The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  It was clear, however, that Franklin’s reputation preceded him—so he proceeded to introduce himself to men of science around Britain. London may have been the nation’s center, but Franklin knew that the provinces were his logical home away from home. (Scottish and English provincials, like Philadelphians, were also eager to assert their places in the republic of letters.) And so, in 1758, during the hot months when fashionable Londoners fled the city, both Benjamin and William visited Franklin and Read ancestral sites. Birmingham had many Read relations, a large number of them with the delightfully specific surnames Cash, Salt, and Wheat. (The Norths and Whites were the family’s abstract characters.) Amid the cheerful breakfasts and dinners with his wife’s kin, Franklin realized that his distant daughter, Sarah, had inherited the “blue Birmingham eyes” he saw all around him.12

  Birmingham also swarmed with learned artisans who admired Franklin or whom he admired; quite often, they happily admired each other. Franklin was already Matthew Boulton’s role model. Boulton, a metalworker with scientific interests, including the nature of heat, would eventually collaborate with Isaac Watt to develop a working steam engine. He was overjoyed to meet Franklin, “the best Philosopher of America,” a mutual friend proclaimed.13

  Franklin had another felicitous meeting, with John Baskerville, a “japanner” (black-enameler) and fellow printer whose name still designates a distinctive typeface (a version of which you are now reading). Through Fothergill, Franklin had subscribed to Baskerville’s 1757 edition of Virgil, signing up for six copies. Franklin later told Baskerville how he had “mischievously” tricked a critic who complained, as did many, that Baskerville type was “a Means of blinding all the Readers in the Nation.” Franklin had handed the man a page and led him to believe it was the offending font; it was actually the Caslon typeface the man claimed to prefer but now obliviously reviled. Baskerville promptly printed the endorsement—who better to advertise a new typeface than Philadelphia’s famous man of letters?14

  Franklin departed Birmingham but remained a presence nonetheless. In 1775, his new friends would organize themselves into the Lunar Society. This club, very like the Library Company, eventually included luminaries such as Erasmus Darwin (evolutionist grandfather of the evolutionist), Josiah Wedgwood (the potter), Joseph Priestley, and James Watt, along with Boulton. Franklin found his closest Birmingham friend in Priestley, a dissenting minister and experimental natural philosopher. Franklin would help him prepare his History and Present State of Electricity, first published in 1767, and would follow Priestley’s subsequent chemical experiments. When Franklin wrote to any of these Lunar Men, it was as one provincial genius to another and often as one self-improved workingman to another. By working, reading, tinkering, and printing, they had all, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, helped build the republic of letters and extend an enlightened society throughout the English-speaking world.15

  Scotland presented the world with yet more provincial geniuses who befriended Franklin: David Hume; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Adam Smith. From Scotland, Franklin received his first honorary doctorate, bestowed by St. Andrews in early 1759. Meet “Dr. Franklin,” as he would thereafter be known. Receiving the honor was an excuse to visit Scotland, and so the Franklins summered there in 1759. Dr. Franklin adored “North Britain,” where he experienced “the densest Happiness I have met with in any Part of my Life.” Even more than the Lunar Men, the Scots celebrated Franklin’s marvelously mixed qualities: genteel artisan, philosophical provincial, famous everyman. In rapid succession, the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews admitted Franklin as a burgess, a person legally entitled to enter and roam at will. Edinburgh welcomed him as a guild brother whose character had “reach’d them, Across the Atlantick Ocean.” William Strahan, the Scot who had cleverly befriended Franklin before he was the famous Dr. Franklin, triumphantly swept him around Edinburgh.16

