The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  93 BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:131–132; BF to PC, July 28, 1747, PBF, 3:157–158; “Opinions and Conjectures,” [July 29, 1750], PBF, 4:16.

  94 BF to PC, Apr. 29, 1749, PBF, 3:362.

  95 Autobiography, 241; BF to Thomas Darling, Mar. 27, 1747, PBF, 3:114–115; BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:133–134, 133n.

  96 BF to PC, Mar. 28, 1747, PBF, 3:118, 119; BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:132–133.

  97 BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:132; BF to CC, June 5, 1747, PBF, 3:143.

  98 “Articles of Agreement with David Hall,” [January 1, 1748], PBF, 3:263–267.

  99 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), 531–535, quotation on p. 532.

  100 Simon Schaffer, “Experimenters’ Techniques, Dyers’ Hands, and the Electric Planetarium,” Isis 88 (1997), 456–483; BF to PC, May 25, 1747, PBF, 3:127.

  101 BF to PC, July 28, 1747, PBF, 3:158; BF, “Opinions and Conjecture,” PBF, 4:17 (on knuckle) and 33 (on purgative); BF to [John Franklin?], Dec. 25, 1750, PBF, 4:82–83 (on “Blow”).

  102 BF to John Mitchell, Apr. 29, 1749, PBF, 3:365–367, 369–370.

  103 Ibid., 369–372, 376.

  104 BF to PC, Apr. 29, 1749, PBF, 3:364, 365; BF to CC, Aug. 30, 1754, PBF, 5:427 (on winter as season for electrical experiments).

  Chapter 5

  1 BF to John Lining, June 17, 1758, PBF, 8:110.

  2 Autobiography, 185.

  3 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1990), chaps. 1–3, quotations on p. 51; David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999), 1–31; J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, 2001), chaps. 2 and 3.

  4 Harley, New Nature of Maps, chaps. 4 and 6.

  5 Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89 (1999), 188–214; Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, 1997), 21–31.

  6 Walter Klinefelter, “Lewis Evans and His Maps,” APS Transactions, n.s., 61 (1971), 5, 7–8; BF to WS, May 2 2, 1746, PBF, 3:77.

  7 Editorial notes, PBF, 3:48n, 116–117, 392n–393n; Klinefelter, “Lewis Evans and His Maps,” 9, 12, 17.

  8 Klinefelter, “Lewis Evans and His Maps,” 3–16.

  9 Ibid., 21, 30–31.

  10 William E. Lingelbach, “Franklin and the Lewis Evans Map of 1749,” American Philosophical Society Yearbook 1945 (Philadelphia, 1945), 63–73.

  11 BF to Jared Eliot, July 16, 1747, PBF, 3:149.

  12 BF to Eliot, Feb. 13, 1750, PBF, 3:463–464.

  13 Ibid., 464, 465.

  14 BF to James Bowdoin, Jan. 24, 1752, PBF, 4:257, 258; BF to Jared Eliot, Apr. 12, 1753, PBF, 4:466; BF to PC, Sept. 1753, PBF, 5:68.

  15 BFS, chap. 6; editorial note, PBF, 4:360–366; BF, “Opinions and Conjectures,” [July 29, 1750], PBF, 4:19–20.

  16 J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1982), 194–195; PC to BF, July 11, 1750, PBF, 4:5–6; editorial note, PBF, 4:126.

  17 Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 50–55; John Gascoigne, “Ideas of Nature: Natural Philosophy,” CHS, 295–302; Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002).

  18 Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 195–196.

  19 Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1752 (Franklin would mention in his Autobiography , p. 243, that Nollet had considered him to be an imagined person—this was perhaps a faulty memory of the London article); editorial note, PBF, 4: 360–366; Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), chap. 3.

  20 [BF], “To the Royal Academy of * * * * *,” [after May 19, 1780], PBF, 32:399–400.

