The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  Other useful captains were kinfolk. Nantucketers were always to be found swarming around Franklin. Among these, Timothy Folger had pride of place. Franklin’s sister, Jane Mecom, used “capt. Foulger” to send letters to Craven Street; Jonathan Williams Sr., Franklin’s nephew, employed Folger to communicate with Franklin. The family also relied on another Nantucket relation, Seth Paddock, as well as Captain Isaac All, Franklin’s nephew by marriage, to keep in touch with each other. As Franklin summarized in a note to Deborah in 1765, he “receiv’d kind Letters per [Captain James] Friend and per the Packet”—both private and public services solved, for the moment, some of the dilemmas of distance.74

  Franklin also used transatlantic correspondence to participate in the republic of letters. Sea captains and kinfolk sent him an astonishing range of American specimens and commodities. In return, Franklin packed scientific equipment off to America. From Jamaica, for example, Falconer sent a turtle (probably to eat) and two exotic birds (as pets or specimens). Taking advantage of London’s unparalleled workshops for scientific instruments, Franklin purchased several items for Harvard College, including “an equal Altitude Instrument” possibly intended for Harvard’s observation of the 1769 transit of Venus. He sent a reflecting telescope, microscope, and thermometer to Humphry Marshall, and a perspective glass to a friend in France.75

  Franklin next figured out how to make himself visible throughout the Atlantic world: he circulated his likeness on paper. He broadcast Edward Fisher’s mezzotints of himself to friends, family, and patrons—anyone with space on a wall. These inexpensive images showed him at his desk, electrical wires and bells dangling behind him. William and Benjamin Franklin bought one hundred copies of the 1763 print. William evidently sold many of them. His father took a dozen to roll up, slide into tin cases, and send to Boston, “it being the only way in which I am now likely ever to visit my Friends there.” In the autumn of 1768, his old friend John Bartram remarked that “thy pretty exact picture” (probably the mezzotint) was “a dayly fresh membrance of intimate frindship” between himself and his “dear Benjamin.” The Bache family, into which Franklin’s daughter Sarah had married, owned another copy, which they evidently moved between dining room and parlor so that “Franklin” could stay with the assembled company. The mezzotint showed Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, what his famous grandfather looked like. Little Benny was reported to kiss the icon.76

  Above all, Franklin trafficked in groceries—“Goodeys,” he drooled. He harvested an amazing range of treats from members of his North Atlantic family. Deborah Franklin forwarded Indian no-cake (maize roasted and then ground) from Nantucket. Nantucketer Seth Paddock sent “Salted Cod fish Cured” from Timothy Folger. Other shipments included salt beef and pork, the dried tongues and air bladders of codfish (a delicacy, when reconstituted), dried venison, Deborah Franklin’s hams, ordinary ground maize, cranberries, buckwheat, and American apples, which Franklin particularly relished. These foods comforted the homesick Franklin but, in the quantities he received, it is hard to believe that he—even in his stout middle age—ate everything himself. More likely, he proffered American treats to his hosts and his guests. He thus distinguished his hospitality from Mrs. Stevenson’s and gave Deborah Franklin a virtual presence in the house on Craven Street.77

  LETTERS, feasts of venison, favors to friends, American goodies—postal work was pleasant. The same could not be said of the commercial traffic across the British Atlantic. Franklin found himself at the center of a political storm when Parliament passed the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on a range of paper items that were to bear the stamp. The revenue was desperately needed—Britain had run up an unprecedented debt during the Seven Years’ War, and officials were taxing everything they could think of. But the Stamp Tax affected all the paper items that the letter-posting, newspaper-reading, novel-buying colonists had come to regard as part of everyday life and that served as an important link between the colonists and the metropole. This tax was the first in a series that stirred up the colonial protests that would culminate in the American Revolution.

