The First Scientific American
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37 Frederic George Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division One: Political and Personal Satires (London, 1883), 4:649; James Delbourgo, “Political Electricity: The Occult Mechanism of Revolution,” available at www.common-place.org, vol. 5, no. 1 (Oct. 2004), accessed on Dec. 30, 2004; David P. Miller, “‘My Favourite Studdys’: Lord Bute as Naturalist,” in Lord Bute: Essays in Reinterpretation, ed. Karl W. Schweizer (Leicester, 1988), 213–239.
38 JP to BF, Sept. 21, 1766, PBF, 13:423–424; Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, 2nd ed. (London, 1769), 636–647.
39 DF to BF, [Oct. 6–13? 1765], PBF, 12:296; L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 4:150–15 1.
40 [BF], “Prudential Algebra,” [before Aug. 3? 1773], PBF, 20:337–338.
41 BF to Jane Mecom, Jan. 9, 1760, PBF, 9:18; BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., Mar. 5, 1771, PBF, 18:56; Jonathan Williams Jr. to BF, Apr. 20, 1773, PBF, 20:176; Williams to BF, [before Sept. 21, 1773], PBF, 20:408–410.
42 Autobiography, 145 ; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004), 49–64.
43 BF to [Noble Wimberly Jones?], Mar. or Apr. 1771, PBF, 18:65; Jones to BF, Jan. 13, 1773, PBF, 20:24; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), 137, 146–150, 249.
44 P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 258–265.
45 Ibid., 268–276.
46 Ibid., 270 (quotation), 276–284; Rob Iliffe, “Science and Voyages of Discovery,” CHS, 618–645; Larry Stewart, “Global Pillage: Science, Commerce, and Empire,” CHS, 825–844.
47 BF to JP, May 4, 1772, PBF, 19:125–126; BF to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Oct. 8, 1772, PBF, 19:325–326.
48 Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus (Princeton, 1959).
49 Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 98–101, 146–165; Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 653–668, 673–674.
50 Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 153, 157–159; BF to John Winthrop, June 6, 1770, PBF, 17:158.
51 BF to Cadwallader Evans, Sept. 7, 1769, PBF, 16:199; BF to John Ewing, Aug. 27, 1770, PBF, 17:212.
52 BF to Grey Cooper, June 24, 1768, PBF, 15: 158; BF to Jonathan Shipley, Aug. 19, 1771, PBF, 18:209, 210; Richard Jackson to BF, [July 27? 1771], PBF, 18:191.
53 [BF], foreword to Alexander Dalrymple, Scheme of a Voyage by Subscription to Convey the Conveniences of Life . . . to Those Remote Regions, Which Are Destitute of Them . . . (London, 1771), PBF, 18:215, 216.
54 Ibid., 216. See also Williams and Marshall, Great Map of Mankind, 258–259.
55 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London, 1986).
56 Dr. Bray’s Assoc. to BF, 1766, PBF, 13:516; on fees for associates, Jan. 4, 1770, Benjamin Franklin Journal, 1764–1774, Franklin Papers, APS; [BF], “A Conversation on Slavery,” Public Advertiser, Jan. 30, 1770, PBF, 17:39, 43, 44; David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 192–198.
57 Editorial note, PBF, 19:112–113; Anthony Benezet to BF, Apr. 27, 1772, PBF, 19:113–116; BF to Benezet, Feb. 10, 1773, PBF, 20:41; Benjamin Rush to BF, May 1, 1773, PBF, 20:193.
58 [BF] on the Somerset Case, London Chronicle, June 18–20, 1772, PBF, 19:188; Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 198–202.
59 BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., July 7, 1773, PBF, 20:291–292 (on Wheatley); BF to Anthony Benezet, July 14, 1773, PBF, 20:296.
60 BF to WF, July 14, 1773, PBF, 20:303; “A Friend to the Poor” [BF], [December? 1773], PBF, 20:523, 525.
61 Editorial note, PBF, 21:293–296; JB to BF, Feb. 12, 1773, PBF, 20:46; BF to JB, [Mar.? 1773], PBF, 20:131–133; BF to JB, June 29, 1773, PBF, 20:251; BF notes, [before Aug. 3? 1773], PBF, 20:337.
62 Barbeu-Dubourg, intro. to Oeuvres de M. Franklin (1773), PBF, 20:430 (“Je suis persuadé que beaucoup de peres de familles desireroient un semblable Mentor à leurs filles”), 431 (“son bain d’air”).
63 Ibid., 431–432. Barbeu-Dubourg had published both, the latter as an appendix to John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, an important criticism of the Stamp Act.
64 [BF], The Interest of Great Britain Considered (1760), PBF, 9:62; Echeverria, Mirage in the West, chap. 1.
