The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  44 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994).

  45 PG, Dec. 28, 1732; Poor Richard, 1734, PBF, 1:311; Autobiography, 145; Sheila Skemp, “Family Partnerships: The Working Wife, Honoring Deborah Franklin,” in Benjamin Franklin and Women, ed. Larry Tise (University Park, Pa., 2000), 19–36.

  46 Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York, 1977), 17, 25, 80–82.

  47 Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, 1979); Stowell, Early American Almanacs, 13–25, 76, 80–82.

  48 PR, 1733, PBF, 1:314, 315; PR, 1735, PBF, 2:9; PR, 1736, PBF, 2:137, 141.

  49 PR, 1744, PBF, 2:396; Martin Davies, Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (London, 1995), 39, 63.

  50 PR, 1733, PBF, 1:311. Richard Saunder, Franklin’s English prototype, had scoffed at astrology; see Capp, English Almanacs, 239.

  51 Anderson, Radical Enlightenments, 99–101. Confusingly, there was a real Titan Leeds, whose almanacs Jerman was claiming to publish; see Stowell, Early American Almanacs, 69, 72.

  52 PR, 1745, PBF, 3:3–4

  53 PG, Sept. 17, 1747 (PR), PBF, 3:236.

  54 Poor Richard Improved, 1748, PBF 3:250–251; PRI, 1749, PBF, 3:335; Franklin similarly regarded Francis Bacon as “the father of the modern experimental philosophy,” PBF, 3:339. See Anderson, Radical Enlightenments, 120–123.

  55 PRI, 1748, PBF, 3:250, 251; PRI, 1749, PBF 3:336; Alan D. McKillop, “Some Newtonian Verses in Poor Richard,” NEQ 21 (1948), 383–385; Anderson, Radical Enlightenments, 55–60.

  56 PRI, 1751, PBF, 4:90, 91; Edwin Wolf, 2nd, ed., The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia, 1674–1751 (Philadelphia, 1974), 5; Directors of Library Company to John Penn, Aug. 3, 1741, PBF, 2:312.

  57 Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, Glass: A World History (Chicago, 2002), chap. 5; Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, 1995), esp. chap. 5.

  58 Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th ed. of 1730 (New York, 1952), 15–16; J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1982), 5, 43–47; Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 112–117; I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (Philadelphia, 1956), 118–127.

  59 Charles E. Letocha, “The Invention and Early Manufacture of Bifocals,” Survey of Opthalmology 35 (1990), 226–235; AWM, Dec. 9, 1736.

  60 PG, Apr. 28, 1743, and Dec. 9, 1746; PRI, 1753, PBF, 4:406–408.

  61 PR, 1734, PBF, 1:358.

  62 PRI, 1757, PBF, 7:86.

  63 PRI, 1753, PBF, 4:408. The signature is from PRI, 1745, PBF, 3:4.

  64 Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 575–593; Thomas P. Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York, 1996).

  65 PR, 1741, PBF, 2:298–299; PG, Mar. 17, 1742; PG, Apr. 26, 1744.

  66 Wolf, Library of James Logan, xvii–xlv; Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 535–536; PG, Nov. 3, 1737 (see also PBF, 2:188n).

  67 Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 536–539.

  68 BF to James Logan, [1737?], PBF, 2:184–185; Logan to BF, Feb. 26, 1744, PBF, 2:401–402; BF’s preface to Logan’s Cato Major (1744), PBF, 2:405.

  69 Smyth, “The Life of Benjamin Franklin,” WBF, 10:489n; Proceedings of the Right Worshipful Grand Lodge, 90; BF, Some Observations on the Proceedings against the Rev. Mr. Hemphill (1735), PBF, 2:38; BF, afterword to [John Tennent], Every Man His Own Doctor (1736) , PBF, 2:155–158.

  70 PG, Dec. 30, 1736.

  71 BF to PC [1752?], PBF, 4:392–403; Paul C. Pasles, “The Lost Squares of Dr. Franklin: Ben Franklin’s Missing Squares and the Secret of the Magic Circle,” American Mathematical Monthly 108 (2001), 489–511.