  21 BF to James Logan, [Nov. 7, 1748], PBF, 3:325.

  22 BF to CC, Jan. 1, 1754, PBF, 5:185–186, 186n.

  23 BFS, 98–99.

  24 PG, Oct. 19, 1752, PBF, 4:367.

  25 Cited in BFS, 69.

  26 BF to John Mitchell, Apr. 29, 1749, PBF, 3:374.

  27 PRI, 1753, PBF, 4:408–409.

  28 Ibid.

  29 BF to PC, Sept. 1753, PBF, 5:69–76; BF to John Lining, Mar. 18, 1755, PBF, 5:524–525; BF to PC, Nov. 22, 1756, PBF, 7:24; BF to Ebenezer Kinnersley, Feb. 20, 1762, PBF, 10:37–38.

  30 Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed., Dictionar y of Scientific Biography (New York, 1970–1990), 3:51.

  31 Heilbron, Early Modern Physics, 200–202.

  32 BF to John Mitchell, Apr. 29, 1749, PBF, 3:372; BF to John Perkins, Feb. 4, 1753, PBF, 4:433.

  33 BF to CC, Apr. 23, 1752, PBF, 4:298–299.

  34 BF to CC, Feb. 26, 1763, PBF, 10:204.

  35 BF to CC, Apr. 23, 1752, PBF, 4:299, 300. He would restate this many times.

  36 I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), chap. 4.

  37 BF to PC, July 29, 1750, PBF, 4:9.

  38 Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York, 1957), 22.

  39 Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 625–626.

  40 BF to President and Council of the Royal Society, May 29, 1754, PBF, 5:334.

  41 Ezra Stiles, “Oratio,” [Feb. 5, 1755], PBF, 5:500; James Turner’s words of 1758 are cited in PBF, 8:59n.

  42 Charles Woodmason, “To Benjamin Franklin Esq.,” PBF, 5:60; Richard Brooke to BF, June 27, 1755, PBF, 6:95; “Musing near a Cool Spring,” [1756?], PBF, 7:74; Ebenezer Kinnersley to BF, Mar. 12, 1761, PBF, 9:293.

  43 Ezra Stiles to BF, Feb. 26, 1766, PBF, 13:175; John Walsh to BF, July 1, 1773, PBF, 20:267.

  44 Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften . . . (Berlin, 1902–[1997]), 1:472; Peter Hinrich Tesdorpf, “Poem in Eulogy of Franklin,” PBF, 16:122.

  45 Woodmason, “To Benjamin Franklin Esq.,” 60; Kinnersley to BF, Mar. 12, 1761, 285; Penuel Bowen to BF, Nov. 6, 1771, PBF, 18:244.

  46 PRI, 1749, PBF, 3:339; BF to CC, Oct. 11, 1750, PBF, 4:68.

  47 Word searches for “Lisbon” (none by Franklin relating to the 1755 earthquake) and “earthquake(s)” (six instances by Franklin, all as news, not commentary), Papers of Benjamin Franklin on CD-ROM, Yale University; editorial notes, PBF, 4:125, 317n; Elizabeth Hubbart to BF, Feb. 16, 1756, PBF, 6:404, 404n; Dennis R. Dean, “Benjamin Franklin and Earthquakes,” Annals of Science 46 (1989), 481–495; Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2002), 240–250.

  48 BF to PC, Sept. 1753, PBF, 5:69–70; BF to PC, Apr. 18, 1754, PBF, 5:262.

  49 BF to DF, June 10, 1758, PBF, 8:94. On Peter and Jemima, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 25.

  50 James Alexander to BF and BF to Alexander [1753?] (both read before the Royal Society in December 1756), PBF, 5:178–180.

  51 Ibid.

  52 BF to PC, May 21, 1751, PBF, 4:134, 135.

  53 Ibid., 135; General Post Office: Appointment of BF and William Hunter, Aug. 10, 1753, PBF, 5:18, 18n.

  54 Autobiography, 246, 246n.

  55 See PRI, 1750, PBF, 3:438–441, and PRI, 1754, PBF, 5:182–183.

  56 [BF], “To the Printers of the Gazette,” PG, May 9, 1751. See also BF, petition to the House of Commons, [Apr. 12–15, 1766], PBF, 13:241–242.