65 Barbeu-Dubourg, intro. to Oeuvres de M. Franklin, 423, 424.
66 Ibid., 429.
67 Ibid., 427.
68 BF to DF, Dec. 1, 1772, PBF, 19:395 (on apples and cranberries); BF to DF, Feb. 2, 1773, PBF, 20:34, 34n (on all those apples); BF to Nathaniel Falconer, Feb. 14, 1773, PBF, 20:58 (on nuts and apples); BF to WF, Feb. 14, 1773, PBF, 20:62 (on cranberries, meal, and dried apples); BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., Mar. 9, 1773, PBF, 20:101 (on cod sounds and tongues); WF to BF, Jan. 5, 1774, PBF, 20:11 (on pork and dried apples); “Cravenstreet Gazette,” 221.
69 BF to Timothy Folger, Sept. 29, 1769, PBF, 16:208; BF to Folger, Aug. 21, 1770, PBF, 17:210.
70 BF to DF, Dec. 15, 1766, PBF, 13:525; BF to DF, Jan. 28, 1772, PBF, 19:43–44; BF to DF, Aug. 22, 1772, PBF, 19:275; BF to Georgiana Shipley, Sept. 26, [1776], PBF, 19:301–302.
71 “The Colonist’s Advocate” [BF], eleven essays in the Public Advertiser (early 1770), PBF, 17:description on p. 5; “An American” [BF], Public Ledger (Nov. 19, 1774), PBF, 21:357.
72 “N. N.” [BF], London Chronicle, Nov. 6–8, 1770, in PBF, 17:273.
73 BF to Henry Home, Lord Kames, Feb. 25, 1767, PBF, 14:69–70; BF’s marginalia in [Matthew Wheelock], Reflections Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies (1770), PBF, 17:394–395; [BF], Remarks on Agriculture and Manufacturing, [late 1771?], PBF, 18:273.
74 BF to John Pringle, May 10, 1768, PBF, 15:115–118, 492–496.
75 François Willem de Monchy, May 15, 1767, PBF, 14:149–150, and plates following p. 150; Thomas Gilpin to BF, Oct. 10, 1769, PBF, 16:216–218; BF to Gilpin, Mar. 18, 1770, PBF, 17:103; Samuel Rhoads to BF, May 3, 1771, PBF, 18:94; Rhoads to BF, May 30, 1772, PBF, 19:158; BF to Rhoads, Aug. 22, 1772, PBF, 19:278–279; BF to Peter P. Burdett, Aug. 21, 1773, PBF, 20:371. See also Douglas S. Brown, “The Iberville Canal Project,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32 (1946), 491–516.
76 Franklin’s Account of His Audience with Hillsborough, Jan. 16, 1771, PBF, 18:15. Hillsborough had also nixed an American land scheme, the Grand Ohio Company, in which William and Benjamin Franklin were interested. See Peter Marshall, “Lord Hillsborough, Samuel Wharton and the Ohio Grant, 1769–1775,” English Historical Review 80 (1965), 717–739; Bailyn, Faces of Revolution, 174–177.
77 Journal of Jonathan Williams Jr., with BF and others, 1771, PBF, 18:114–116; BF to DF, July 14, 1772, PBF, 19:207.
78 BF to WF, Aug. 19–22, 1772, PBF, 19:258, 259.
79 Alan Q. Morton and Jane A. Wess, Public and Private Science: The King George III Collection (Oxford, 1993).
80 Editorial note and BF to Richard Dawson, May 29, 1772, PBF, 19:153–156.
81 J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1982), 202.
82 Franklin sent copies of his letter to Dawson and the committee report and a sketch to Dubourg to include in the French edition of his writings. Editorial note and Committee of the Royal Society, PBF, 19:260–262, 262–265; BF to JB, May 28 [–June 1], 1773, PBF, 20:213–216.
83 BF to John Pringle, Dec. 1, 1762, PBF, 10:158–159; Pringle to BF, [May? 1763], PBF, 10:269.
84 BF to William Brownrigg, Nov. 7, 1773, PBF, 20:466, 468.
85 Ibid., 464–465.
86 Ibid., 464–465, 466, 467, 469; Brownrigg to BF, Jan. 27, 1773, PBF, 20:30–31. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 637; Charles Tanford, Ben Franklin Sti
lled the Waves . . . (Durham, N.C., 1989), chaps. 1–3.
87 BF to Brownrigg, Nov. 7, 1773, PBF, 20:471–474.
88 BF, preface to The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston . . . (1773), PBF, 20:86; Fothergill to Dartmouth, [Feb. 6, 1775], PBF, 21:482.
89 WF to BF, Oct. 13, 1772, PBF, 19:333–334; BF to WF, Dec. 2, 1772, PBF, 19:416–417.
90 Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 221–238; editorial note, PBF, 19:399–409; BF to Thomas Cushing, Dec. 2, 1772, PBF, 19:411–413.
