The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  3 The literatures on Franklin are enormous, and what appears below is necessarily selective, focusing on monographic studies.On science as public culture, the main works are Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1988); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992); Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (New York, 1992). These works have only scattered references to Franklin and do not consider imperial or transatlantic contexts for science.The best studies of Franklin’s science are specialized and tend to stress the electricity. See especially the foundational work of I. Bernard Cohen: “Introduction,” in Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, ed. I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), 3–161; Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (Philadelphia, 1956); and Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Another essential source is J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1979). Many other studies have also stressed Franklin’s electrical work, most recently Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (Berkeley, 2003), and Philip Dray, Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (New York, 2005). There is very little material on other aspects of Franklin’s sprawling work in science, but see Charles Tanford, Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General (Durham, N.C., 1989). Excellent studies of Franklin and public affairs (which nevertheless do not explain the place of science within his life) include Gerald Stourzh, Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy (Chicago, 1954); Paul W. Conner, Poor Richard’s Politics (New York, 1965); Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley, 1996); Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 2002); David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004); Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2004); and Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York, 2005).The “catalog of a life” approach is exemplified by Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938); H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2000); Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003); and J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin: Journalist, 1706–1730, and The Life of Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747 (Philadelphia, 2005), the first two of a projected seven-volume study of Franklin.

  4 Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv., “science” and “scientific.”

  5 Ibid., “scientist”; Steven Shapin, “The Image of the Man of Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge, 2003), 159–183.

  6 BF to PC, Sept. 1753, PBF, 5:69.

  Chapter 2

  1 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 2nd ed. (New Haven, 2003), 43, 268.

  2 Ibid. 50–51; Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 10 (1953), 3–19; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “Migrants and Motives : Religion and the Settlement of New England,” New England Quarterly 58 (1983), 339–383.

  3 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986), 14–15; Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89 (1999), 188–214.

  4 Autobiography, 52–53. The best overview of Franklin’s life in Boston is in Arthur Bernon Tourtellot, Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius, 1706–1723 (Garden City, N.Y., 1977).

  5 BF to Samuel Mather, May 12, 1784, Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 10 vols. (New York, 1905–1907), 9:208.

  6 Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Har vard (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), chaps. 1 and 2; William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994), 93–94.

  7 Autobiography, 53; Nian-Sheng Huang, Franklin’s Father Josiah: Life of a Colonial Boston Tallow Chandler, 1657–1745, APS Transactions 90 (2000), 73–74; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 60–65, 111–118 (on Boston’s economy).

  8 Huang, Franklin’s Father Josiah, 15–86; “Feb. 5, 1702/03,” The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 1:482.

  9 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996), 30–46; Stephen A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), esp. chap. 3; W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York, 1986), 4–5, 8.

  10 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1976), esp. chap. 6 (but cf. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making [Chicago, 1998], chap. 1); Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 94–13 3.

  11 Rorabaugh, Craft Apprentice, 6–7; Huang, Franklin’s Father Josiah, 60–62.

  12 Autobiography, 53.

  13 Genealogical notes, PBF, 1:lviii, lx; N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), 205–206, 636–639; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987), 30–33, 80–81, 290; Daniel Vickers, “Beyond Jack Tar,” WMQ 50 (1993), 418–424; Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London, 1995).

  14 PBF, 1:liv, lv (on Starbucks); Nathaniel Philbrick, Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602–1890 (Nantucket, Mass., 1994), 79 (on Starbuck store), chap. 11 (on Peleg Folger); Edward Byers, The Nation of Nantucket: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660–1820 (Boston, 1987); Edouard A. Stackpole, The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen during Two Centuries, 1635–1835 (Philadelphia, 1953), 37 (on Peleg).

  15 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York, 1967), 101.

  16 PBF, 1:liv, lv; Folger genealogy, PBF, 10:397–399; BF to Abiah Franklin, Oct. 16, 1747, PBF, 3:179–180; BF to Keziah Coffin, Aug. 29, 1765, PBF, 12:247; BF to [Jonathan Folger], Aug. 29, 1765, PBF, 12:248; BF to Jane Mecom, July 7, 1773, PBF, 20:290.

  17 BF to Jane Mecom, Jan. 9, 1760, PBF, 9:18.

  18 PBF, 1:lvii, lix, lx; Peter Franklin to BF, Feb. 21, 1765, PBF, 1 2:77; Autobiography , 79; PBF, 8:120 and illustrations that follow.

  19 Autobiography, 53–54; Benjamin Franklin (the elder), “Sent to My Name upon a Report of His Inclineation to Martial Affaires,” 1710, PBF, 1:4.

  20 N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York, 1996), 45; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 155–156, 163–169, 186–193.

  21 . Autobiography, 57.

