Then, in April 1756, Franklin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He at last joined the club whose members he had long admired: Newton, Sloane, Hales, Collinson. He surely enjoyed Collinson’s indiscreet testimony that “there was not one negative Ball,” or vote, against him, “an Instance of Unanimity” that the society’s president said “he never before saw.”94
Shortly thereafter, in 1760, Franklin joined another London organization, Dr. Bray’s Associates. The Reverend Dr. Thomas Bray, who died in 1730, had founded the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in 1699 and had also established libraries in England and Wales. His associates, a small philanthropic group, sponsored the education and evangelization of African slaves. Franklin knew by reputation several of the associates, including a leading member, the ubiquitous Stephen Hales. The associates, as individuals and as a group, also sought to better slaves’ lives. Hales’s desire to ventilate slave ships was a classic example of their meliorism. The associates shared an unusually humanitarian concern for non-European peoples, while leaving the slave trade itself unchallenged.95
Franklin’s sympathy with the associates made sense, given his ambivalence toward slavery. He owned household slaves yet regarded slaves as a poor way to stock his colony with labor. He questioned whether they were naturally the equals of Euro-Americans. Now, he also worried that slaves were a liability in time of war. In a plan for settling any new western land won from the French, Franklin warned that “loose English people,” Germans, and slaves were likely to desert to the French. (So, too, would aggrieved Indians.) Slavery was not only economically irrational, in his view, but a weakness within the empire.96
Franklin gained a direct voice within that empire when, in 1757, the Pennsylvania Assembly chose him as its agent and sent him to London. Many of the British colonies were hiring agents to lobby for their interests. Franklin’s task was quite specific—and delicate. The Pennsylvania Assembly was locked in battle with the colony’s proprietors, Thomas and Richard Penn, heirs of Quaker founder William Penn. The Penns refused to let their colonial properties be taxed. Franklin was to persuade them and other British officials that taxing the proprietors would generate significant revenue for the colony, benefiting it and the empire.
That Franklin got this job reflected the colonists’ confidence that he was a Pennsylvanian famous enough to shine in the metropole. His appointment resulted in a five-year stay, during which Franklin—busy on behalf of his colony—nevertheless found time to settle himself into the learned societies to which he had just been elected.
He faced doing so alone, for Deborah Franklin was determined never to cross the Atlantic. Her caution was typical—it was her husband’s eagerness to play sailor that was unusual. Deborah and Benjamin were both unusual, however, in their agreeing to disagree. Wives were supposed to obey their husbands; husbands expected to command all members of their households. But Deborah and Benjamin Franklin had negotiated a different sort of marriage. They addressed each other in letters as “dear Child” to signify a familial equality. In his letters, Franklin frequently persuaded or advised his wife, but he never commanded her outright. So when she decided not to embark, that was that. William Strahan, Franklin’s London bookseller, refused to believe it. “Instead of being afraid of the sea, we ought to have a particular regard for it,” Strahan pleaded with Deborah, “as it is so far from being a bar to the communication and intercourse of different and far distant countries, that it facilitates their correspondence.” As Franklin had predicted, his wife was unmoved: “There is no inducement strong enough,” he pronounced.97
Franklin’s reentry to London was otherwise a personal triumph and he brought the entourage to prove it. He embarked with his son, William, and each took a slave, Peter and King. Thus, Franklin, at fifty-one, took his place in London as a somebody—as the electrical genius, the winner of the Copley Medal, and the famous American philosopher. His son and heir visited the capital as a gentleman who would read law at London’s Inns of Court; the slaves indicated social and financial consequence, an unapologetic display of colonial wealth by someone who both held slaves and criticized slaveholding. 98
