Franklin, who had no spare hours to do anything unless he had good reason, picked this moment to chart the Gulf Stream a second time. This chart would assert, once and for all, America’s sovereignty over the North Atlantic. But it would also offer the ocean to France. No longer an eyebrow over an imperial British smirk, the Gulf Stream would become a hand across the sea.
For Franklin, the chart was a personal diplomatic statement, a promise to honor the special relationship between the United States and France that he had helped create in 1778. To produce the chart, he collaborated with French publisher Le Rouge, with whom he had already made a wartime map of North America’s embattled western territories. Le Rouge’s participation indicated some expectation of French demand for such a chart. And Franklin hoped it would help establish a Franco-American packet-boat system.127
The Franklin/Le Rouge chart got to the point by shrinking the Atlantic. It reproduced the northwest corner of the 1768 Mount and Page chart, the section that focused on the Gulf Stream proper. The imperial rivalry over North America, evident in the 1768 Folger and Franklin chart (and the 1772 De Brahm chart), was updated, slightly, in the 1782 chartwork. But for a sprinkling of Spanish names in the south, the landscape was peppered with English (as with the “English Factori” on “James Baye”) and French names. The names of the thirteen states designated the coast as U.S. territory, but “CANADA ou NOUVLE FRANCE” revealed France’s hope of regaining some of the territory it had lost in the Seven Years’ War.
Franklin clearly wanted the chart to be used because he included sailing instructions on it. These were Timothy Folger’s directions but rendered into a French so gropingly literal that one pities the mariners who tried to follow them. In fact, Franklin worried that they could not follow the instructions at all. When Michel Guillaume de Crèvecoeur (alias J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur) was put in charge of U.S. affairs at the French Ministry of the Marine, he helped draft a March 1783 proposal for a packet-boat service between the two allies. Crèvecoeur gave Franklin a copy of his suggestion, and Franklin returned it with comments and a copy of the Le Rouge chart. He noted that the chart’s “directions” were “imperfectly translated” (they were crossed out) and rendered them again in English. His secretary entered most of these notes on the left and bottom margins of the chart; Franklin wrote a note, to the right, on the Gulf Stream’s temperature, his first statement of his research on this matter. The bottom notes referred to Nantucket whalers, the local experts.128
Franklin’s second chart of the Gulf Stream. George-Louis Le Rouge (c. 1782). FRANKLIN COLLECTION, YALE COLLEGE LIBRARY.
Franklin did not, however, name his cousin as an informant. In fact, the chart marked the end of the friendship between the two men, a casualty of war. Folger had visited Franklin in July of 1781, evidently to obtain a U.S. passport so he could return to America. Several pieces of paper might have changed hands: Folger gave Franklin a bond of £3,000 and a written oath of loyalty to the Republic. He may then have handed over a manuscript chart of the Gulf Stream (or a copy of the 1768 chart)—he got his passport, and Franklin got a prototype for the Le Rouge chart. But something had already altered their personal connection. This possible exchange (quid pro quo?) then ended contact between the two cousins. The stiff note in which Folger requested the passport was his last extant letter to Franklin and came after a telling eleven-year gap in their correspondence. The note was addressed simply “Sir” and signed “Yr. Most Obedt. Servt,” nothing like the affectionate and rambling tone of their earlier letters.129
What had happened? Franklin may have worried that a Nantucketer was unlikely to be a loyal American, whatever he swore; he may have conveyed his concern to his cousin. And indeed, in the autumn of 1781, Jonathan Williams warned his uncle that Timothy Folger stood accused of “illicit Trade with the Enemy with your knowledge & support.” Folger, it was said, operated with the awkwardly simultaneous protection of the British and of Franklin—an expansive interpretation of Nantucket’s divided sovereignty. Surely, Franklin regretted his decision to favor a kinsman with an American passport.130
He had stood by many a sailor during the war, but now, Franklin briskly disowned his cousin. Should Folger use his passport to trade with the British, he said, “let our People catch him and hang him with all my Heart . . . for I always think that a Rogue hang’d out of a Family does it more Honour than ten that live in it.” If anyone found him guilty of anything illicit, Franklin added, “they are welcome to hang me into the Bargain.” There is no sign that the cousins ever met again. Folger’s hydrographic collaboration with a famous natural philosopher had ended.131
The war may have made it difficult for Franklin to pursue the sciences, but it had destroyed Folger’s attempts to do so. The family crisis showed too well how science and war may have stimulated each other yet could damage each other as well. The break between Folger and Franklin also made clear that work and status affected a person’s aspiration to philosophy. Within the republic of letters, genteel natural philosophers could fret, if not dissemble, over their wartime political ties. Those who depended on nature for a livelihood had no such leeway. The sea gave Folger his living, and its commercial activities compromised him. Franklin had long thought that the Atlantic would connect people, not divide them. In 1768, he had created an unprecedented chart of the Gulf Stream to make that point. But in 1781, he discarded the very person who had helped him make the chart. He was charming and ruthless, that fur-capped American philosopher.