  Colonists argued that because they were not represented in Parliament, that body had no right to tax them on goods they had to import from the home country. British officials smoothly assured the colonists that they were “virtually” represented—members of Parliament for whom they had never voted nevertheless took their interests to heart. Indeed, many Britons lived in districts that had no member of Parliament at all. But qualified colonists (white men who owned property) were accustomed to electing representatives to their local houses of assembly. Without their own members of Parliament, they did not consider themselves “actually” represented. And the distance between them and their putative representatives in Parliament made it seem unlikely that those men knew much, if anything, about them.78

  Franklin adopted a position of compromise, midway between British and colonial extremes. He would maintain his balance until 1775. He remained convinced that the source of the colonies’ power lay in their rapidly increasing populations. Even if untaxed, their commerce with Britain would eventually yield prodigious amounts of revenue—that was what he wanted Britain’s ministers to accept. But he thought that, in the meantime, colonists should comply with the Stamp Act. He planned for the implementation of the act while recommending its repeal—a compromise that was out of step with American opinion. Colonists were rioting, burning tax officials in effigy, and blocking the distribution of stamp materials. Some British officials advocated force to administer the stamps; Franklin and others deplored this approach.

  Under the pseudonym Homespun, Franklin trumpeted colonial consumer power: a general boycott on imported British goods would demonstrate colonists’ real value. Did Americans really need tea at breakfast? They could instead start the day with good solid food, especially “Indian corn,” one of the most “agreeable and wholesome grains in the world.” Did they need imported cloth? They could shear rather than eat their lambs—“the sweet little creatures are all alive to this day, with the prettiest fleeces on their backs imaginable.” (These were sweet and pretty phrases from a lapsed vegetarian.) A boycott of nearly “two millions of people,” in “a country of 1500 miles extent,” would easily destroy British merchants and manufacturers.79

  In London, cool heads urged consultation with the Americans. And who would be better to consult than America’s only true philosopher, Benjamin Franklin? He was summoned for an interview in the House of Commons in 1766. No orator, Franklin found that the question-and-answer format suited his gift for dialogue. He claimed, yet again, that the empire’s center of power—meaning the majority of its producing and consuming subjects—was shifting to the western side of the Atlantic. He stressed that American consumption of British manufactures grew not only because the population was expanding but also because Americans had increasing wealth. Untaxed, their buying power would be all the greater. Do not alienate us, Franklin was warning the members of Parliament. He lectured them that colonists used to have “particular regard” for Britons and “a fondness for [British] fashions.”80

  Yet Americans’ increasing buying power, Franklin’s trump card, was a tricky one to play. It was hard to deny that colonists already paid for imperial services and could afford to pay more. Cross-examined about the Post Office, Franklin insisted that postage was not a tax but “a quantum meruit [as much as is deserved] for a service done.” One member sharply asked why colonists increased so rapidly. Franklin admitted that people could marry earlier in the colonies because so much land was available—land was the key to their fecundity and wealth. But he denied that this meant colonists could pay more taxes than land-starved Britons. Rather, he pointedly said, ordinary people in America were “better paid for their labour” than the oppressed workers of Britain.81

  To make his point, Franklin distinguished between “duties” on commerce and “internal taxes.” Commercial duties had to be paid when an item was landed; an internal tax was
paid once the good circulated in America. Americans accepted the former, he claimed, but not the latter, as with the Stamp Act. He emphatically stated that Americans would never accept parliamentary taxation: “No power, how great soever, can force men to change their opinions.” Opinion— the term defined matters that could not be defined by facts, sensory experience, or even reason. His use of the term in this context made clear that Franklin did not necessarily believe that Americans were right but also that Britons were unwise to use force against them. But his proposed compromise, a distinction between external versus internal taxes, was a distinction without a difference. Americans would accept neither. That Franklin claimed the difference showed, again, how he was out of step with American opinion at home.82

  Members of Parliament, however, bought his story and repealed the Stamp Act. The architect of the repeal, William Pitt, later Lord Chatham, became a hero to Americans. His image—often in toga and always with implied halo—proliferated throughout the colonies. Franklin presented a bust of him to Harvard College. He also enjoyed a bit of the afterglow. “Caress’d by Ministry,” he bragged of himself. Fothergill may at this time have presented Franklin with a silver milk jug engraved, “Keep bright the chain,” appropriating the imagery of Anglo-Iroquois diplomacy to represent Anglo-American relations.83

  The repeal of the Stamp Act was fortunate for Franklin. Although his interview in Parliament had won him British plaudits, he was nevertheless making enemies in several camps. His criticism of the Pennsylvania proprietors unsurprisingly annoyed those in the proprietary party, as well as the Penns’ powerful friends in Britain. At the same time, many colonists suspected him of a kind of virtual representation of them once they learned he had planned to implement the Stamp Act. The distance over the Atlantic muffled the criticism, as did loud rejoicing over the Stamp Act’s repeal.