  It is striking that Franklin’s Scottish friends were more aristocratic than his English ones. The circle included the Duke of Argyll and Sir Alexander Dick as well as Lord Kames. Being American and a philosopher doubly endeared Franklin to the learned Scots, who, like colonists, lived rather self-consciously within the English-controlled British empire. Indeed, the Scottish aristocrats delighted in Franklin’s hands-on quality. They solicited his advice on fireplaces and heating, which says something about the social warmth (and physical chill) in Scotland. Mentioning another man’s “Paper on Fire” in a 1761 letter to Kames, Franklin described himself as one who had long “been dealing in Smoke.” In 1769, Kames remembered the joke and gave the punch line: “I apply to you for a remedy as to an universal Smoke Doctor.” Franklin explained why Kames’s heating vent leaked smoke, advised how to solve the problem, and stated that the whole thing was “merely the Effect of a Law of Nature.”17

  Franklin would continue the custom of traveling every summer, and each time he expanded his network of correspondents. In 1760, he went to Wales and several northeastern destinations in England. The following year, he went abroad to Flanders and Holland, returning just in time to see George III’s coronation procession. It must have disappointed Franklin that, because of the Seven Years’ War, he could not meet the Frenchmen who had vindicated his Philadelphia experiment. (Correspondence among philosophers separated by war was permitted—the republic of letters was neutral territory—but actual contact was dicier.)18

  When in London himself, Franklin reinforced his mixed character—provincial philosopher, artisanal gentleman—in two important ways: he was painted as a natural philosopher, and he invented his glass armonica.

  Earlier portraits tended, like the first one by Robert Feke, to emphasize Franklin’s gentlemanly status. Benjamin Wilson’s bust-length work of 1759 best captured Franklin at midlife. Wilson was a Fellow of the Royal Society (where he probably met Franklin) and a noted chemical and electrical experimenter as well as an artist. Wilson painted Franklin from life and did a pendant of Deborah from a now-lost colonial image; his Franklin has a lively expression but is otherwise indistinguishable from hundreds of other images of provincial gentlemen. Some subsequent portraits, from 1759 onward, resembled Feke’s and Wilson’s in their emphasis on Franklin’s gentility: wigs and fine clothing emphasize his passivity—he just sits there, the idle creature.19

  After Wilson, however, most portraits also portrayed Franklin as a natural philosopher. And Franklin’s hands emerged as active indicators of knowledge. In James McArdell’s 1761 mezzotint based on Wilson, Franklin holds a book of his electrical experiments and points to lightning striking a distant town. The warning is softened by two patches of light: the heavenly beams above the storm and, gleaming benignly behind Franklin, the glass globe for generating electricity; experimental philosophy resembled providential power.20

  The next important image of Franklin, which Mason Chamberlain executed in 1762, also celebrated the sciences. This private image circulated in Edward Fisher’s cheaper mezzotints. Fisher’s Franklin had no pointing finger—the moral is clear enough without it. An electrical storm crackles outside and smashes several buildings. At his desk, Franklin pauses to listen to the bells behind him, their vibration signaling the atmospheric electricity conducted by the lightning rod atop the house. (On the right-hand bell, Franklin self-deprecatingly hung tiny cork balls, a nod to John Canton’s experiment disproving his theory of electric atmospheres.) These depictions would become standard Franklin images, the busy man of science who used his hands.21

  Franklin with his book and electrostatic globe. James MacArdell after Benjamin Wilson (1761). FRANKLIN COLLECTION, YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.

  Franklin’s glass armonica, like his portraits, emphasized the human hand but in a way designed to stress its gentility. A year or two after 1759, an associate in the Royal Society had demonstrated that by fixing glasses to a table and filling them with different amounts of water, one could create music by sliding wetted fingers around their rims. Franklin had long been interested in music and played several inst
ruments. Looking at the awkward arrangement of upright glasses, he imagined a “more convenient” device “all within reach of hand to a person sitting before the instrument,” and by 1761, he had built it. He reported that his armonica was a set of glass half-globes mounted sideways, in descending size, along a spin-dle and set into a water-filled trough. To revolve the glasses, a player pressed a pedal. His or her “fingers should first be a little soaked in water,” Franklin noted, “and quite free from all greasiness,” the better to elicit an uncanny ringing. William Stukeley, who “visited Dr. Franklyn, the electric genius” in May 1761, remarked on his “glass bells, that warble like the sound of an organ,” a rather fragile, watery, and ethereal organ.22

  Franklin with his electric bells. Edward Fisher after Mason Chamberlain (c. 1762). FRANKLIN COLLECTION, YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.

