The first chart of the Gulf Stream. Mount and Page (1768). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
So, here it is, the first known chart of the Gulf Stream, done (Franklin later recollected) in 1768. Mount and Page was, by late 1767, the Post Office’s contract stationer and produced the chart. The firm often reprinted from its own stock, so it thriftily reused an older map of the whole Atlantic Ocean from its new sea atlas, Atlas maritimus novus (1702). The result is an odd chart, so big it nearly drowns the small feature Folger and Franklin added to it. Folger’s instructions are similarly marginal, even smaller than Franklin’s description of Atlantic storms inserted into Lewis Evans’s map of the mid-Atlantic colonies. Spanning the major landmasses of the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, the chart had to be printed in four panels, joined at the readings for 16 degrees north and 32.5 degrees west. There was plenty of room to depict the full sweep of the Gulf Stream, which Franklin had both described and seen, but the current stops far short of the “Azores or Western Isles,” where Folger had indicated the Gulf Stream dipped south. It was an especially odd image for a natural philosopher who thought of circulation in terms of equilibriums. Someone truly interested in balance should have worried about where all the Gulf Stream’s water went.94
Timothy Folger’s sailing instructions. Close-up of Mount and Page chart. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
In fact, Franklin, Folger, and the Post Office had little interest in presenting the entire circle of water around the North Atlantic. No map merely represents what lies in nature. This, the first chart of the Gulf Stream, made a statement about British overseas power. The Gulf Stream was an imperial ornament, one that measured out Britain’s hemispheric power and connected an enlarged British America to Britain. Laid over a chart that included all the nations bordering the Atlantic, the current swept the viewer’s eye along the new boundaries of British power, from Florida to Nova Scotia. Look at the chart again: imagine the Gulf Stream as an eyebrow arched over an invisible British-American smirk.95
A REMARKABLE CONTRIBUTION to hydrography and maritime cartography, which were only beginning to map the open ocean, the Franklin-Folger chart of the Gulf Stream also holds an important place in the prehistory of the American Revolution. The chart, like many of Franklin’s pamphlets on British policy in the late 1760s, represented at once a promise that Americans would help create a powerful British empire and a threat to withdraw from this project. Colonists, Franklin emphasized, could help conquer the vastly expanded territory of the empire—if treated well by British rulers.
The growing atmosphere of colonial suspicion and defensiveness out of which the map emerged helps explain Franklin’s reliance on Captain Timothy Folger. By invoking Folger’s name, he alluded to a greater community of American knowledge. Franklin conveyed collective wisdom to the Post Office in order to “be of general Service.” British ingratitude for such service would damage the empire. “Subjects will be dutiful and obedient,” Franklin had promised in his “Canada Pamphlet,” only “when the government is mild and just, [and] while important civil and religious rights are secure.” “The waves do not rise,” he darkly predicted, “but when the winds blow.”96
Chapter 7
WRECKED
The Waves never rise but when the Winds blow: Franklin used this metaphor again in 1768, to readers of the London Chronicle, and again to question British policies toward the colonies. Even as he called on nature to make his point, it was not clear whether he blamed the winds (British ministers) for all the trouble. Perhaps the problems in the empire were not as inevitable as the motion of wind over water. Franklin did not, at that stage, despair of Britain, and he happily remained in London. He criticized British colonial policies in order to get them repealed or adjusted, not to make any great change in the political order.1
Franklin’s moderate politics and his loyalty to the ruling elite were evident in his response to the 1768 Wilkes controversy and to sailors’ role in it. Indeed, his distaste for John Wilkes set him apart from many colonists—and Britons—who thought that the government’s treatment of Wilkes revealed its disdain for the rights of ordinary subjects.
Wilkes was a radical English writer who had been gleefully antagonizing Britain’s rulers with essays in his periodical The North Briton. But in 1768, after he attacked the king himself in the forty-fifth issue of the paper, Wilkes was tried and found guilty of seditious libel. He fled to France where, in absentia, he was elected to a parliamentary seat for Middlesex County. He returned in triumph, but his election was nullified on the grounds of his sedition. Many Britons were outraged that the popular will could be ignored and a writer silenced.2
Suddenly, American complaints about British tyranny seemed less far-fetched. Cartoons immortalized Wilkes, whose hunched back and leering squint made him immediately recognizable. Riots broke out. Referring to the issue of the paper that carried the attack, Londoners chalked up “No. 45” everywhere, all over buildings and coaches. “Light up for Wilkes,” crowds would shout outside a house, breaking its windows if the inhabitants did not light candles to show their support. A number of colonial assemblies and groups officially protested on Wilkes’s behalf; some of their actions commemorated the number forty-five, as in drinking forty-five stupefying toasts to the “Member from Middlesex.”
