The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  Franklin expected this haul to sweep American sailors from British prisons; the British drove him mad with a slow series of exchanges, not always for Americans. To speed things up, he claimed there were more British prisoners of war in France than Americans in Britain. It was perhaps an exaggeration but one consistent with his repeated claim that, in terms of population, America always had the edge.82

  The war entered its final, critical stage after the spring of 1780, and the exchange scheme collapsed. Franklin shifted his energies to improving conditions in the British prisons where sailors languished. Several Britons, especially Member of Parliament David Hartley, assisted him. But so closely was Franklin identified with sailors’ welfare that even British prisoners petitioned him for help. He responded by working to improve their rations. He was appalled when one assistant absconded with relief funds, breaking a “sacred Trust” to help the helpless.83

  In one of Europe’s most hierarchical societies, Franklin defended some of the lowliest of workers. It was an astonishing contrast to the disgust he had felt for the striking sailors who had supported John Wilkes in London several years earlier. Franklin refused to consider seamen, even those he rescued, as subordinate workers. No one else treated sailors this way. When the crew of the Ranger muttered against him, John Paul Jones angrily insisted on his authority, whatever the cost. Franklin, by contrast, recommended that Jones release command of the Ranger to someone else and then start afresh with another crew and ship. Franklin also rejected attempts to draft former prisoners into specific tasks. He cautioned against “ordering them to go on board one Ship or another.” “They are Freemen as soon as they land in France,” he insisted, “and may inlist with which Captain they please.”84

  Word spread that Franklin was the seaman’s friend. (One prisoner anxiously noted in his diary a 1781 rumor that Franklin had died.) Even fellow commissioners, such as Adams and Lee, who criticized nearly everything else Franklin did respected his commitment to prisoners of war. At Passy, bushels of letters arrived from seamen, and Franklin never complained of these “begging” letters. He also welcomed fugitive sailors; his accounts show small sums given to men who somehow made their way to Passy. Whatever they privately thought of the old landsman, seamen treated Franklin as their superior and patron and, if they were American, insisted on their patriotism. In one typical letter, addressed to “Dr. Franklin Sir,” the authors asked “the favour to Come Before your honour” in order to prove themselves “amaricans,” not Englishmen.85

  The plight of American sailors was an excellent propaganda tool—all of Franklin’s writings about imprisoned seamen reflected his partisan view of their ordeal. In an age of revolution, slavery had become a catchphrase for tyranny, and maritime workers benefited. If sailors, once valued for their heads, had become hands—mere workers—Franklin’s patronage gave them hearts. He helped to consolidate a new stereotype: the patriotic American tar, scourge of tyrants.

  But Franklin weakened his case when he favored members of his maritime family, especially those whose political loyalties were inventively broad. He knew he was suspected of nepotism (he employed a son-in-law, a grandnephew, and a grandson in official U.S. business). And he probably worried for his maritime kin; the British detained one relation, Isaac All, and briefly imprisoned another, Peter Collas. Above all, Franklin was painfully aware that his mother’s home, Nantucket, was notorious for collaboration with the British. The island’s Quakers refused as a matter of principle to take a side in the war; its merchant mariners were reluctant to do so, lest it reduce profits.86

  Franklin’s family troubles had begun in 1775, when an American privateer seized the ship of one Nantucket relative, Captain Seth Jenkins, thinking it a British vessel. At a Philadelphia prize court in 1776, Franklin had testified that Jenkins was American, and his cousin got his ship back. But Franklin must have warned his relations that he did not trust them, as became clear in 1777 when his “most Effectionate Kinsman,” Seth Paddack (or Paddock), requested “a Comission for me in my Country’s Service.” “I will Tell you this,” Paddack emphasized, “I will never Bring Disgrace on my Self or the family I Belong Too.” His “attachment to [their] Country” was “well Known,” he reminded Franklin, “altho you once Douted it,” perhaps referring to a conversation or lost letter in which Franklin had questioned his patriotism.87