  What did Franklin do with his reprieve? He shaped, yet again, his image as a philosopher. A Scottish friend, Robert Alexander, commissioned a portrait of him by David Martin. Completed in 1766, the painting presented Franklin as a man of science. In it, he wears a short wig in the style known as “physical,” favored by physicans and men of science. He sits and reads, one hand holding a book, the other his chin. The head-on-hand position was the classic pose of contemplation, but here, it is accessorized by that pointing index finger. The finger was not part of the classical convention but evidently was recognized as Franklinian. A huge bust of Newton looms, but Newton’s intellectual heir is the more brightly lit of the two figures. Franklin’s eyes are lowered over his reading material, his trademark spectacles perched on his nose. The Society of Artists exhibited the picture in spring 1767; Horace Walpole noted in his copy of the exhibit catalog that it was “a great likeness.” Franklin himself liked it so much that he requested a copy from Martin, the only change being to his chair, which was ornate in the original but simple in Franklin’s version.84

  Franklin with a bust of Newton. Benjamin Martin (1767). PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS.

  Franklin also used the reprieve to enjoy two summer visits to the European continent, much of which had been off-limits during the recent war. In 1766, he and his Scottish physician friend, John Pringle, traveled through the German-speaking territories. Both were elected to the Royal Society of Science at Göttingen in July. The following summer, the two men went to France. Franklin finally met his electrical champion, Dalibard, as well as many other French men of science. He also began to make contacts in the French political world. He was presented to Louis XV and met several so-called physiocrats. Physiocracy was a French field of political economy. Physiocrats eagerly read Franklin’s work on political arithmetic, and they mistakenly assumed him to be, as they were, opposed to all taxes. He was not, but his odd distinction, when grilled by Parliament, between internal and external taxes had misled many. And it was to that problem he had to return, once the pleasant summer rambles were over.85

  Franklin’s views on taxes and commerce were never quite clear. He hoped that “in time perhaps Mankind may be wise enough to let Trade take its own Course, find its own Channels, and regulate its own Proportions.” This was yet another of those images that was supposed to convince readers that nature proved the truth of some point that was actually debatable. Colonists did not believe it. Many of them instead found their own solution in smuggling. Franklin denounced them in the London Chronicle in late 1767, pointing out that commercial duties contributed to the “publick treasure” and common good of the empire. Smugglers were “pickpockets.” Among the offices thus shortchanged was the Post Office, which had recently restricted public officials’ franking privileges; this decreased the potential for corruption but made it more important to safeguard lawful forms of revenue. Franklin seemed to sympathize with British officials; Americans had reason to suspect him of going native, what with his long residence in London.86

  The fact that Franklin lived in London also raised questions about his ability to oversee, at a remove, postal affairs in America. In May 1768, the Commissioners of Customs in Boston complained to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury about the “want of a proper establishment of the posts in this Country,” particularly the slowness of mail service. One problem they claimed was inefficient service along the American coastline. This was a criticism of Franklin’s supposedly reformed service and may have generated gossip about him. Only a month later, Anthony Todd related to a correspondent that Lord Sandwich had hinted that Franklin “ought, after some year’s absence, to return thither [to America] to his duty.”87

  How could Franklin prove himself dutiful, even in absentia? The commissioners’ second complaint proved useful. They pointed to the peculiar fact that travel from London to Boston was much quicker than that from Falmouth to New York, even though these were roughly similar distances. It provided Franklin with the perfect opportunity to say something about the Gulf Stream. He made his first public statement about the current in an October 1768 letter to Todd. “The long passages made by some Ships bound from England to New York,” he claimed, resulted from their sailing in the middle of the “Gulph Stream”—hence the post’s different arrival times in North America, depending on which route a ship had taken across the North Atlantic.88

