The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  The thermometer was just the beginning. On Franklin’s 1785 voyage, his grandnephew, Jonathan Williams, had tested two other devices. Franklin had probably advised Williams and certainly found the results worth discussing in his “Maritime Observations.” One instrument was “an empty bottle, corked very tight,” that was sent down deeper and deeper until, at thirty-five fathoms, the water pressure “forced in the cork.” Williams hauled up the resulting water sample from that depth, “six degrees colder than [water] at the surface.” Then Williams deployed a sea gauge modeled on Stephen Hales’s instrument, described in the Philosophical Transactions that had contained one of Franklin’s early electricity pieces. Williams’s version was a keg with “a valve at each end, one opening inward, the other outward.” The bottom valve leaked, but the imperfect sample from eighteen fathoms was nevertheless “12 degrees colder than at the surface.” It was an early example of deep-sea exploration. The technology remained little improved until the second half of the nineteenth century.73

  Ocean currents, physical circulation, seaborne observations, Atlantic weather, charts, definitions of place and distance—by returning to some of the oldest questions of his career, Franklin had come full circle. His earliest ambitions had been either to attend college or run away to sea. The “Maritime Observations” shows that, in a remarkable way, he had done both—he had combined natural philosophy with engagement in the public affairs of the Atlantic world. (He inspired others to think of the Gulf Stream in political terms. In 1790, Tom Paine declared the French Revolution “as fixed as the Gulf Stream.” Jonathan Williams claimed the current’s waters were as distinct as “the colours of red, white and blue.”) 74

  The Poupard engraving illustrates Franklin’s engagement in Atlantic affairs. In the lower right-hand corner, Franklin points at the sea, personified as Neptune. Moreover, he appears to be haranguing Neptune, perhaps enlightening the god on some aspect of his own watery medium. And why not? In many earlier paintings and engravings, Franklin extends an insistent finger and consorts with deities. The Poupard engraving is less polished than the British and European images that had created these ideas of Franklin. In a charming way, however, it brings to America a grand Old World tradition of celebrating Franklin’s power over the physical and social worlds of the Atlantic.75

  But however brilliant its insights and however ambitious its collection of data, the “Maritime Observations” seems unfinished. The temperature readings are all there, but they remain substantially unanalyzed; the patriotic focus on a small corner of the Atlantic world seems forced, given Franklin’s ongoing interest in the whole planet. Perhaps, had Franklin had more time, he could have followed up with another and more synthetic essay.76

  Perhaps . . . the word lingers over Franklin’s life in science. One political crisis after another, from the Seven Years’ War to the formation of the United States, had prevented his full-time pursuit of natural philosophy. The “ifs” proliferate: if he had had time to do more experiments, if he had accepted patronage from Britain’s great and good, if he had stayed in England even after the colonies broke away.

  Then there’s the biggest if. What if the American Revolution had never happened? Franklin is so associated with that event that it may seem improper for anyone—and unpatriotic for an American—to ask the question. But Franklin’s hallowed status as Revolutionary and Founder may obscure how the Declaration of Independence and War of Independence did a kind of damage to his life. What if, instead, he had been able to settle permanently in London? He would have become a fixture among British men of letters and followed all the new developments in electrical and chemical demonstrations. Might he have bequeathed to later “scientists” still other insights? Would we still have a sense that the electrical experiments of the 1740s were his intellectual peak? Or might he have continued to develop, fully, as a natural philosopher? The evidence from the 1760s through the 1780s points in too many directions.

  Without the American Revolution to distract him, perhaps Franklin might have been an even greater figure in the sciences; perhaps not. Every great life should have a mystery at its center—this is Benjamin Franklin’s.

  IN THE SPRING of 1787, one year after his “Maritime Observations” appeared in the APS Transactions, Franklin was longing yet again for the one thing he lacked—repose. He hoped to get it either by resigning his gubernatorial office or, failing that, “by ceasing to live.” But just then, a convention met in Philadelphia to discuss the writing of a new constitution for the United States. There was no escape : Franklin became the convention’s oldest delegate.77

  He was not always perceived as its most diligent. (He was literally caught napping.) Characteristically, he refrained from addressing the full assembly and instead worked more quietly in committees and with private conferences. And at least some of Franklin’s fellow delegates were not sure he was qualified as a legislator. A Georgia delegate stated that “Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age . . . the very heavens obey him. . . . But what claim he has to be a politician, posterity must determine.” 78

  Franklin did make some contributions to the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, those contributions were interesting evidence of how he thought science would assist politics and how it would not or even should not.