91 BF to Thomas Percival, [Oct. 15, 1773], PBF, 19:444, 445.
92 BF to JB, [Mar. 10, 1773], PBF, 20:103 (first quotation); BF to JL, June 22, 1773, PBF, 20:241–242; BF to Samuel Cooper, July 7, 1773, PBF, 20:270 (second quotation, Hutchinson letters); BF to Benjamin Rush, July 14, 1773, PBF, 20:315 (third quotation).
93 Uglow, Lunar Men, 229–241; BF to JP, [July 1772?], PBF, 19:215, 216.
94 BF, notes on colds, PBF, 20:529.
95 Ibid., 529–538.
96 Ibid., 533.
97 Final Hearing Before the Privy Council, PBF, 21:47, 49, 56, 59; William Temple Franklin, ed., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. (London, 1818), 1:185.
98 Anthony Todd to BF, Jan. 31, 1774, PBF, 21:74; BF to JI, Apr. 26, 1777, PBF, 23:613, 613n.
99 J. A. Leo Lemay, Ebenezer Kinnersley: Franklin’s Friend (Philadelphia, 1964), 110; [BF], “A Letter from London,” Boston Gazette, Apr. 25, 1774, PBF, 21:83.
100 W[illiam] Small to BF, Aug. 10, 1771, PBF, 18:199; Percival to BF, Jan. 10, 1775, PBF, 21:446.
101 BF to Jane Mecom, Sept. 26, 1774, PBF, 21:317; John Winthrop to BF, Mar. 28, 1775, PBF, 22:10.
102 Toby L. Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of American History 81 (1995), 51–80; BF to WF, Mar. 22, 1775, PBF, 21:548.
Chapter 8
1 “Speculation on the Speed of Ships,” Apr. 5, 1775, PBF, 22:16.
2 Ibid.; Margaret Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 1650–1900: A Study of Marine Science (London, 1971), 186–188, 202.
3 “Observations at Sea on Temperatures of Air and Water,” PBF, 22: 17–18.
4 Ibid.
5 BF to [JP], May 16, 1775, PBF, 22:44 (he accidentally gave this 1768 letter the date of General Gage’s similar letter, of 1769—see Chapter 6, above); BF to [JP?], May 1775, PBF, 22:55; JP to BF, Feb. 13, 1776, PBF, 22:349.
6 Editorial note, PBF, 22:204–205; J. B. Harley, Barbara Bartz Petchenik, and Lawrence W. Towner, Mapping the American Revolutionary War (Chicago, 1978), 91–92.
7 Editorial Note, PBF, 22:132–134; William Smith, The History of the Post Office of British North America, 1639–1870 (Cambridge, 1920), 67; WS to BF, Oct. 4, 1775, PBF, 22:220, 221; BF to WS, July 5, 1775, PBF, 22:85.
8 BF to Anthony Todd, Mar. 29, 1776, PBF, 22:392–393.
9 Ibid., 299n (on letters from Hewson); MS to BF, Sept. 5, 1776, PBF, 22:589.
10 BF “to a Friend in London,” [Oct. 3? 1775], PBF, 22:215–216 (see also BF to JP, Oct. 3, 1775, PBF, 22:218).
11 Commission from Congress, [Mar. 20, 1776], PBF, 22:386.
12 William Goforth to BF, Feb. 22–23, 1776, PBF, 22:359.
13 New-Jersey Gazette, Dec. 31, 1777.
14 BF to Richard Bache, Sept. 30, 1774, PBF, 21:325–326; Thomas Paine to BF, Mar. 4, 1775, PBF, 21:515–518; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), 72.
15 Thomas Paine, Common Sense and Other Writings, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York, 2003), 36. Franklin had considered the problem in 1754, with the Albany Plan of Union, then recommending “small vessels of force” as colonists’ contribution to imperial security; see “Reasons and Motives,” [July 1754], PBF, 5:413.
16 I. Bernard Cohen, “The Empirical Temper of Benjamin Franklin,” in Benjamin Franklin: A Profile, ed. Esmond Wright (New York, 1979), 70–71, but also SFF, 122, 329n, 127.
17 Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionar y America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), 233.
18 David Armitage, “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,” WMQ 59 (2002), 53–54.
19 Design for Continental Currency, PBF, 22:facing p. 358; proposal for the Great Seal of the United States, before Aug. 14, 1776, PBF, 22:563.
20 BF to Silas Deane, Aug. 27, 1775, PBF, 22:184; Preamble to a Congressional Resolution on Privateering, PBF, 22:388–389; BF to [Samuel Cooper], [Oct. 25, 1776], PBF, 22:670.