  72 Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (New York, 1964), chap. 4; John Haskell Kemble, “England’s First Atlantic Mail Line,” pt. 1, Mariner’s Mirror 26 (1940) , 33–54.

  73 Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas, 39–46.

  74 Autobiography, 126, 127; editorial note, PBF, 2:178.

  75 Distribution of the mail, Apr. 1743, PBF, 2:377–378; BF to PC, May 21, 1751, PBF, 4:135.

  76 John Clyde Oswald, Benjamin Franklin, Printer (New York, 1917), chap. 13; Frank Lambert, “‘Pedlar in Divinity’: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, 1737–1745,” Journal of American History 77 (1990), 812–837.

  77 Autobiography, 179.

  78 “A PROPOSAL for Promoting USEFUL KNOWLEDGE,” May 14, 1743, PBF, 2:381; Autobiography, 193, 193n.

  79 [BF], Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Philadelphia, 1749), PBF, 3:415–417. The key Christian-naturalist works were John Ray’s Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) and William Derham’s Physico-Theology; or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from His Works of Creation (1713)

  80 BF to WS, July 10, 1743, PBF, 2:383–384; BF to WS, July 4, 1744, PBF, 2:409–410.

  81 Editorial note, PBF, 2:383n–384n; BF to WS, Jan. 31, 1757, PBF, 7:116; BF to WS, Aug. 19, 1784, WBF, 9:262.

  Chapter 4

  1 PR, 1747, PBF, 3:100; James N. Green, “Benjamin Franklin as Publisher and Bookseller,” in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, Del., 1993), 99.

  2 PR, 1747, PBF, 3:100.

  3 Simon Schaffer, “Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade,” in Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (London, 2002), 37–39.

  4 Autobiography, 63.

  5 Thomas Tryon, The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness; or, A Discourse of Temperance, 3rd ed. (London, 1697), 33, 43, 325.

  6 Ibid., 237–238, 247, 264, 265, and chap. 14; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1983), 291–292.

  7 Philippe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” WMQ 61 (2004), 609–642.

  8 Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York, 1957), 208 (Abiah Folger seemed suspiciously conversant with the Pythagorean trope about mad philosophers and their mad diets); Autobiography, 63. It is also possible, given that Franklin would eventually author a tract called The Way to Wealth, that he at some point read Tryon’s Way to Make All People Rich (1685) or his England’s Grandeur, and Way to Get Wealth . . . (1699).

  9 Autobiography, 87–88.

  10 Ibid., 101.

  11 Ibid., 99–100.

  12 Ibid., 149, 150; W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford, 1979); Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1999).

  13 Steven Shapin, “How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England,” in Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self Help Medicine and Hygiene, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Baltimore, 2003), 21–58.

  14 Ralph H. Major, “Santorio Santorio,” Annals of Medical History 10 (1938), 373–375.

  15 Autobiography, 73; [BF], Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Philadelphia, 1749), PBF, 3:417, 417n (on Arbuthnot and Sanctorius).

  16 Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv., “circulate” and “circulation”; Jerome J. Byle-byl, ed., William Harvey and His Age: The Medical and Social Context of the Discovery of the Circulation (Baltimore, 1979).

  17 Everett Mendelsohn, Heat and Life: The Development of the Theory of Animal Heat (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 29–34; S. Todd Lowry, “The Archaeology of the Circulation Concept in Economic Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974), 429–444; I. Bernard Cohen, �
��Harrington and Harvey: A Theory of the State Based on the New Physiology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 187–210; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), 174.

  18 Richard Striner, “Political Newtonianism: The Cosmic Model of Politics in Europe and America,” WMQ 52 (1995), 583–608; I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison (New York, 1995), 204–210, 215–230, 243–257. In this last work, Cohen cautioned against equating equilibriums with Newtonianism; assumptions about political balance had multiple sources.

  19 BF to JB, [Mar. 10, 1773], PBF, 10:103.

  20 J. L. Heilbron, “Franklin as an Enlightened Natural Philosopher,” in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin, 207; BF to JP, Sept. 19, 1772, PBF, 19:299–300.