  22 Rorabaugh, Craft Apprentice, 11–14.

  23 Johns, Nature of the Book, 74–108.

  24 Possible BF poetry, PBF, 1:6–7; Autobiography, 58–60.

  25 Autobiography, 62.

  26 Ibid., 61n; Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal: In the Marketplace, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence, R.I., 1971).

  27 William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 5–29; Spectator 1, no. 10, (1711) p. 54.

  28 Spectator, 7, no. 554 (1713), 543, and 8, no. 635 (1715), 424.

  29 Autobiography, 64.

  30 Ibid., 113–114.

  31 Ibid., 63–64.r />
  32 J. D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford, 1991); Richard Ollard, “The Navy,” in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 10, Companion, ed. Robert Latham (Berkeley, 1983), 285–287; Daniel A. Baugh, The British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), 100–102.

  33 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, esp. chaps. 3 and 4; Ira Dye, “Early American Merchant Seafarers,” APS Proceedings 120 (1976), 331–360; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 127–130, 312–316; Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, N.J., 1970), chaps. 6, 7.

  34 Autobiography, 64; Samuel Sturmy, The Mariners Magazine (London, 1669), poem by Henry Phillippes on p. 1.

  35 Autobiography, 64.

  36 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 75–104; Autobiography, 62–63.

  37 Tourtellot, Benjamin Franklin, 233.

  38 New-England Courant, Aug. 7–Aug. 14, 1721; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 345–366; James W. Schmotter, “William Douglass and the Beginnings of American Medical Professionalism : A Reinterpretation of the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy,” Historical Journal of Western Massachusetts 6 (1977), 23–36; Maxine Van de Wetering, “A Reconsideration of the Inoculation Controversy,” NEQ 58 (1985), 46–67; Margot Mi-nardi, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721–1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” WMQ 61 (2004), 47–76.

  39 NEC, Nov. 27–Dec. 4, 1721.

  40 Silence Dogood, no. 1, NEC, Apr. 2, 1722, PBF, 1:9–10; Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore, 1997), 16–33.

  41 NEC, Dec. 3, 1722.

  42 Silence Dogood, no. 13, NEC, Sept. 24, 1722, PBF, 1:42.

  43 Autobiography, 69.

  44 Ibid., 68–70.

  45 Ibid., 71.

  46 Ibid., 71–73, 81.

  47 Ibid., 75–76.

  48 Ibid., 77–78.

  49 Ibid., 81–83, 92–93.

  50 Ibid., 93.

  51 Ibid., 93–94.

  52 Ibid., 96, 99–101; Johns, Nature of the Book, 62–99.

  53 BF to Benjamin Vaughan, July 31, 1786, WBF, 10:531; Autobiography, 101.

  54 Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London, 1996), 98, 13 2–133.

  55 Autobiography, 96, 97.

  56 Ibid.; Anderson, Radical Enlightenments, 33–53.

  57 Autobiography, 97, 97n; Anderson, Radical Enlightenments, 33–53.

  58 Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 1–29; Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1997), 56–58, 60.

  59 Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 30–117; Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 201–244; Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York and Oxford, 2004); Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980).

  60 Feingold, Newtonian Moment, 118–141; Mary Fissell and Roger Cooter, “Exploring Natural Knowledge: Science and the Popular,” CHS, 134–139.

  61 Autobiography, 97; Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1988); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992).

  62 Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 1989); James E. McClellan III, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1985), chap. 2; Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), chap. 4.

  63 BF to Sir Hans Sloane, June 2, 1725, PBF, 1:54.

  64 Autobiography, 97–98.

  65 Ibid., 103–104, 105–106.

  66 Ibid., 106; “Plan of Conduct,” PBF, 1:99, 100.

  67 BF, “Journal of a Voyage,” 1726, PBF, 1:73, 98.

  68 Ibid., 83, 89, 94–95.

  69 Ibid., 85–90.

  70 Ibid., 93–95.

  71 Ibid., 95.

  72 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “gulf-weed.”

  73 BF, “Journal of a Voyage,” 89, 90, 93, 94, 95.

  74 Chronology, PBF, 1:lxxxvii; BF, “Journal of a Voyage,” 90.

  75 BF, “Journal of a Voyage,” 84–85, 88, 91.

  76 Ibid., 92, 93.

  77 Ibid., 95–96.

  78 Ibid., 97–99.

  79 Autobiography, 106.

  Chapter 3

  1 BF, “Journal of a Voyage,” 1726, PBF, 1:99.

  2 Autobiography, 107.

  3 BF epitaph, PBF, 1: 1 1 1.

  4 Proceedings of the Right Worshipful Grand Lodge . . . at Its Celebration of the Bi-centenary of the Birth of Right Worshipful Past Grand Master Brother Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 1906), 55–56; Autobiography, 116.

  5 Autobiography, 109, 116–118.

  6 “Standing Queries for the Junto,” PBF, 1:258–259.