21 William M. Fowler Jr., Rebels under Sail: The American Navy during the Revolution (New York, 1976), chaps. 3 and 4; Committee of Secret Correspondence to Peter Parker, July 10, 1776, PBF, 22:507; BF and Robert Morris to Silas Deane, Oct. 1, 1776, PBF, 22:644.
22 Editorial note, PBF, 22:536–538.
23 Ibid.
24 Lord Howe’s Conference with the Committee of Congress, Sept. 11, 1776, PBF, 22:602.
25 JA, 3:418.
26 Gerald Stourzh, Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy (Chicago, 1954), chaps. 4 and 5.
27 Sheila Skemp, Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist (Boston, 1994).
28 Editorial note, PBF, 23:23; BF’s Description of His Ailments, Oct. 17, 1777, PBF, 25:78–79; BF’s Journal of His Health, Oct. 4, 1778[–Jan. 16, 1780], PBF, 27:497; Fowler, Rebels under Sail, 135.
29 Editorial note, PBF, 23:23n, 59n; BF to Richard and Sally Bache, May 10, 1785, WBF, 9:327, 696; Jonathan Williams Jr. to BF, Jan. 25, 1777, PBF, 23:232.
30 Chronology, PBF, 33:lviii–lix; Thomas J. Schaeper, France and America in the Revolutionary Era: The Life of Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, 1725–1803 (Providence, R.I., 1995), 97.
31 BF to Jane Mecom, Dec. 8, 1776, PBF, 23:34; BF to MS, Jan. 12, 1777, PBF, 23:155; Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York, 1957), 42–43, 60.
32 BFP, 96–99; Mémoires secrets cited in Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries , 61; BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Sept. 18, 1777, PBF, 24:539; BF’s Description of His Ailments, 79.
33 BF to George Whateley, May 23, 1785, WBF, 9:338.
34 Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 61; BFP, ill. on pp. 9–10; Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), chaps. 4 and 5 (portraits on frontispiece and p. 162).
35 Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, 1968), chap. 2.
36 Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (New Haven, 1988), 69–79; Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–99 (London, 2002), chaps. 5–7.
37 Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York, 1986); Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, 1993); Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995); Jeremy Popkin, “The Gazette de Leyde under Louis XVI,” in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed. Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin (Berkeley, 1987), 94–98.
38 BF to JB, Dec. 4, 1776, PBF, 23:24–25; Reinier Arrenberg to BF, Mar. 31, 1777, PBF, 23:538–539 (also 538n–539n); editorial note, PBF, 24:171n; JB to BF, June 25, 1777, PBF, 24:222; Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 55–56; Schaeper, France and America in the Revolutionary Era, 98.
39 JL to BF, [June 24, 1777], PBF, 24:217–218; Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier to BF, June 8, 1777, PBF, 24:142; Report of a Committee of the Académie Royale des Sciences, May 23, 1778, PBF, 26:520–521; Lavoisier to BF, Aug. 9, 1778, PBF, 27:236; Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 59–60.
40 JL to BF, May 26, [1777], PBF, 24:84; Jean-François-Clément Morand to BF, Aug. 10, 1777, PBF, 24:405; Horace Walpole to William Mason, Feb. 27, 1777, in The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee, 16 vols. (Oxford, 1903–1905), 10:22.
42 Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, 309–328; Pearson, Voltaire Almighty, chaps. 14–20.
43 Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, 328–333; Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975), esp. chap. 2; Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1991), chap. 9; Gillispie, Science and Polity in France, esp. 3–21; John Lough, The Encyclopédie, (London, 1971), chaps. 8 and 9.
44 Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 38–54. Antoine-François Quétant produced the 1777 edition.
45 Ibid., 15, 24–38; Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), chap. 4.
46 BF to Madame Brillon, “The Ephemera,” PBF, 27:430–435; Gilbert Chinard, “Random Notes on Two ‘Bagatelles,’” APS Proceedings 103 (1959), 740–760. On Franklin’s French social life, see Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven, 1966).
47 On fans, see New-Jersey Gazette, Dec. 31, 1777; Charles M. Andrews, “A Note on the Franklin-Deane Mission to France,” Yale University Library Gazette 2 (1928), 63. On waves, see Achille-Guillaume Lebège de Presle to BF, Nov. 22, 1777, PBF, 25:183; William Carmichael to BF, May 14, 1778, PBF, 26:451. On electricity, see Abbé Jacob Hemmer to BF, Sept. 24, 1778, PBF, 27:457. On learned societies, see Société Royale de Médecine re. BF, June 17, 1777, PBF, 24:176; Padua Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts to BF, Dec. 20, 1781, PBF, 36:273; Princess Daskaw to BF, Nov. 4, 1789, William Temple Franklin, ed., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. (London, 1818), 1:408.
48 Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 50; Lopez, Mon Cher Papa, 26–27; Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1766–1783, 3 vols. (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1891), 2:505.