  21 Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy (New York, 1988), chaps. 1–3 (for background), 245–247; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 223–230; Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago, 1982).

  22 Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, 1983); Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1988), esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

  23 Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (New York, 1999).

  24 Silence Dogood, no. 10, NEC, Aug. 13, 1722, PBF, 1:33.

  25 B. B. [BF], A Modest Enquir y into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency (1729), PBF, 1:144, 147, 149, 150.

  26 Ibid., 150; Autobiography, 124.

  27 “Articles of the Union Fire Company,” 1736, PBF, 2:150. See also Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, 139–140; W. A. Wetzel, Benjamin Franklin as an Economist (Baltimore, 1895), 18–22; Lewis J. Carey, Franklin’s Economic Views (Garden City, N.Y., 1928), esp. chaps. 1 and 6; Tracy Mott and George W. Zinke, “Benjamin Franklin’s Economic Thought: A Twentieth Century Appraisal,” in Critical Essays on Benjamin Franklin, ed. Melvin H. Buxbaum (Boston, 1987), 114, 116–118.

  28 “Proposals and Queries to Be Asked the Junto,” [1732], PBF, 1:260; PG, July 8, 1731.

  29 Ivan Hannaford, Race: The Histor y of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996), chaps. 1–6, quotation on p. 171.

  30 Ibid., chap. 7; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York, 1969), chaps. 2 and 5, Petty quotation on pp. 224–225; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York, 2002), quotation on pp. 162–163.

  31 S.v. “La Condamine, Charles-Marie de,” in Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, 1978), 15:217–272; PR, 1745, PBF, 3:5; PRI, 1750, PBF, 3:445.

  32 BF, Account of the New Invented Pennsylvanian Fire-Places (1744), PBF, 2:425; Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., “The Franklin Stove,” in I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 199–211; John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2004), 171–174, 180–183.

  33 BF, Pennsylvanian Fire-Places, 422, 425.

  34 Ibid., 422–423, 432.

  35 Ibid., 435, 438.

  36 PR, 1 733, PBF, 1:312.

  37 BF, Pennsylvanian Fire-Places, 422, 441.

  38 The six works were: Nicolas Gauger, La méchanique du feu (Paris, 1713), trans. J. T. Desaguliers as Fires Improv’d (London, 1715); Martin Clare, The Motion of Fluids, Natural and Artificial (London, 1737); Luca Antonio Porzio, De militis in castris sanitate tuenda (The Hague, 1739); [Hermann Boerhaave], Boerhaave’s Aphorisms (London, 1735); J. T. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (London, 1734–1744); Robert Boyle, Philosophical Works, ed. Peter Shaw (London, 1725).

  39 BF, Pennsylvanian Fire-Places, 422, 423.

  40 In his various letters and essays, Franklin discussed Boyle but not the other barometric expert, Evangelista Torricelli.

  41 J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1982), 22–35; Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996), 46–57

  42 Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 38–43, 47–50.

  43 F&N, pt. 3.

  44 See esp. J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1979), 63–73, chap. 14.

  45 BF, Pennsylvanian Fire-Places, 423; F&N, 366–368.

  46 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “atmosphere”; D. G. King-Hele, “The Earth’s Atmosphere: Ideas Old and New,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 26 (1985), 237–238, 247–253.

  47 BF, Pennsylvanian Fire-Places, 426, 440.

  48 F&N, 254–261, 269–276.

  49 Joyce E. Chaplin, “The Secret Lives of Plants,” Environmental History 10 (2005), 127–131; Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 57–59; Mendelsohn, Heat and Life, 75–80; D. G. C. Allan and R. E. Schofield, Stephen Hales: Scientist and Philanthropist (London, 1980), 10–19, 30–64, 122, 140; F&N, 278–279.

  50 BF to Josiah and Abiah Franklin, Sept. 6, 1744, PBF, 2:414.

  51 Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21 (1983), 1–43; BFS, 40–60, quotations on p. 44; Autobiography , 240.