  Franklin’s glass armonica. Oeuvres de M. Franklin (1773). HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

  Soon, the “celebrated Glassy-Chord invented by Mr. Franklin, of Philadelphia,” enjoyed a slight craze, carrying Franklin’s name abroad yet again. The device was extremely difficult (and expensive) to make, tricky to transport, and amazingly hard to play well, so it is all the more surprising that it gained a following. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, no less, played and composed for the device. To honor friend Giambattista Beccaria’s “musical language,” Italian, Franklin dubbed his instrument “the Armonica.”23

  The glass armonica has puzzled those who think of Franklin as a no-nonsense American, a practical inventor. Whence these warblings, which delighted hoity-toity European audiences? Put the armonica alongside the machine for generating static electricity, however, and the family resemblance is clear: both devices have revolving pieces of round glass, both require the human hand to generate or verify their sensible emissions, and both have emissions that can be varied or sustained, depending on manual effort. The hand was the connection. Keyboard instruments, such as harpsichords—the nearest things to armonicas—did not allow a player to vary sound according to finger pressure. Pianofortes were an exception, but they were still rarities in Britain in the 1760s. Independently, Franklin had invented an instrument that used the hand to elicit modulated sounds. He loved the “incomparably sweet” tones of his armonica and that “they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger,” the whole point of the device.24

  Stroking an armonica, a finger created a sound that stimulated a sentiment, a sweet or heavenly mental state. Some of Franklin’s contemporaries insisted that the sentiments connected mind and body in the deepest way possible. Franklin concurred. When he played any instrument, touch and sound affected him. After a friend gave him a small harp, he declared, “I shall never touch the sweet Strings of the British Harp without remembering my British Friends.” Instructing armonica players how to manipulate the instrument, he noted both the player’s manual sensation and the listener’s aural and mental “Pleasure.” Franklin may have been an American inventor, but this invention revealed his desire for a sophisticated, cosmopolitan reputation.25

  Franklin’s intellectual interaction with women during his time in England was another strong sign that he was becoming more European than American. He had always asserted that women would benefit from the same education as men, but his active circles of friends, from the Junto through the Library Company, had been entirely male. That situation changed once he encountered more women, in Britain, who did have education comparable to men. The first truly accomplished armonicist, for instance, was Franklin’s protégée Marianne Davies. She performed publicly to great acclaim from London to Vienna and gave Marie-Antoinette lessons on the instrument.26

  Franklin’s new interest in female learning was apparent in his witty correspondence with his landlady’s daughter, Mary “Polly” Stevenson. While Franklin traveled, they had exchanged letters—Franklin missed his blue-eyed daughter and Stevenson’s father was dead, so they comforted each other a little. Then, Stevenson decided to make Franklin her teacher as well. She had studied her mother’s lodger well and, in 1760, dropped into a letter two questions about fluid dynamics: Why did water become “warm by pumping”? And how was it that the moon (as “you told me in your last obliging Conversation”) affected tidal flow in rivers?27

  Franklin obliged Stevenson, again, with a detailed account embellished with a sketched cross section of an estuary. He concluded by asking, “After writing 6 Folio Pages of Philosophy to a young Girl [Stevenson was twenty], is it necessary to finish such a Letter with a Compliment? Is not such a Letter of itself a Compliment?” “Such a Letter is indeed the highest Compliment,” Stevenson agreed. It lessens the charm of their dialogue only slightly that Franklin and Stevenson were performing stock characters: the gentleman and (younger) lady who improved each other in philosophical conversation. Several examples of popular guides to science took this form and “complimented” women by considering them the intellectual equals of men, even though they were still barred from universities and learned societies.28

  Yet the discussion was to be respectable, avoiding scandal (in this context, a philosopher was not to use his hands) or scandalous topics, such as a materialism bordering on atheism. “I would not have trusted myself in the Hands of a Philosopher who regards only Second Causes,” Stevenson confided to Franklin, referring to his faith in the Prime Mover. Her phrasing betrayed her awareness that others might not think their conversation innocent, let alone edifying.29