  The Nantucket swarm then followed Franklin to France. Both Seth Paddack and Timothy Folger ended up there at different points. And another relation, John Folger, managed to compromise Franklin when he lost some U.S. dispatches. Folger had agreed to carry the correspondence to Congress but was tricked into leaving his official package with a British spy who, after extracting the documents, replaced them with blank paper and then resealed the bundle. The theft was discovered only when Folger trustingly delivered the packet. After an embarassing inquiry, Folger was acquitted of spying. Again, a family connection survived a crisis; Folger thereafter transmitted Franklin’s private letters, including at least one to Tom Paine.88

  The accusation of loyalism particularly dogged America’s whalers, who themselves became wartime prey. Whaling was extremely valuable—Americans, Britons, and the French all wanted whale products. Whale oil and bone served many of the functions petroleum and plastic do now, and demand for them was growing rapidly. Most experienced whalers came from the Maritime Provinces in Canada and from New England—including Nantucket, where Franklin had so many relatives. The industry was moving to the South Atlantic, down to Brazil, on its way to the Pacific of Herman Melville’s era, and Americans, particularly Nantucketers, led the way.

  The war in fact fostered battle over whaling and fishing. The president of Congress instructed American ships to attack “the British Fishery.” The American commissioners championed their own sea hunters; of the prey off the coasts of Brazil, they claimed that “none but the Americans” had “learned the Art of killing that sort of Whales.” But “American” whalers started turning up on non-American ships, even British ones. Did they voluntarily serve? Had they been impressed? Franklin received several letters from Nantucketers who presented themselves as loyal Americans. They swore that if they served on British whalers, they did so to avoid a worse fate: serving on British warships and fighting fellow Americans.89

  For the moment, Franklin chose to believe them. Consider a remarkable contrast. He was partial toward seamen and regarded them as patriots even if there was evidence to the contrary, but he was indifferent to his loyalist son, William Franklin. The former royal governor of New Jersey was imprisoned for two years; his father never said or wrote a word on his behalf. Meanwhile, the elder Franklin lavished time, words, and money on the ordinary tars who were, for him, the truer patriots.

  GIVEN his political preoccupations, it is amazing that Franklin had any time to think of science. That he made time showed his genuine interest but also a grim determination to keep his hand in somehow. War and philosophy were, however, even stranger bedfellows than Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

  Certainly, nation and nature competed for Franklin’s attention. Except to a favored few, he gave up answering all letters on science, instead writing “Answers in the Margin,” as he did with one among a paralyzing number of inquiries about lightning rods. He was nonetheless able to cram in a remarkable amount of reading. He attended lectures and experiments when he could and discussed new theories with his friends. At one point, Le Roy reminded his “Dear friend” of “almost a cart Load of Books of the Royal academy for you here, at my House.”90

  Franklin’s critics—including his fellow commissioners—complained that he spent too much time on philosophy. He entertained and enjoyed the French, they grumbled; meanwhile, he neglected to tell them, his colleagues, of key developments, and his papers were a jumble. Adams declared that Franklin’s life was “a scene of continual discipation.” Franklin spent his mornings, Adams relayed, being visited by “Phylosophers, Accademicians and Economists,” then took tea at various ladies’ salon
s. Some of this was true—Franklin himself confessed his untidiness. But whatever his haphazard methods of diplomacy, he worked at it steadily, in contrast to his experiments and observations. Therein lies an excellent and irrefutable measure of Franklin’s patriotism: the growing obsolescence of his work in science.91

  Bad news arrived in 1777 when Alessandro Volta (for whom the volt would be named) challenged Franklin’s theory of electricity. In 1775, Volta, an Italian correspondent of Beccaria and Priestley, had perfected a device that Johannes Wilcke had invented in the 1760s. Volta’s “electrophore” sandwiched an electrostatic cake (a blend of turpentine, resin, or wax) between a fixed metal plate below and a rotating wooden shield covered with tinfoil above. When the cake was rubbed (while the lower plate was grounded), it generated and condensed a charge (like a Leyden jar), but its fixed metal plate also retained a charge—it did not decay.92

