Blood”—considerable hazards within a closed system. People still thought there were four humors within the body, but blood suddenly took pride of place; people still believed the body to be a bag of fluids, but now they paid more attention to organs, such as the heart, that were perceived to do something with these fluids.
Thanks to Harvey, circulation gained tremendous and lasting resonance within social thought. It was the first example of an idea within the modern sciences becoming a metaphor or even model for the human world. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), for example, wrote that money was to the commonwealth what “naturall Bloud” was to the human body; each, by “circulating, nourisheth” the state or body. The global expansion of European commerce, the growth of urban centers with complex social networks, and the government’s increased regulation of trade and migration all elicited a barrage of publications on the circulation of goods, financial instruments, people, and ideas. Circulation as metaphor abounded. Even now, we talk about “pumping” money into the economy.17
Franklin and his contemporaries usually employed the concept of equilibrium to talk about circulation—hence Franklin’s concern with a balance of fluids entering and leaving his body. This notion too had ancient ancestors, as with the idea that health resulted when the body’s humors reached an optimal balance. Newton’s work in physics, and particularly his universal law of gravitation, gave a modern emphasis to equilibrium: every action had an equal and opposite reaction. The field of statics examined the forces that created an equilibrium, a form of stasis. And like circulation, the term equilibrium became a catchword within the human sciences; balance among political agents could be compared to equilibriums within nature. The doctrine of checks and balances in the political system of the United States, for instance, reflected the eighteenth-century fascination with equilibriums.18
For better or worse, modern science had begun to influence theories of human society. Nature had always been a source of examples for human behavior. But now, its presumed systems, as established by natural philosophers, were models for human institutions. Almost as soon as the concepts of circulation and equilibrium emerged in natural science, they were appropriated into discussions of commerce and politics.19
And so, Franklin moved easily from physical equilibriums to moral equilibriums. His Dissertatio
n on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725) had in its very title identified two opposing principles that characterized the human condition. And by the early 1770s, Franklin would develop what he called a “Moral or Prudential Algebra.” This algebra was a system for making decisions. A worried decisionmaker had to list, in two columns, arguments for and against something. Once this was done, the person could then strike out the items that balanced each other and eventually see which column carried most weight.20
Again, Franklin’s interest in balance was typical of his contemporaries’ wider enthusiasm for the sciences as models for social inquiry. The crossover was most evident in the two fields of political arithmetic and political economy, both of which interested Franklin and both of which used numbers to establish some certainty about future events.
Political arithmetic studied human populations; political economy studied the commercial endeavors of those populations. At the end of the seventeenth century, Englishman William Petty had coined the term political arithmetic to describe the analysis of population dynamics. That field and political economy would then blossom over the course of the eighteenth century, eventually culminating in Adam Smith’s famous Wealth of Nations (1776). Each field was considered political because it examined matters of state interest. A large population could be a significant political asset—the amount of wealth that a population generated definitely was. The size of a population and its ability to labor and spend its wages were fundamental measures of economic health. Political rulers now wanted—actually, demanded—numbers; printers who produced newspapers and almanacs began to print numerical assessments of public affairs, which indicated a popular audience for such matters as well.21