  But on they went, the young woman from London and the older man from Philadelphia, discussing all manner of natural phenomena, including, of course, electricity. Stevenson read Franklin’s Experiments and Observations; he proposed experiments for “my dear little Philosopher.” By tying a rope to an upper window and, from the garden below, shaking it into undulations, she could observe the formation of waves. By placing light and dark patches of cloth over snow, she could see the dark sink faster as it absorbed heat and melted the snow beneath. The Junto’s members had earlier devised this experiment to demonstrate a point from Newton’s Opticks—Franklin now included a woman in the club.30

  Franklin taught Stevenson the usefulness of philosophy. Should she ever find herself short of freshwater while at sea, he advised, she and her fellow passengers could wet their clothes with saltwater or, better still, “make Bathing-Tubs of their empty Water Casks” and sit in seawater for an hour or two each day. The specialized pores in their skin would absorb the water and filter out the salt (impossible if they drank the water). He thus shared with Stevenson the point he had proposed to Cadwallader Colden about the two-way flow of perspiration.31

  Franklin paid Stevenson the greatest compliment by inserting her into his web of learned correspondents, which grew bigger and more tangled with each passing year. When he sent her a “Paper” with his “Sentiments” on the evaporation of water in 1761, his accompanying instructions indicated how the republic of letters crossed boundaries of nation and sex: “It is Mr. Collinson’s Copy, who took it from one I sent thro’ his Hands to a Correspondent in France some Years since; I have, as he desired me, corrected the Mistakes he made in transcribing, and must return it to him; but if you think it worth while, you may take a Copy of it.” Everyone worked this way. Writing from Harvard, John Winthrop IV asked Franklin to circulate his thoughts on light. Franklin did so, adding the note, “This Letter to be return’d to B.F. after Drs [Richard] Price and [Joseph] Priestly have perus’d it.” Franklin’s access to the postal system subsidized such circulation. In 1762, he told Sir Alexander Dick that he could provide, “free of Charge for Postage in America,” any specimens or seeds for a professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh.32

  THE SCOPE of British botany in America was about to be considerably enlarged. The British and French were hammering out a treaty to end the Seven Years’ War. There had been no American hostilities since 1757, just after Franklin crossed the Atlantic. But the conflict had continued elsewhere—it was the first truly global (or world) w
ar, involving military action in Europe, Asia, Africa, and both South and North America. So much territory was involved that as Britain and France (and their allies) met to negotiate in Paris, it was clear that the presumed victor, Britain, could expect incredible gains.33

  The prospect scared Britain’s rulers. Could they really control so much of the globe? Franklin would not soothe their fears. He reminded anyone who would listen that British America, where the population constantly increased, was destined to become the center of the empire.

  It was now obvious that Spain’s empire, once the mightiest in the modern world, had waned; Britain and France were vying to become the new dominant power in the Americas. Denouncing French aspirations in 1761, Franklin cited Tommaso Campanella’s alarmist De monarchia hispanica discursus (Discourse on the Spanish Monarchy), written in 1601 and first published in German in 1620. That work decried Spain’s dangerous ascent to hemispheric power. “The matter contain’d is so apropos to our present situation,” Franklin declared, “only changing Spain for France.” Then he supposedly quoted passages from Campanella that he had, in fact, wickedly invented—they cannot be found in the original. All was fair, Franklin evidently believed, in the struggle to get more American territory for British settlers.34

  British ministers feared, however, that if the colonies expanded, they would also become more autonomous. Even when Britain conquered New France (later Canada) and even though they held the upper hand in the peace negotiations, British officials were reluctant to add Canada to British America. So much new territory, covering such a distance, would be difficult to administer and protect and would worsen the physical disparity between the colonies and the home country. The alternative, to add easily managed Guadeloupe to Britain’s lucrative sugar islands, was a serious consideration.35