  This simple observation about nature allowed Franklin to make three complicated points about empire: the Gulf Stream was useful to the empire (particularly the postal system); Americans had superior knowledge of it; and he himself, in London, had access to this knowledge. To make his case, he named his source, “Captain Folger a very intelligent Mariner of the Island of Nantuckett,” and appeared to be quoting a conversation he had had with him. Folger knew the Nantucket whalers, who in turn knew “that the Whales are found generally near the Edges of the Gulph Stream, a strong Current so called which comes out of the Gulph of Florida, passing Northeasterly along the Coast of America, and the [n] turning off most Easterly running at the rate of 4, 3 ½, 3 and 2 ½ Miles an Hour.”89

  By paraphrasing his cousin to Todd, Franklin gave him the authority to define natural facts. Folger had claimed that whalers had to “Cruise along the Edges of the Stream in quest of Whales,” becoming “better acquainted with the Course, Breadth, Strength and extent of the same” than did “Navigators” who “only cross it in their Voyages to and from America.” Those navigators made the mistake of sailing west in the eastward path of the Gulf Stream, which slowed them considerably. They did so for good reason, however, in order to stay clear of “Cape Sable Shoals, Georges Banks or Nantucket Shoals,” putting them smack in the middle of the current. They avoided grounding or wrecking their ships at the cost of a slower crossing—probably a reasonable trade-off.90

  But Franklin thought that navigators could steer a path between the shoals and the current. He reported to Todd that he had asked Folger to mark “on a Chart, the Dimentions Course and Swiftness of the Stream from it’s first coming out of the Gulph, where it is narrowest and strongest; till it turns away to go to the Southward of the Western
Islands, where it is Broader and weaker.” He had also solicited from Folger “Written directions” about avoiding both the stream and the dreaded banks and shoals. Folger marked the chart in red, and Franklin sent it to the Post Office to engrave and distribute to packet boat captains. The Post Office dutifully printed the chart, complete with Folger’s instructions. The teamwork between a philosopher and a mariner was crucial; the philosopher’s generosity in giving the mariner coauthorship unusual.91

  It seems incredible that British captains were entirely ignorant of the Gulf Stream. Yet maritime knowledge was sometimes highly segmented. From 1765 to 1770, the Post Office neither requested nor required packet captains to gather information about navigation or give advice about charts. And the journals of one very able seaman, James Cook (later the famed Captain Cook of Pacific exploration), bear out Franklin’s claim. Cook surveyed Newfoundland from 1764 to 1765, under the guidance of Surveyor General Samuel Holland, who mapped the area in order to regulate the French crews that continued to fish there. Cook’s charts were published individually by both Mount and Page and Thomas Jefferys, then gathered into Sayer and Bennett’s The Newfoundland Pilot (1769). Cook indeed kept an eye out for currents and discovered them both to east and west. But after he “Try’d the Current but found none” on May 26, 1765, he stopped looking, despite pestering local fisherman about “the hidden dangers” of the tricky Newfoundland coast.92

  Cook may have been just a few years too early for the locals to be forthcoming with him. In 1768, when Folger told Franklin about the Gulf Stream’s significance to whalers, it was no longer a commercially advantageous trade secret. In the seventeenth century, American whalers had begun their hunts just offshore. By the 1730s, they had abandoned offshore whaling for deep-sea whaling, and around the 1750s, they headed to the Gulf Stream. But after 1760, whalers were moving into Arctic waters, and around 1768, they went south toward the Caribbean, Africa, and Gulf of Mexico. By publicizing the Gulf Stream, Folger had the satisfaction of knowing his name was circulating among high-ranking British officials without any nagging guilt over ruining another man’s trade. Secretary of the Post Office Todd now knew Folger as a maritime expert; Franklin’s letter was copied at least twice in 1769 (the copyist mistakenly gave that year for its composition) and made the rounds in the Treasury.93