Even sailors, most of whom lacked enough property to vote, demonstrated their support of Wilkes. Rioting was clearly a popular pastime for the British—but especially so for sailors, who had plenty to protest. The state was consolidating its authority over them, as the waves of impressment during the Seven Years’ War had shown. Even landspeople grew uneasy over how press gangs seized maritime laborers. Some began to compare the situation to slavery; both African captives and impressed sailors were snatched from their homes to labor involuntarily. Across the Atlantic, colonists thought they were protected from impressment, but naval captains assumed otherwise. The difference in opinion had erupted back in 1747 in Boston. When officials tried to impress colonial men, they incited a three-day riot. Thereafter and certainly through the Seven Years’ War, sailors’ protests continued in the colonies, and they spread to the metropolis. When sailors refused to work, they would “strike” the sails, inventing a term that other workingpeople eventually used for their own work stoppages. London-based sailors did this in solidarity with Wilkes.3
Franklin was horrified. As the 1768 riots swept around London, he denounced Wilkes as “an outlaw and exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing.” The “drunken mad mobs” had cost the city an estimated £50,000 in physical damage, not to mention “the expence of candles.” The capital was “a daily Scene of lawless Riot and Confusion.” Mobs were “knocking all down that will not roar for Wilkes and Liberty.” Just as bad were the “Sailors unrigging all the outward-bound Ships . . . Watermen destroying private Boats and threatning Bridges.”4
This was a surprising attitude for a former workingman, let alone a colonist whose own maritime kin might easily have been impressed. (Growing older, Franklin grew yet more like his father. In 1773, he would tell his sister, Jane Mecom, that one of their step-nephews was “fit, I should think for a better Business than the Sea.”) But the maritime strikes and acts of sabotage were, for Franklin, beyond the pale, much like the colonial smuggling he constantly condemned. He had his own doubts about British law and politics. But he was a law-and-order man who had no patience with Wilkes’s insistence that the British government was rotten to the core, to say nothing of Wilkes’s taunting of George III. Franklin’s stance was a contrast to his earlier defense, in the 1730s, of John Peter Zenger against similar charges of seditious libel.5
Franklin’s position represented compromise, the kind of compromise he wanted on colonial policy, and it made him look compromised on either side. He knew it. At the end of 1768, he confessed that his “impartiality” made him suspected “in England of being too much an American, and in America of being too much an Englishman.” He would keep deploying metaphors based on nature (waves
rising with the wind) in order to argue for the plain truth of his positions. But his authority as a philosopher was increasingly difficult to wield in the political realm. This remained Franklin’s dilemma until 1775. That year marked the most frustrating moment of his life, when his status as a natural philosopher failed to give him any political leverage whatsoever. His sudden undoing in 1775 had a radicalizing effect on him and forced him to leave London, the empire’s center of learning, where he had clearly preferred to be. In his case, “the winds” blasted him clear out of the British empire—just when he had hoped the empire’s increasing glory might redound to him.6
GLORY had indeed been his. In November 1768, Franklin was elected president of the American Philosophical Society. The honor crowned him, in absentia, as supreme among American philosophers. Two infant and rival Philadelphia societies, the American Society (formed by Quakers and assemblymen) and the Philosophical Society (with the proprietary faction), had long played tug-of-war over Franklin as their founding member. In 1768, the two groups merged into the American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia, for Promoting Useful Knowledge, which has retained this amalgamated, eighteenth-century name to the present day. The first APS presidential election pitted the two earlier societies’ presidents, Franklin and James Hamilton, against each other. Franklin’s election lost the society any hope of patronage from the proprietors.7
The APS election was fitting reward for Franklin’s long efforts, starting with the Junto, to found a learned society in Philadelphia. He would be reelected annually until his death in 1790. The APS president was no mere ornament; the letter notifying Franklin of his election stated that the other officers “hope for your Patronage and assistance.” Franklin was expected to woo foreign members, the great and the good who, flattered at the Philadelphia society’s attentions, would promote it to learned societies in their home countries. Franklin accepted the charge. He would disseminate the first volume of the society’s Transactions (1771) to British learned societies and individuals.8
Franklin was also revisiting several questions about physical circulation. On his 1766 tour of Europe, he encountered some interesting “Glasses from Germany.” These were pulse glasses, tubes filled with alcohol or ether and then sealed with a slight vacuum, that registered small gradations of heat by generating bubbles. Franklin had more sensitive versions made in London in 1768. He did not specify with whom he worked, but clearly, he was continuing to collaborate with artisans, as when he had encouraged Caspar Wistar’s production of glass electric globes in Pennsylvania.9
With these improved pulse glasses, Franklin could detect differently heated currents of air. “I bored a very small hole through the wainscot in the seat of my window,” he explained of what was, in fact, Mrs. Stevenson’s window. He placed the top of a pulse glass against the draft of cold winter air. The heat from the room was enough to generate bubbles from the bottom of the glass, despite its chilled top. All of Franklin’s “philosophical” visitors marveled at the sensitivity of the device. He himself could not decide whether the bubbles resulted from some heat-activated “subtil invisible vapor” within the fluid or whether they were heat—“fire”—itself.10
Either way, the pulse glass rekindled Franklin’s interest in using the atmosphere of a heated room to experiment with circulation. Shortly thereafter, he developed and mounted a damper in the fire-place he had installed at Craven Street a decade earlier. And by 1771, he perfected a vase-shaped metal stove that, like a Pennsylvania fireplace, consumed smoke rather than leaking it into a room. He used the device for three winters in London and then took it home to use in Philadelphia.11