  The device defied Franklin’s definitions of electricity as a fluid that slipped in and out of an equilibrium. Jan Ingenhousz carefully broached the news to Franklin in November 1776, noting that “as the present troubles may possibly have prevented you getting some knowledge of this discovery, I think it may [my] duty to give you a Slight idea of its nature.” This was the main subject of Ingenhousz’s letter—only toward the end did he add, “You will be surprized to hear that I am maried,” which apparently hardly mattered in comparison.93

  Ingenhousz sent his letter to Philadelphia after Franklin had left for France. It caught up with him in January 1777, around the time a Frenchman rushed to deliver the same news. Soon thereafter, Georgiana Shipley, an earlier recipient of Franklin’s pet squirrels, wrote him that Sir William Hamilton (volcanologist and, nominally, Emma Hamilton’s husband) had told her all about it at a London dinner party. Franklin really was the last to know about the attack on his theories, and he could not believe it, anyway. “I thank you for the Account you give me of M. Volta’s Experiment,” he wrote Ingenhousz. He dismissed it as “only another Form of the Leiden Phial” but confessed himself “puzzled by one Part of your Account.” This was the critical part: “‘Thus the electric Force once excited may be kept alive Years together’; which perhaps is only a Mistake.”94

  It was no mistake, as many others kept eagerly telling Franklin. But he was too busy to do experiments with the electrophore to test his theories of electricity on it. Matters were made worse in May 1777, four months after Ingenhousz’s news of the electrophore had reached Franklin, when lightning struck the Purfleet gunpowder magazine and Benjamin Wilson started his assault on Franklin’s theory of lightning rods. Franklin had insisted that he would and could let his ideas fend for themselves. His friends in London, however, thought he and his ideas might need a little help.

  Ingenhousz tackled the electrophore. In 1775, Henry Baker had endowed an annual lecture on physical science at the Royal Society. (The Bakerian Lecture is still the society’s premier lecture in physics.) Ingenhousz was invited to give the lecture in 1778, and quite generously, he used the opportunity to defend what he described as Franklin’s “almost generally received theory” of positive and negative electrical charges. Ingenhousz had tested an electrophore. He noted that when its electrostatic cake was charged, so was the metal plate below it. Yet if the two were separated, one could not add charge to the other—each was more or less stable. From this finding, Ingenhousz deduced that each of the two charged parts of the electrophore bore a different charge, positive in the metal and negative in the cake. The two kinds of electricity were known to repel each other—that must explain why the metal plate and the cake could not transfer their charges to each other. These findings confirmed that Franklin’s definition of electricity as an “inherent quality” of matter still held.95

  Ingenhousz’s lecture appeared in the volume of the Philosophical Transactions that appeared in 1779. That volume also contained “Sundry Papers relative to an Accident from Lightning at Purfleet.” These papers included Benjamin Wilson’s long account of his experiments to prove blunt and short lightning rods more effective than the long, pointed variety Franklin still recommended. In his essay, Wilson did not shrink from naming and attacking his adversary. “Behold!” he wrote, lightning had struck, “contrary to Dr. FRANKLIN’s assertion.” In his account of his experiments, Wilson included some diagrams and a plea to the king. Then followed a shorter statement signed by the society’s president, John Pringle, as well as Joseph Priestley and others. The statement championed Franklin’s pointed rods.96

  The Royal Society thoroughly examined challenges to Franklin’s most important ideas about electricity, and the fellows who were Franklin’s friends came down firmly on his side. And no one, not even Wilson, stated the obvious—the philosopher at the center of the fracas was formally an enemy. Not even the Gentleman’s Magazine , which synopsized the Philosophical Transactions, stooped to mentioning the political context. Instead, that London periodical simply noted that “when philosophers thus differ, many will think themselves safest with no conductors [lightning rods] at all.” Though he was distant from London and unable to do his own experiments, Franklin maintained his place in the heart of its learned community.97