Even his passage to London was memorable. This was Franklin’s fastest Atlantic crossing ever. His ship, the postal packet General Wall, was protected partway by a large military convoy bound for Nova Scotia, where it would besiege French Louisbourg. The convoy lingered over two months in New York (the Franklins and other passengers ate up their “Sea Stores” and had to buy more) before Lord Loudon, commander in chief of the British forces in North America, gave it permission to sail. The General Wall was the only packet that dared complete the voyage—the other two postal vessels turned back. Franklin recalled how the packet’s captain, Walter Lutwidge, had “boasted much before we sail’d, of the Swiftness of his Ship” but “she proved the dullest of 96 Sail, to his no small Mortification.”99
Franklin then witnessed some superb seamanship. Lutwidge measured the General Wall’s speed against a straggling vessel “almost as dull as ours” and then experimented with the way his ship was loaded. He ordered all hands and passengers to stand as a group and then moved them about to test weight distribution. The experiment reduced roughly forty people (officers, crew, landsmen) to the direct authority of the captain—and to the status of mere ballast. Franklin was, briefly, equal to his slave. Discovering that the water supply, loaded too far forward, retarded the ship, Lutwidge had the casks “remov’d farther aft; on which the Ship recover’d her Character, and prov’d the best Sailer in the Fleet.” Lutwidge bragged that it reached speeds of thirteen knots per hour. Another officer scoffed but lost a bet to Lutwidge when the log-line (a device that determined rate of travel) proved the astonishing speed. Cracking on, the General Wall reached Falmouth in just over three weeks, making Franklin’s passage a record postal crossing.100
Franklin used his time at sea to get some writing done. He composed a preface for Poor Richard Improved, his expanded almanac. He called his essay the “Speech of Father Abraham,” the musings of a village elder who had a remarkable familiarity with the many aphorisms of Richard Saunders. In a rapid-fire synopsis of Poor Richard, Father Abraham told poor young men how to get ahead—“The Way to Wealth,” as the essay became known. As with Franklin’s Experiments and Observations, the “Way to Wealth” would enter multiple editions in multiple languages, making him not just a philosopher but a charmingly provincial one. In a way, it was a farewell speech for Franklin. He bade good-bye to his early career as a colonial printer. Retired from that business, he could live as a London gentleman, the antithesis of Father Abraham.
When he arrived in England in July 1758, Franklin took up rented rooms with Margaret Stevenson, a widow whose house was on Craven Street, just off Charing Cross. This was a happy choice. Mrs. Stevenson (and her daughter, Mary, nicknamed Polly) offered Franklin an upper-middle-class address yet not one so grand as to make Franklin seem pretentious (or bankrupt him). The two Stevenson women gave the two Franklin men a surrogate and respectable family. The location itself was well chosen. Charing Cross was not far from Holborn, where William would read law, and lay at the intersection of Whitehall, which ran southwest toward the governmental centers of London, and the Strand, a cultural promenade that included several important clubs and societies.101
Within two weeks of his arrival at Craven Street, Franklin presented himself and the Pennsylvania Assembly’s complaints to the Penns; within three weeks, he attended his first meeting of the Society of Arts. He thus marked out the political and cultural paths he would continue to tread for the rest of his London career. Then, he collapsed.
For two months, Franklin was too ill to do anything. He later admitted, in a letter to his wife, that he had at first refused to believe that what he thought “a violent cold and something of a fever” was very serious. “I ventured out twice, to do a little business and forward the service I am engaged in,” which made him worse. His doctor “grew very angry,” having
cautioned him against exertion, and took the extraordinary step, Franklin recalled, of forbidding him the use of pen and ink. Franklin must have thought back to the pleurisies that had nearly killed him decades earlier and feared that his violent cold might turn in that direction. No wonder the doctor lost his temper. Franklin conceded to his wife that the current malady was no ordinary one but was, in fact, his “seasoning,” the contemporary term for a traveler’s often miserable and sometimes fatal adaptation to a new physical environment.102
In the hot Philadelphia summer of 1749, Franklin had waited for fame while stripped to his shirt and drawers; in 1757, he arrived in London famous—but there he was, back in his underwear, confined to bed while brilliant London bayed outside. That vast Atlantic Ocean still exacted a toll on those who dared cross it. What if Franklin had died then, at the height of his philosophical celebrity but long before playing his role in the American Revolution? How would he now be remembered?