  52 Autobiography, 117; Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 516.

  53 Editorial note, PBF, 2:379n; Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 515–516, 577–579.

  54 Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionar y America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), chap. 2; Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Alfred O. Aldridge, “Benjamin Franklin: The Fusion of Science and Letters,” in American Literature and Science, ed. Robert J. Scholnick (Lexington, Ky., 1992), 39–57; Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994).

  55 CC to BF, Oct. 1743, PBF, 2:386, 387n.

  56 Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 494–497, 559–567; E[phraim] Chambers, Cyclopedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728), list of subscribers.

  57 Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 67–73; Francis D. West, “John Bartram and the American Philosophical Society,” Pennsylvania History 23 (1956), 463–466, Bartram quotation on pp. 465–466; BF to CC, Nov. 4, 1743, PBF, 2:388; BF to CC, Apr. 5, 1744, PBF, 2:406.

  58 BF to CC, Oct. 16, 1746, PBF, 3:92n (on Gronovius).

  59 CC to BF, Sept. 17, 1744, PBF, 2:416; BF to CC, Oct. 25, 1744, PBF, 2:417–418.

  60 Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 567–575; Brooke Hindle, “Cadwallader Colden’s Extension of the Newtonian Principles,” WMQ 13 (1956), 459–475.

  61 BF to CC, Nov. 28, 1745, PBF, 3:46.

  62 BF to CC, Aug. 15, 1745, PBF, 3:33.

  63 Autobiography, 196; BF to CC, Aug. 15, 1745, PBF, 3:34–35; BF to CC, Nov. 28, 1745, PBF, 3:47.

  64 BF to CC, Aug. 15, 1745, PBF, 3:35 (on heart), 37 (on warmth).

  65 BF to John Lining, Apr. 14, 1757, PBF, 7:188; BF to DF, Feb. 19, 1758, PBF, 7:380.

  66 BF to CC, [Feb. 1746], PBF, 3:67–68.

  67 Ibid., 69, 70.

  68 Ibid., 67.

  69 BF to WS, Feb. 12, 1745, PBF, 3:13.

  70 T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004), pt. 1.

  71 “A Tradesman” [BF], Plain Truth (Philadelphia, 1747), PBF, 3:195, 197, 199.

  72 Ibid., 190, 204.

  73 Autobiography, 183, 187; “Form of Association,” PBF, 3:205–212.

  74 “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” 1747, PBF, 3:123, 124, 125.

  75 PR, 1735, PBF, 2:
7.

  76 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998); Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, 2000), esp. chap. 5.

  77 BF to PC, Mar. 28, 1747, PBF, 3:119; I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), intro., 57–77.

  78 Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 160–171.

  79 Ibid., 171–174.

  80 Ibid., 179–182.

  81 F&N, 290–299; Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 159–179.

  82 James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

  83 BFS, 40–65; BF to PC, Mar. 28, 1747, PBF, 3:115–117, 118–119; Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments, intro., 57–61.

  84 Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments, 60n, 62n, 401–408; J. A. Leo Lemay, Ebenezer Kinnersley: Franklin’s Friend (Philadelphia, 1964), esp. chaps. 3 and 4.

  85 PG, June 5, 1740; “A Short Account of the Library,” [July 13, 1741], PBF, 2:309; on West Wing of the State House, now Independence Hall, personal communication of Karie Diethorn, chief curator, Independence National Historical Park, Dec. 22, 2005; Edwin Wolf, 2nd, “At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin”: A Brief History of the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1731–1976 (Philadelphia, 1976), 6.

  86 BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:127.

  87 Ibid.

  88 Ibid., 128–129.

  89 Ibid., 130–132; Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 187–190.

  90 BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:131–132.

  91 BF to PC, July 28 1747, PBF, 3:157–162; Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 187–192; Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), 88–91.

  92 BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:131; BF to PC, July 28, 1747, PBF, 3:158. Franklin had used images of balance earlier; see BF to [Thomas Hopkinson?], Oct. 16, 1746, PBF, 3:85–86.