Chapter 9
FINAL ACCOUNTS
IMAGINE Franklin on his terrace at Passy—head tilted back, double reflection of a globe floating over the lenses of his spectacles, delighted smile underneath. He was seeing his first balloon. On November 21, 1783, the Passy terrace was crowded with onlookers. John and Sarah Jay were visiting; two weeks earlier, their daughter Ann had been born in the Franklin household. John Adams’s teenage son, John Quincy, was also on hand. They were fortunate in their access to a prime viewing spot—thousands of Parisians had desperately elbowed their way into any and all promising places. Everyone had waited for hours as the launch was repeatedly delayed. Then, as the sun sank, the balloon finally rose—the first aerial flight to carry human beings successfully. Someone at Passy asked what possible good the device might serve. Franklin shot back, “À quoi sert un enfant qui vient de naître?” (What good is a newborn baby?). It was a remarkable compliment, perhaps, to tiny Ann Jay.1
And it was a somewhat surprising declaration for a seventy-seven-year-old natural philosopher. Franklin was well aware that he was quite the opposite of a newborn baby. He would live seven years more, but not knowing that, of course, he assumed he might die any day. His newborn baby comment revealed his ambivalence over his stage of life. He expressed hope for the future—immediate utility was no measure of anything, let alone science. Yet even old things—or people—had their value. In his late years, Franklin had, after all, managed to master French, the language in which he made his celebrated retort about balloons and babies.
In this late phase of his life, Franklin hoped to be free, finally and completely, from public affairs. U.S. independence and the end of the mission in France offered him a return to private life. Many friends urged him to use the reprieve to finish his autobiography—they knew the world would want a record of his amazing rise to celebrity. But however flatteringly put, these pleas reminded Franklin of his mortality. “I have begun to write two or three Things which I wish to finish before I die,” he wrote Ingenhousz in early 1785, “but I sometimes doubt the possibility.”2
First manned aerial flight, seen from Franklin’s terrace. Bartelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, Première Suite . . . (1784). HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
Franklin seemed determined to spend as much effort on living his life, whatever remained of it, as he did on telling the story of it. Why write about past accomplishments if future ones were still possible ? Yet the past accomplishments were definitely the bird in the han
d, the things worth advertising to the world. Franklin tried to do a bit of everything—cover his past, do something with his remaining days, consider the future. The results reveal an attention divided, even as the new prospects for science particularly enchanted the old man of letters.
IT MAY SEEM APT that the United States achieved its independence just as the sciences were entering a new phase. Recognizable fields of inquiry—chemistry and physics in particular—were emerging, as were men who specialized in them. The world now had a new republic and new ways of thinking, for a new age. Too much was occurring; looking back, we can only quickly review some of the highlights, much as Franklin did.