Chapter 6
DISTANCE
FRANKLIN carefully tended his flame, even as it threatened to go out. He not only survived but also used his enforced leisure to burnish his image and make an important contact. Lying in bed, he had his portrait painted and befriended the doctor who kept him confined. The portrait was a miniature on ivory by an obscure artist, one C. Dixon. In it, Franklin the invalid wears the comfortable clothing of a philosophical gentleman at home—a turban (instead of a scratchy wig) and a banyan, or dressing gown. Franklin sent the miniature to Deborah to forward to his sister, Jane Mecom, as an intimate memento of his ascent to gentility (or a possible memento mori). Franklin’s new friend was John Fothergill, FRS, a physician to several important Britons and the editor of the first edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations. Fothergill became, like Peter Collinson, a useful ally in several spheres of activity—and in eight weeks, he got Franklin back on his feet.1
Once recovered, Franklin threw himself back into the London whirl. On November 14, 1757, he resumed his meetings with the Penns. Ten days later, he attended his first meeting of the Royal Society and was formally admitted as a fellow. The following month, Franklin made his first appearance before the Board of Trade, an important arbiter for colonial affairs. It was as if he had never been ill. William Franklin, marveling over his father’s steady devotion to the sciences, said, “It is surprizing how you could find Time to attend to T[hings?] of that Nature a[mid all?] your Hurry of public Business.”2
It was indeed “surprizing.” Franklin faithfully executed his mission in London to wring money out of Pennsylvania’s proprietors. As he did so, he waged a much bigger war: to enlarge the scope of the British empire and his place within it. He succeeded on both counts. The Seven Years’ War, the conflagration that had started in one small part of North America, burned its way across much of the rest of the globe and brought unprecedented expansion and change to the British empire. It also brought Franklin new power and influence.
Yet his and the empire’s successes raised new problems. Distance was the real dilemma. Although its global reach gave the British empire might and grandeur, it was now much harder to regulate and to communicate across the empire’s vast distances. As people employed natural sciences in their quest to master the globe’s expanse, those sciences became more politically valuable than ever. And as Franklin extended his influence—through travel, correspondence, and force of character—his status as a philosopher became an essential passport in multiple realms.
AS EVER, the sciences served Franklin’s broader ambitions. In London, he had many opportunities to make himself known more widely and for a wider range of accomplishments. He began to build up a circle of acquaintance that eventually encompassed a range of Britons and other Europeans. They were a more heterogeneous group than he had known in Philadelphia—more affluent and sometimes aristocratic; some were interested in arts rather than sciences, and some were women, his first female intellectual peers.