  To make his own contribution to the republic of letters, Franklin had to reuse earlier ideas and writings, some of them decades old. For his circle at Passy, he reworked an essay, “The Morals of Chess,” that he had probably written for the Junto. He continued to extol pointed lightning rods and coauthored a 1780 paper with Le Roy that advocated gilded points for the Strasbourg Cathedral. This was also the year Franklin wrote his flatulent assessment of the Newtonian-Cartesian debate. That bagatelle may have expressed some irritation over the busy self-importance of philosophers who did not have new and unprecedented republics to tend.98

  The oldest idea out of which Franklin got the most mileage was that of America’s fast-growing population. His French friends must have been impressed with Americans’ sexual diligence. Franklin’s “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” had been circulating, in French, since Barbeu-Dubourg had published it in his 1773 edition of the Franklin Oeuvres. And Franklin never missed a chance to claim that the busily breeding Americans were thoughtfully forming a prize consumer market for any Europeans who took them on as trading partners. In his widely reprinted “Comparison of Great Britain and America as to Credit, in 1777,” he restated that “natural Propagation” doubled the American population every twenty-five years. “Accession of Strangers” would speed the rate to every twenty years, but it was not necessary.99

  And Franklin finally confessed that Polly Baker was none other than he. Although many French readers (including Voltaire) knew Polly was a fiction, some people still thought Miss Baker existed. Perhaps she was now a grandmother. The credulous Abbé Raynal had included her story, as authentic, in his Histoire philosophique et politique des . . . deux Indes (1770). The truth came out in a three-way conversation between Franklin, Raynal, and Silas Deane. Deane knew the story was a hoax (though he did not know its author). He tried to convince Raynal that Baker did not exist, and Franklin listened to the two men argue until, doubtless bursting with laughter, he told all. “My word,” Raynal conceded to Franklin, “I am more pleased to have included your tales in my work than the truths of others.”100

  Franklin continued to play the teasing and even flirtatious American political arithmetician. To his charming but chaste Madame Brillon, he confessed belief in not ten commandments but twelve, far more generous in number and moral intent than what Moses bore down from Sinai. “The first was, Increase and multiply” and the twelfth “that ye love one another.” Franklin professed himself “always willing to obey them both whenever I had an Opportunity,” which he hoped offset his sin of “Coveting my Neighbour’s Wife,” meaning his correspondent. When the Lafayettes had a daughter in 1782, christening her Virginie to honor the American republic, Franklin congratulated their “Acquisition of a Daughter” and their choice of America’s “most antient State” for her name. He ho
ped the Lafayettes would “go thro the Thirteen” states to complete their family. Franklin did worry, though, for the souls destined to bear the names “Massachusetts & Connecticut . . . too harsh even for the Boys.”101

  As he tossed over his stock of old ideas, nature itself saved Franklin. Shortly after six o’clock in the evening on December 3, 1778, he and other amazed Parisians could be found outside, staring up at the sky. The aurora borealis, a brilliant celestial display, was illuminating France. The flashes were brightest for a surreal fifteen minutes, but the effects lasted over three hours, glowing even after midnight. Nature was kind—only after the Franco-American treaties were signed in 1778 could Franklin have ventured back into natural philosophy.

  The northern lights had fascinated Franklin for most of his life. In 1737, he reported on them in the Pennsylvania Gazette and continued to ponder them over the succeeding decades. Le Roy and Franklin discussed what they had seen on that spectacular evening in Paris. They agreed that others (including Denis Diderot) had supplied only “ridiculous Explanations,” such as the idea that the earth’s core was made of a glass that affected its atmospheric magnetism, somehow making electrical rays shoot through the sky.102

  Convinced he could do better, Franklin stole four days from diplomacy and produced an essay and two diagrams. He drafted his thoughts in English and then translated them, with clumsy literalness, into French. Two friends, the Abbé de La Roche and then Le Roy, corrected the French, and Le Roy read the essay to a public session of the Académie des Sciences in April 1779.103