Chemical investigators were turning “air,” in its multiplying forms, into different gases. Franklin followed the major developments, which included Lavoisier’s eclipse of Priestley. The Frenchman coolly redefined many of Priestley’s findings, as when he dismissed the concept of phlogiston. Priestley had argued that combustion burned phlogiston away from substances; in 1772, Lavoisier demonstrated that combustion made the substances heavier and so must be joining something (oxygen) to them, not taking something (the ultimately phantom phlogiston) away. Then, in 1782, Lavoisier redid some of Priestley’s experiments with different states of air and demonstrated that water was a compound of inflammable air (hydrogen) and oxygen. Lavoisier concluded that no form of matter was ever lost; it only changed its configuration in relation to other materials.3
These and other experiments began to transform heat, that slippery fluid, into caloric units. Caloric measurements determined the amount of heat generated or transferred in different material reactions. These units could be standardized, from one demonstration to another. Explanations of the cause of heat also multiplied; experimenters examined chemical reactions, as well as physical causes such as friction. Again, Franklin followed these developments. (His theories of heat as a specific, fluid substance that could be conducted through various materials had indeed informed some of the relevant research that followed.) He discussed Joseph Black’s theory of latent heat with a correspondent. And he probably also knew of Lavoisier’s widely discussed Mémoire sur la chaleur (1783), or report on heat, a calorimetric study of animal heat and of combustion.4
Like heat, electricity took on a new form as well. It became less subtle substance than measured phenomenon. Volta had, with his electrophore, prompted men of science to define electricity in standard units. Electrical equipment became both more complicated and more precise, with electrometers and new electrophores appearing regularly. Experimenter Robert Symmer did some surprising things with two electrostatically charged stockings (one black and one white). Independently, each garment showed signs of electricity ; for instance, they repelled other objects. But the charged socks had no such effect on each other—they simply hung there, limply. How, Symmer asked, could they be thought to each have a different charge? Franklin’s two quantities of electricity, positive and negative, again were suspect. Electrical and chemical experiments intersected; demonstrators discovered that electricity could, when it sparked the right gas, cause combustion. Medical practitioners tested electricity’s effects on animals and humans. Electricians, including Franklin, were fascinated by electric eels. The wriggling creatures were perhaps more evidence of electricity’s constitutive place within matter, including living matter.5
The science starts to look familiar to us. Chemical demonstrations identified what we would regard as real elements (oxygen and hydrogen), as well as their actual combinations (water). We also glimpse more precision in experimentation, hence all those caloric and electric units. The subtle fluids of Franklin’s day were modernized, assigned qualities that strike us today as more “scientific.” The beautiful circulations of Franklin’s fluids were in retreat, replaced by precision and control over heat, gases, and electricity. Discrete questions began to dominate scientific discussion and publications. Polymaths were vanishing, and specialists were emerging.