Franklin clearly enjoyed being a member in good standing—and high repute—of the republic of letters. While he lived in London, he attended the Royal Society’s meetings and, more unusually, served on its committees. He was elected a member of its council in 1760. He followed suit for the Royal Society of Arts, where he kept track of new inventions and, in 1761, served on a committee.3
Franklin also executed new experiments and entertained new theories. Soon after his recovery, he reconsidered his ideas about heat. (Maybe the recent illness had reminded him of his fear of drafts.) He moved away from his earlier theory that bodily heat was produced mechanically, as by friction, and considered that it might instead result from a process of fermentation akin to digestion. He continued to regard heat as a fluid. He visualized heat (a quality) in terms of quantity, something that might be measured as it flowed one way or another, creating warmth or coldness in its wake.4
Above all, Franklin began to think of substances as “conductors” of heat—he seems to have been the first to apply that electrical term to thermal phenomena. In 1758, he worked with John Hadley, professor of chemistry at Cambridge, to examine evaporation and cooling. He and Hadley confirmed that evaporation, either of alcohol or ether, would drive down the mercury in a thermometer, whatever the ambient temperature. “From this experiment,” Franklin blithely concluded, “one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day” were the poor soul placed in a breezy passageway and repeatedly doused with ether. The result made Franklin suspect that some materials were “better fitted by Nature to be Conductors” of heat than others.5
As proof, he recalled the hot Philadelphia day of 1749 when he had streamed with perspiration and called for dry shirts. That, he now realized, was a mistake. The evaporation of sweat kept cool “the atmosphere round, and next to our bodies”; moisture conducted the heat away. Franklin remarked that, unlike his animate body, “inanimate bodies immers’d in the same air” became as hot as the surrounding temperature. His desk, chair, and “a dry shirt out of the drawer . . . all felt exceeding warm.” Metal felt warmer than wood and hence had to be a better conductor of heat.6
Franklin was presenting these thoughts in letters of 1757 and 1758 to John Lining, a South Carolina physician and a fellow Sanctorius disciple. (Lining replicated Sanctorius’s metabolic autoexperimentation, correlating the readings of his body with those of Charleston’s balmy climate.) To Lining, Franklin described evaporation in colonial terms, especially in the context of productive work. He considered that evaporation might be “why our reapers in Pen-sylvania,” working “in the clear hot sunshine,” found themselves cooled by their sweat, as long as they could “supply matter for keeping up that sweat, by drinking frequently of a thin evaporable liquor, [such as] water mixed with rum.”7
Franklin next compared the bodies of his colony’s free white workers with those of the enslaved “negroes” in the West Indies, where sugar and rum originated. These workers, Franklin believed, had “a quicker evaporation of the perspirable matter from their skin and lungs, which, by cooling them more, enables them to bear the sun’s heat better than whites.” He added that this was “the alledg’d necessity of having negroes rather than whites” to work the Caribbean’s sugar fields. The use of the word alleged hinted that Franklin did not entirely believe in slavery’s necessity. (He did not admit that it was probably his own slave, Peter, who had fetched him dry shirts to replace the sweat-soaked ones.) Finally, Franklin turned back to questions about circulation in the natural world and wondered whether evaporation did not tend to cool the earth, offsetting the sun’s heat.8
Franklin’s writings on meteorology, from about the same time, likewise blended the local with the universal. Atmospheric electricity had universal properties. But it occurred more in some places than others, and Americans, blessed (or cursed?) with frequent thunderstorms, were natural electricians. In London, where thunderstorms were rare, experimenters had found it difficult to “extract the electricity from the atmosphere” in order to verify “Mr. Fran
klin’s hypothesis.” North Americans, in contrast, had greater appreciation for the dangers of lightning—and for the benefits of lightning rods and chains. Political arithmetic proved it. In England, Franklin estimated, “those who calculate chances may perhaps find that not one death (or the destruction of one house) in a hundred thousand happens from that cause.” The implication was that Americans did not enjoy the same odds.9
As he pursued questions in the sciences, Franklin was unable to keep up with everything, even with the work of his disciples. From the 1750s onward, Franklinists abounded throughout Europe. Franz Ulrich Theodor Aepinus was the most important. Aepinus admired Franklin’s theory of electrical matter, but he made one key modification to it. Franklin had said that glass would resist an electrical force because it already contained electricity. In a 1759 treatise, Aepinus argued that this resistance was essentially true of most nonelectrical matter. In fact, all matter had to be composed of mutually repulsive particles, as Franklin had posited of electricity. Aepinus used this idea to explain magnetism. Together, magnetism and electricity revealed that different forms of matter could attract and repel each other. This must be how matter constituted itself, with particles repelled from or attracted to each other, depending on what other particles were around them.10
In 1759 or shortly thereafter, Franklin learned of Aepinus’s work. He briefly commented on some of it, seemed to agree with its major points, but did not further develop his own theories in response. His fame had, paradoxically, made him central to philosophical discussions on which he had little time to comment.11
The First Scientific American Page 20