  57 [BF], “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 1751, PBF, 4:227–229, 233.

  58 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002), 8–9; Lewis J. Carey, Franklin’s Economic Views (Garden City, N.Y., 1928), chap. 3; Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938), 216 (on the Iron Act); SFF, 156–164; Andrea A. Rusnock, “Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simo
n Schaffer (Chicago, 1990), 49–68.

  59 “Increase of Mankind,” 229, 233–234. Or, as Franklin emphasized in 1754, the colonies “being separated by the ocean” from the mother country, “they increase much more its shipping and seamen”; see BF to William Shirley, Dec. 22, 1754, PBF, 5:450.

  60 PRI, 1751, PBF, 4:91, 93; “Increase of Mankind,” 233–234.

  61 “Increase of Mankind,” 228, 230–231, 234. On Franklin’s continuing antipathy to slaves, see Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore, 1997), 158–167, but also Waldstreicher, Runaway America.

  62 “Increase of Mankind,” 234.

  63 Ibid., 234, 234n; BF to PC, [1753?], PBF, 5:160.

  64 PRI, 1751, PBF, 4:97, 98.

  65 BF to PC, May 9, 1753, PBF, 4:479–485.

  66 BF to John Franklin, Jan. 2, 1753, PBF, 4:409; CC to BF, Nov. 29, 1753, PBF, 5:122.

  67 BF to WS, Apr. 14, 1745, PBF, 3:21, 22n; BF to WS, Dec. 11, 1745, PBF, 3:49; book advertisements in PG, May 31, 1744, Oct. 2, 1746, and Apr. 9, 1747.

  68 Mary Blewitt, Surveys of the Seas: A Brief History of British Hydrography (n.p. [Great Britain], 1957), 18–26.

  69 Norman J. W. Thrower, ed., The Three Voyages of Edmond Halley in the Paramore, 1698–1701 (London, 1981); Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1996), chap. 4; Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (Oxford, 1998), chaps. 3 and 10.

  70 BF to WS, July 4, 1744, PBF, 2:410, 410n—411n; PC to BF, June 14, 1748, PBF, 3:300; editorial note and petition to king, [Nov. 18? 1752], PBF, 4:380–383; PC to BF, Jan. 26, 1754, PBF, 5:191; editorial note, PBF, 10:85–88.

  71 Editorial note, PBF, 4:382–383; BF to John Pringle, May 27, 1762, PBF, 10:99.

  72 BF to PC, [1751], PBF, 4:240, 241; BF to Eliot, May 3, 1753, PBF, 4:474 (on trade winds).

  73 BF to John Perkins, Feb. 4, 1753, PBF, 4:esp. pp. 433—437, quotation on p. 434.

  74 BF to PC, Aug. 25, 1755, PBF, 4:167.

  75 Adolph B. Benson, ed., Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770, 2 vols. (New York, 1937), 1:155; BF to John Mitchell, Apr. 29, 1749, PBF, 3:376; BF to John Perkins, Feb. 4, 1753, PBF, 4:431.

  76 BF to WS, Apr. 18, 1754, PBF, 5:264.

  77 “A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hales, F.R.S. from Captain Henry Ellis, F.R.S.,” Philosophical Transactions, 1751–1752, 47 (1753), 211–213; “A Letter to the President, from Stephen Hales, D.D. and F.R.S.,” June 8, 1751, Philosophical Transactions, 1751–1752, 47 (1753), 215.

  78 “Letter to Hales from Ellis,” 213.

  79 Bruce A. Warren, “Deep Circulation of the World Ocean,” in Evolution of Physical Oceanography: Scientific Surveys in Honor of Henry Stommel, ed. Bruce A. Warren and Carl Wunsch (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 8; “Letter to Hales from Ellis,” 213, 214.

  80 “Letter to Hales from Ellis,” 213.