  Franklin was revealingly silent on the clause of the constitution that actually mentioned science. Article I, Section 8 gave the federal government power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The section was the origin of U.S. patent law, and Franklin disapproved. Other delegates drafted, argued, and revised the clause; the convention’s most famous “Author and Inventor” did not help them.79

  Franklin thought authors and inventors should get credit for their creations but not benefit financially. Certainly, he wanted credit for what he had invented. Having worn his bifocals for decades, he had made sure to tell a London friend, in 1785, exactly what they were and how they worked. He had even provided a diagram and corrected the opinion of an eminent London instrument maker and optician about their function. But he claimed no right to any reward for his “double Spectacles.” And he had even earlier stated, in his autobiography, that he had never wished to patent his Pennsylvania fireplace. He had allowed another man to do so (he got “a little Fortune by it”) because he believed “that as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours.”80

  Nor did Franklin assist two rival patent seekers who were trying to develop a working steamboat as the Constitutional Convention met. The steamboat would play a major role in the new nation. Steam power, like ballooning, represented another attempt to conquer distance. Vehicles powered by steam could move faster and against powerful currents. As Americans threatened to take over at least part of a continent and to find the means to ascend the Mississippi River, the promise of steam power was immense. It was not yet clear, however, if the new inventions would fulfill their promise.

  James Rumsey and John Fitch had each designed steam engine–powered boats, and each sought support anywhere he could find it. They both curried favor from the various states. Fitch also angled for federal help. He demonstrated his boat on the Delaware River while the Constitutional Convention met—it was a pleasant diversion for the delegates and invaluable advertising for Fitch. Both Rumsey and Fitch approached the APS and solicited its fabled president. Franklin let Fitch copy the part of his manuscript “Maritime Observations” that discussed using a jet of water to power boats. But he worried that the steamboat’s construction and operation were far too expensive. In the end, Rumsey got APS support to go to England, where he could buy a Watt and Boulton steam engine for his experiments and, if they were successful, apply for a British patent. Franklin’s letter of introduction for Rumsey explained his emigration as necessary because “another Mech
anician of this Country is endeavouring to deprive him of such Advantage, by pretending a prior Right to the Invention.”81

  Franklin still assumed that knowledge was cumulative and collaborative, that it should be made public for the good of all. Newton had modestly claimed that he could see further than others only because he “stood on the Shoulders of Giants.” Franklin, Newton’s acolyte, continued to see things that way. But even he, the old Newtonian, accepted that older and wealthier countries, such as England, should have patent law. That was why he encouraged Rumsey to go there to work on his steam engine. In the more complicated and wealthier countries of Europe, patent laws encouraged innovation—and the state could pay for the encouragement. But the happy mediocrity of the United States could not support anything comparable. Younger Americans saw things differently. The constitution’s clause on intellectual property was approved and still exists.82

  Maybe the nation could not yet help science, Franklin thought, but science could help the nation. The field of political arithmetic gave him one last chance to define his new nation, particularly its system of representation.

  The drafters of the Articles of Confederation had not accepted political representation based on population, as Franklin had recommended. But the men who drafted the Constitution considered the possibility more carefully. At the convention, debate over systems of representation reached an impasse. There was agreement that two houses, upper and lower, should represent the states. But how should representation—and contributions to national finances—be apportioned among the states? Delegates from big states proposed that population should determine numbers of national representatives in both houses, upper and lower; delegates from small states feared they and their descendants might, within such a system, be trampled on.

  Franklin urged compromise yet insisted that “the number of Representatives Should bear some proportion to the number of the Represented.” He proposed a ratio of one member of the lower house for every 40,000 inhabitants. This idea died in committee. But a ratio between population and representatives in the lower house, balanced by a fixed number of senators for each state, eventually passed. This “Great Compromise” finally rejected the “virtual representation” that had precipitated the Revolution. The size of a state’s population would determine its political power in the House of Representatives, as well as its contribution to national taxes. The delegates also proposed a national census, to be taken every ten years. The first was done in 1790, eleven years before the former home country, Great Britain, managed to do the same.83

  Franklin had long believed that population—a growing body of producers and consumers—was the true measure of America’s power. The U.S. Constitution enshrined that idea. The document is an excellent example of how the science of political arithmetic, in which Franklin had been a pioneer, had become, at the end of his life, an accepted tool of politics.