Was this progress? Maybe not. At the time, no one, including Franklin, could have known whether these new ideas would carry the day. Consider three possibilities they considered: the microscope could help identify the nature of heat, magnets might have therapeutic value, and aerial travel was perfectly possible. Early on, Franklin and his contemporaries regarded the first two notions as plausible and only subsequently labeled them nonsense and quackery. And they were stunned that the final concept turned out to be valid. As we review Franklin’s engagement with the sciences after a long lapse, it is useful to remember this context—the wonderful yet bewildering new era that opened up at the end of his life, which would offer an opportunity for him to decide which camps he would be in.6
First, consider the microscopic heat. In the late 1770s, Jean-Paul Marat had trained sunlight through a microscope and onto heated objects. He claimed that the projected wavelike pattern was visible evidence of the fluide igné (igneous fluid) that Lavoisier had defined. The Académie Royale endorsed this work in 1778, which inspired Marat to launch a more ambitious essay on light, attacking Newton’s theory of color. Marat courted Franklin, sending him essays under an alias and inviting him to demonstrations. When Franklin finally turned up in 1779, Marat focused the solar microscope on the American’s notoriously unwigged head. The light that reflected off the philosopher’s brainpan supposedly resembled the rays attributed to “Genius.” The genius himself was too careful (or busy) to render any judgment on Marat’s new ideas about light. But other academicians decreed Marat’s experiments inconclusive and his critique of Newton unconvincing.7
Second, consider the medical magnets. They were the tools of Franz Anton Mesmer, who originated the idea of “animal magnetism.” Mesmer was a healer from southern Germany whose therapy—dubbed mesmerism—was supposed to encourage the circulation of magnetic fluid into and within the body. Blockage of this magnetism was said to cause a variety of ailments, which Mesmer cured by touching patients with rods or his hands. At his clinic in Vienna, he arranged private treatments as well as collective sessions. In the latter, patients (or curiosity seekers) gathered around a trough filled with metal. Participants would grasp rods sunk into the trough, and magnetism, Mesmer claimed, would then flow into them. These séances featured soothing music, often emanating from a pressure-sensitive instrument such as a piano or glass armonica. Mesmer was a gifted performer on the armonica, which emphasized the delicate power of his hands.8
When he opened shop in Paris in 1778, he was initially friendly with Franklin. But Ingenhousz had informed Franklin that his friends in Vienna doubted Mesmer’s powers. Franklin strategically took an interest in the healer’s armonica playing, not his therapy. And when Mesmer demonstrated his medical talents at the Académie, he failed to gain its endorsement. But his patients were undeterred, and he soon had a cult following, even among academicians. Some doctors and men of science found it odd that Mesmer kept his procedures mysterious—no man of science was supposed to do that. And many people found it odd that, when Mesmer treated female patients, he sat very close to them and stroked them very attentively, eliciting responses remarkably like those of sexual climax—certainly, no gentleman was supposed to do that. To his critics, Mesmer had (or pretended to have) the wicked power over nature that others had suspected in Franklin.9
Those fascinating, armonica-playing natural philosophers. In hindsight, we believe that Franklin was a benevolent genius and Mesmer an opportunistic quack. But at the time, each man dodged some of the same criticisms. They were labeled charlatans, magicians, and seducers. True, Franklin had only kissed the ladies (maybe some of the very same ladies) whom Mesmer stroked. Both, however, were known as charmers of the fair sex. Moreover, Franklin had also been using his charms to seduce the French into a new war against Britain; nothing Mesmer did was quite that dangerous.
The lurid gossip surrounding Mesmer prompted an official inquiry in 1784. Both the Académie and the Société Royale de Médicine formed committees to investigate him, but the Académie contingent,
which included Franklin, Lavoisier, and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (the advocate of the guillotine), took charge. The tests they administered compared separate groups: people who thought they were being magnetized but were not, and those who thought they were not but were. The investigators also agreed to be magnetized to see what, if anything, it felt like. At Passy, Franklin assembled a group of subjects. He, his grandsons, and an officer, possibly John Paul Jones, were all mesmerized.
The results indicated that people who thought they were being magnetized, whether they were or not, had the strongest therapeutic responses. Expectations, not magnets, had medical value. In a published report, the committee denounced Mesmer. But the investigators noted the curative powers of the human imagination, what is known today as the placebo effect. And an unpublished report, submitted to the king, showed concern mostly over Mesmer’s behavior toward his female patients, not over the therapy. The investigators were using science to denounce conduct. Franklin himself had admitted, in a 1784 letter, that “Expectation” and even “Delusion” could harmlessly cure people. Yet he sat in judgment on Mesmer and decided against him. “It is surprizing,” Franklin clucked to Ingenhousz, “how much Credulity still subsists in the World.” A print showed Franklin leading the academicians against Mesmer and the demons of ignorance—note Franklin’s spectacles and his finger pointed at the committee’s report, the one that was published. One notorious charmer routed another and quite possibly had his own reasons for doing so. 10
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