  81 BF to William Watson, Apr. 19, 1754, PBF, 5:265 (vol. 47 of Philosophical Transactions); BF to PC, July 27, 1750, PBF, 4:8 (Hales essay in Philosophical Transactions ); Pennsylvania Assembly to Governor, [May 15, 1755], PBF, 4:40.

  82 Diana and Michael Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer—The Life of William Dampier (New York, 2004).

  83 William Dampier, A Discourse . . . , in Dampier, A Collection of Voyages in Four Volumes (London, 1729), 2:45, 100, 103–104, 105; Anna Neill, “Buccaneer Ethnography: Nature, Culture, and Nation in the Journals of William Dampier,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2000), 165–180.

  84 Thrower, Voyages of Halley, 60; Dampier, Discourse, 49–58.

  85 BF to John Perkins, Feb. 4, 1753, PBF, 4:429, 431 (including notes 7 and 8), 441.

  86 Pennsylvania Hospital: Report of the Weekly Committee, Nov. 24, 1753, PBF, 5:116–117; Charles Hargrave to BF, Mar. 6, 1761, PBF, 9:282 and 282n.

  87 BF to Perkins, Feb. 4, 1753, PBF, 4:442; Falconer cited in Jonathan Raban, ed., The Oxford Book of the Sea (New York, 1993), 119–131.

  88 BF to PC, June 26, 1755, PBF, 6:84.

  89 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (New York, 2000).

  90 Carl Van Doren, “Introduction,” in Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736–1762, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Philadelphia, 1938); Autobiography, 209.

  91 Autobiography, 234—235.

  92 BF to PC, Nov. 5, 1756, PBF, 7:13; Autobiography, 238.

  93 BF to Jared Eliot, Apr. 12, 1753, PBF, 4:466; William Shipley to BF, Sept. 1, 1756, PBF, 6:499.

  94 PC to BF, [May 27, 1756?], PBF, 6:449.

  95 Edgar L. Pennington, Thomas Bray’s Associates and Their Work among the Negroes (Worcester, Mass., 1939); D. G. C. Allan and R. E. Schofield, Stephen Hales: Scientist and Philanthropist (London, 1980), 65—76.

  96 BF, “A Plan for Settling Two Western Colonies,” 1754, PBF, 5:458.

  97 WS to DF, Dec. 13, 1757, PBF, 7:296—297; BF to DF, Jan. 14, 1758, PBF, 7:359–360.

  98 Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 25, 144.

  99 Autobiography, 252, 255—256.

  100 Ibid., 256; Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (New York, 1964), 45.

  101 Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London, 1994), 99, 147–148.

  102 BF to DF, Nov. 22, 1757, PBF, 7:272–274.

  Chapter 6

  1 BFP (1962), 47–50, 236–250; Brandon Brame Fortune and Deborah J. Warner, Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C., 1999), chap. 4.

  2 Chronology, PBF, 7:xxvi–xxvii; WF to BF, Mar. 2, 1769, PBF, 16:60.

  3 James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton, to BF, Nov. 24, 1766, PBF, 13:509-510; Morton to BF, [Dec. 11, 1766?], PBF, 13:518–519, 518n; Society of Arts to BF, June 10, 1761, PBF, 9:322.

  4 Everett Mendelsohn, Heat and Life: The Development of the Theory of Animal Heat (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 102–104.

  5 BF to John Lining, Apr. 14, 1757, PBF, 7:184—185; BF to Lining, June 17, 1758, PBF, 8:108–109.

  6 Ibid., 110, 111. Franklin proposed a device of connected pieces of wood and metal that would indicate the different materials’ conductivity. See the sketch in the upper left corner of the illustration of page 169.

  7 BF to Lining, June 17, 1758, PBF, 8:110–111; Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 595–596.

  8 BF to Lining, June 17, 1758, PBF, 8:111.

  9 William Watson to the Royal Society, Dec. 20, 1752, PBF, 4:390; BF to Ebenezer Kinnersley, Feb. 20, 1762, PBF, 10:52.

  10 F&N, 537–543.

  11 Ibid., 540.

  12 Chronology, PBF, 8:xxiv; BF to DF, Sept. 6, 1758, PBF, 8:144—145.

  13 Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (London, 2002), 59–60.