Franklin also addressed new questions about fluids and circulation. He considered the formation of waves in the sea and raindrops in the sky. He wrote up new observations on electricity, perhaps reinvigorated by his ongoing correspondences with Joseph Priestley and John Canton. Franklin and Canton rhapsodized over news of a “beautiful” American experiment. In this investigation, Ebenezer Kinnersley, one of Franklin’s old electrical collaborators, used an electric charge to melt a fine wire, thus proving that electricity made “a hot and not a cold Fusion”—it was fire, all right. Then Franklin served on a Royal Society committee that investigated Canton’s claim that water and other liquids were compressible and that the compressibility depended on ambient temperature and barometric pressure. Franklin had earlier assumed that liquids were not compressible. But the committee verified the findings and voted Canton the 1764 Copley Medal, his second.12
In 1768, Franklin consolidated his own reputation as a philosopher by publishing an expanded edition of his writings. A fourth edition of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity appeared in December of that year. (It was not advertised for sale until the following month, so it bears a 1769 publication date.) This edition differed from its predecessors substantially, not least of all in size. It had tripled in length, growing from 154 pages in the third edition to 496 in the fourth. And the bulk of the volume was new, though it hardly exhausted what Franklin still had in manuscript form. Many of the new portions were in fact old letters that he had been meaning to revise before publishing them either in the Philosophical Transactions or in his own volume of essays. But “finding that he is not like to have sufficient leisure, he has at length been induced, imperfect as they are, to permit their publication.”13
In some cases, these letters had been waiting for Franklin’s attentions since the 1750s—no wonder his friends pleaded for their publication. (Franklin’s reticence may be why his letter on the Gulf Stream to Anthony Todd appeared neither in the 1769 edition of his writings nor in the succeeding one five years later.) Readers of the fourth edition of the Experiments and Observations enjoyed the freshness and spontaneity of Franklin’s unrevised essays; it all added to his seeming effortlessness. “There are not very many philosophical writers . . . who can suffer so little,” the Monthly Review concluded, “by appearing in an undress before the public.”14
The description of an undressed Franklin—lounging at home, wigless, turbaned, in banyan—was apt. Despite the fourth edition’s learnedly stout size, it had a warmer and more personal tone than the earlier versions, which had showcased letters on physical science written to fellow philosophers. The 1769 Experiments and Observations added letters meant for a popular audience and therefore a larger one. For example, the fourth edition contained eight of his letters to Mary Stevenson, which made public Franklin’s inclusion of women in the republic of letters.
He also included his classic essay on swimming in the fourth edition. Sometime before 1769, Franklin had written to a friend who assumed he was too old to learn to swim yet had new employment on the water, which he dreaded. Franklin reassured him that the skill would keep him safe, “to say nothing of the enjoyment in so delightful and wholesome an exercise.” His friend had a river at the bottom of his garden in London, “a most convenient place” to gradually master his fear. Like all swimming instructors, Franklin told his pupil to start with floating. The trick was to think of water as an element that naturally suspends the body, rather than one that might oppress and invade it. If the novice kept calm, Franklin assured his pupil, he could feel this. Franklin pointed out that freshwater had greater specific gravity than the trunk of the human body and saltwater had greater specific gravity than all of it. “You will be no swimmer,” Franklin cautioned, “till you can place some confidence in the power of the water to support you.”15
This definitive edition of the Experiments and Observations showed Franklin at his most confident. By including his “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” he noted his critical engagement with imperial affairs, but he went no further. And he finally published his first letter to Collinson, in which he acknowledged the gift of a glass electric tube that had started it all. Maybe he felt that he could finally admit he had had that assistance. His place within the Atlantic republic of letters was assured, as the other essays showed. They included Franklin’s corr
espondence with grand figures, including Lord Kames, and foreign worthies, such as Dalibard, who had done the sentry box experiment. 16
And Franklin was likewise completely at home among London’s learned circles. He attended Royal Society meetings and lectures and became a frequent guest at dinners of the Royal Society Club, an offshoot (more Junto than Library Company) where conviviality made the learned conversation go down sweetly. He also joined the Club of Honest Whigs, which met at a coffeehouse every two weeks. Formed by the water-compressing John Canton, this club mixed dissenting clergymen, men of science, and men of letters. The “Whig” in the club’s name indicated that its members favored some of the reformist politics of the day. (The opposing Tories favored tradition, meaning an established church and social hierarchy, both embodied in king and Parliament.) But the Club of Honest Whigs could hardly be termed daringly radical—it suited Franklin very well. 17
Abroad, his reputation continued to spread. In 1772, the Académie Royale des Sciences, the French equivalent of London’s Royal Society, elected Franklin an associé étranger (foreign member). He was one of only eight honorees, Franklin bragged to his son, and only because one of the previous eight had died. His French contacts now included Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, whose science was undistinguished but service to the Académie prodigious; Franklin followed the work of Le Roy’s brother, Pierre, who had developed a chronometer that was successfully tested at sea from 1771 to 1772.18
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