  The constitutional debate also gave Franklin an opportunity to argue for the value of all workingmen, including sailors. They were still considered the lowest of the low because they were among the least likely to own property. Other delegates in Philadelphia proposed property requirements for the franchise. Franklin rose in protest and uncharacteristically addressed the entire convention. A property requirement would, he lamented, disqualify the maritime heroes of the Revolution, who had received little enough for their efforts. (Congress had offered land bounties to many people during the war but never to sailors, not even naval officers.) Franklin insisted that workers were, no less than property holders, qualified to vote. “The late war is a glorious Testimony in favor of plebian Virtue,” he lectured. “I know that our Seamen prisoners in England refused all Allurements to draw them from their Allegiance—they were threatened with Halters but refused.”84

  Franklin’s claim was not strictly true. (Some seamen had defected.) And it did not convince the other delegates, who went on to draft property requirements for voters. But it was an amazing preview of the momentous debates that would occur in the age of Andrew Jackson over extending the franchise to all free white men. Franklin’s argument marked his long series of debts to sailors and his even longer memory of the value of ordinary working people. True, sailors were no longer as valuable for their knowledge as they had once been. Scientific expertise was changing that. But Franklin did not believe that this demotion meant that working men were any less capable as political actors—he continued to wrap sailors in the sentimental patriotism he had used in wartime to denounce their imprisonment. Above all, he held true to his old idea that the ability to work defined a person’s value.

  He had been quiet and even sleepy during parts of the convention. But Franklin managed to get in the last word. As the moment arrived for a final vote on the document, he delivered the convention’s final speech. He did so out of fear that disagreements among the delegates might drag debate out even further and eventually prevent a strongly favorable vote for the Constitution.

  In his September 17 oration, Franklin distinguished between opinion and system. He confessed himself unable to agree with each word of the constitution. But that was not the point. “When you assemble a Number of Men, to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom,” he told his fellow delegates, “you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion.” Opinion inescapably characterized the human condition, as Franklin had emphasized in his 1731 “Apology for Printers” and had reiterated in his 1766 interview in Parliament on the Stamp Act.85

  As he had on those occasions, Franklin insisted that opinion did not need to divide people. Indeed, he said, it might help the delegates see their handiwork as contingent, necessarily and productively contingent. Franklin acknowledged that political theorists might wish to create within the United States a “System.” He thus used a word associated with natural science, one that implied a theoretically coherent scheme for human governance. But this goal was an impossible one. Unlike the laws of nature, the constitution would never elicit universal assent. It could never be perfect. But Franklin was pleased to find “this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does.” He urged any who, like himself, believed “in his own Infallibility” to vote to accept the document. A unanimous vote would be far more authoritative than a divided outcome. By confronting their opinions, the measures of their infallibility, delegates could achieve consensus.86

  It was Franklin’s final public statement on the connections between science and human affairs. Throughout his life, he had considered many definitions of knowledge. He had considered the place of opinion in public life. He had used probability to examine questions of life and death. He had sometimes used a Newtonian language of nature’s laws. In the 1740s, Franklin had made Polly Baker declare her belief in the laws of nature and nature’s God; in 1776, he may have helped Thomas Jefferson put similar words into the Declaration of Independence. But a few years later, surrounded by French Physiocrats, Franklin had overheard French mayflies, ephemera, declare the futility of any political system. Those short-lived, garrulous insects had evidently followed him back to Philadelphia, where they buzzed in his ears yet again.

  Franklin, the first scientific American, argued that the United States should be founded on a reasonable acceptance of doubt. He questioned whether certainty had any place in public affairs and pleaded for toleration of a variety of opinions. People would always disagree with each other, as he had explained in his “Apology for Printers,” but their differences did not have to prevent civil exchange with each other. By restating the idea in 1787, Franklin cleverly acknowledged the disagreements among the delegates yet identified a way for them to transcend them honorably. He thus guaranteed that the U.S. Constitution would gain the acceptance of all those who had helped write it. Immediately after his speech, his motion was carried with the unanimous vote he had wanted.

  But Franklin let opinion overrule him in another and more tragic way. However admirably he had deployed political arithmetic to defend ordinary
white people, he did not use it to champion the rights of the truly oppressed. The final constitution, on which the signature of “Benj. Franklin” appeared, included the notorious “three-fifths” clause. Until the Civil War wiped it away, that clause meant that each slave would count as three-fifths of a free person for the purposes of representation and taxation. A related clause declared that unless they paid taxes, Indians did not count at all. There is reason to believe Franklin was critical, even regretful, about the three-fifths clause. But he may have agreed that Indians should be excluded from the new nation.

  He was very careful not to mention slavery at the Constitutional Convention—of all issues discussed there, it was the one most likely to threaten the equanimity and compromise he sought. But in the year the convention met, he made a public statement against slavery when he agreed to serve as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. As the organization’s president, Franklin helped prepare a mission statement. In this document, he went well beyond criticism of the slave trade and attacked slavery itself.

  Moreover, the statement insisted that people of African descent had the capacity to acquire not just liberty but also “civil liberty.” This wording implied that they or their descendants might become citizens. The Republic could not, Franklin believed, contain populations doomed to permanent inferiority and exclusion. So slaves had to be freed. But their mere manumission could not undo the effects of slavery, “an atrocious debasement of human nature.” Education and other assistance had to “promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellow-creatures.” It was the most radical opinion Franklin ever expressed, one that only a handful of his white contemporaries shared.87