  14 BF to John Baskerville, [1760?], PBF, 9:257–260.

  15 Uglow, Lunar Men, 264–265; BF to Matthew Boulton, May 22, 1765, PBF, 12:140; notes for JP, [1766], PBF, 13:542–543; Erasmus Darwin to BF, Jan. 24, 1774, PBF, 21:24–25.

  16 Chronology, PBF, 8:431; BF to Kames, Jan. 3, 1760, PBF, 9:9; City of Edinburgh for BF, Sept. 5, 1759, PBF, 8:434; James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment (New York, 2003).

  17 BF to Kames, Oct. 21, 1761, PBF, 9:376; Kames to BF, Feb. 18, [176] 8, PBF, 15:50–51; BF to Kames, Feb. 28, 1768, PBF, 15:61. See also BF to Sir Alexander Dick, Jan. 21, 1762, PBF, 10:14–16.

  18 Editorial note, PBF, 10:62n; G. R. de Beer, “The Relations between Fellows of the Royal Society and French Men of Science When France and Britain Were at War,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 9 (1952), 244–299. Franklin was scrupulous and avoided writing Dalibard during the war; see BF to Dalibard, [Dec. 9, 1761], PBF, 10:396.

  19 BFP, 53–57, 409–410, ill. 2.

  20 Ibid., ill. 2.

  21 Ibid., ill. 4.

  22 Editorial note, PBF, 10: 116–126.

&nbs
p; 23 Ibid., 119n, 123; BF to Giambatista Beccaria, July 13, 1762, PBF, 10:126–130.

  24 BF to Giambatista Beccaria, July 13, 1762, PBF, 10:130; Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, eds., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (London, 2001), s.vv., “Franklin, Benjamin,” “musical glasses,” and “pianoforte.”

  25 Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002); BF to Caleb Whitefoord, Dec. 9, 1762, PBF, 10:173 (on harp); BF to le Comte de Salmes, July 5, 1785, WBF, 9:361.

  26 Editorial note, PBF, 10:118–123.

  27 BF to MS, May 17, 1760, PBF, 9:118; MS to BF, [Aug.? 1760], PBF, 9:194–195; Claude-Anne Lopez, “Three Women, Three Styles,” in Benjamin Franklin and Women, ed. Larry E. Tise (University Park, Pa., 2000), 5 1–63.

  28 BF to MS, Sept. 13, 1760, PBF, 9:216; MS to BF, Sept. 16, 1760, PBF, 9:217; Geoffrey Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, 1995), esp. 144–157, 341–348; Londa Schiebinger, “The Philosopher’s Beard: Women and Gender in Science,” CHS, 184–210.

  29 MS to BF, May 19, 1761, PBF, 9:319.

  30 BF to MS, Sept. 13, 1760, PBF, 9, 212–217; BF to MS, [Nov.? 1760], PBF, 9:247–252.

  31 BF to MS, Aug. 10, 1761, PBF, 9:339.

  32 BF to MS, Mar. 30, 1761, PBF, 9:296–297; John Winthrop to BF, Mar. 5, 1773, PBF, 20:95; BF to Sir Alexander Dick, Jan. 21, 1762, PBF, 10 :16.

  33 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (New York, 2000), pt. 5.

  34 “A Briton” [BF], “Of the Meanes of Disposing the Enemie to Peace,” London Chronicle, Aug. 11–13, 1761, PBF, 9:342–343; Gerald Stourzh, Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1969), 80–81.

  35 Anderson, Crucible of War, 503–506.

  36 BF, A Plan for Settling Two Western Colonies, [c. 1754], PBF, 5:457; BF to Kames, Jan. 3, 1760, PBF, 9:7; Anderson, Crucible of War, 523–528, 594–597; Stourzh, Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy, 61–65.

  37 [BF], The Interest of Great Britain Considered . . . (1760), PBF, 9:78 (on manufactures), 81 (on waterways), 88–89 (on manufactures), 91 (on Russia).