  7 Ibid., 257; “Proposals and Queries to Be Asked the Junto,” [1732], PBF, 1:259.

  8 PBF, 1:113–114; Autobiography, 120.

  9 “The Busy-Body,” no. 1, American Weekly Mercury, Feb. 4, 1728/1729, PBF, 1:115–116.

  10 Letters of “Martha Careful” and “Caelia Shortface,” AWM, Jan. 28, 1728/ 1729, PBF, 1:111–113.

  11 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986), 145–167; Charles E. Clark and Charles Wetherell, “The Measure of Maturity: The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1765,” WMQ 46 (1989), 279–303; PG, Oct. 23, 1729.

  12 Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 (Princeton, 1968).

  13 PG, Apr. 22, 1731, and Dec. 14, 1731.

  14 Autobiography, 96, 96n.

  15 Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Centur y England (New Haven, 1958); Neal C. Gillespie, “Natural Order, Natural Theology and Social Order: John Ray and the ‘Newtonian Ideology,’” Journal of the History of Biology 20 (1987), 1–49; William B. Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge, 1990), 305–308.

  16 BF, “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World” [1732], PBF, 1:265; BF, “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, Nov. 30, 1728, PBF, 1:104, 105.

  17 BF, “Apology for Printers,” Pennsylvania Gazette, June 10, 1731.

  18 Ibid.

  19 PG, Dec. 8, 1737, Apr. 6, 1738, and May 18, 1738.

  20 Gary B. Nash, “Up from the Bottom in Franklin’s Philadelphia,” Past & Present, no. 77 (1977), 57–83.

  21 PG, June 15, 1732, Oct. 29, 1741, Aug. 4, 1748, and Sept. 7, 1749.

  22 Clark and Wetherell, “Pennsylvania Gazette,” 289–291; David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” WMQ 56 (1999), 243–272.

  23 David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 3–26, 87–114.

  24 PG, July 31, 1735 (on coffee), Sept. 8, 1737 (on oil), Nov. 16, 1734 (on soap). On advertisements of projects, see the discussion of Pennsylvania Academy below.

  25 PG, Mar. 21, 1734.

  26 PG, Dec. 12 and 26, 1734.

  27 PG, Dec. 29, 1730, and Jan. 5, 1731.

  28 PG, May 14, 1730 (on Boston), May 28, 1730 (on inoculation), Mar. 4 and 11, 1731 (on Philosophical Transactions), and July 8, 1731.

  29 PG, Nov. 30, 1732.

  30 PG, Jan. 6, 1737.

  31 Hugh Meredith, Dissolution of Partnership, [July 14, 1730], PBF, 1:175.

  32 PG, June 30, 1737; Deborah Franklin advertised other missing religious books in PG, Aug. 13, 1741.

  33 Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonr y and Politics in Eighteenth-Centur y Europe (New York, 199 1), esp. 3–22, 31–35; St
even C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 16–17 (for quotation), 25–41.

  34 Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 36–38, 41–43, 47–50, 56–57, 137; Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 3–4, 9–25, 36–41, 55.

  35 Bullock, Revolutionar y Brotherhood, 46–47; Accounts for Printing Business, 1748–1766, PBF, 3:271.

  36 PG, Dec. 8, 1730; Report of a Committee on By-laws for St. John’s Lodge, [June 5, 1732], PBF, 1:232.

  37 Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 50–52, 66–68.

  38 Autobiography, 130, 142.

  39 [BF], “A Short Account of the LIBRARY,” PBF, 2:308–309; Rules for Library Co. of Philadelphia, Dec. 12, 1763, PBF, 10:387.

  40 Autobiography, 143; Directors of Library Co. to John Penn, Aug. 8, 1738, PBF, 2:207; BF to WS, July 4, 1744, PBF, 2:412, 412n; PG, June 5, 1740 (see also PBF, 2:286n).

  41 Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago, 1999); Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 342–346; Frank A. Kafker, ed., Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Nine Predecessors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford, 1981); John Lough, The Encyclopédie (London, 1971), 1–19; E[phraim] Chambers, Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728), xxix, 202, 358. Franklin even reprinted Chambers’s description of Masons; see Proceedings of the Right Worshipful Grand Lodge, 61–62.

  42 Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), 337–356; Lough, Encyclopédie, 17–60, 85–91.

  43 BF to WS, Apr. 29, 1749, PBF, 3:379; BF to WS, May 9, 1763, PBF, 10:261; BF to Thomas Becket, Dec. 17, 1763, PBF, 10:393; BF to Charles Thomson and Thomas Mifflin, July 7, 1769, PBF, 16:171–172; Library Co. Committee to BF, Jan. 25, 1771, PBF, 18: 17; JP to BF, Apr. 19, 1771, PBF, 18:69–71 (on price list); BF to Library Co. Committee, PBF, 18:117–118; Library Co. to BF, Apr. 27, 1772, PBF, 19:117.