The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  9 JI to BF, Oct. 5, 1778, PBF, 27:506.

  10 Gillispie, Science and Polity in France, 265–283; Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), chap. 6; BF to La Sabliere de La Condamine, Mar. 19, 1784, WBF, 9:182–183; BF to JI, Apr. 29, 1785, WBF, 9:320.

  11 Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784 (Princeton, 1983), 15–17, 22; Hallion, Taking Flight, chaps. 1 and 2.

  12 Gillispie, Montgolfier Brothers, 3–4, 27–33; Hallion, Taking Flight, chap. 3.

  13 Gillispie, Montgolfier Brothers, 51–56; Hallion, Taking Flight, chap. 3.

  14 Gillispie, Montgolfier Brothers, 75, 118–125; Hallion, Taking Flight, 53, 56–59.

  15 Gillispie, Montgolfier Brothers, 7–10, 28; Hallion, Taking Flight, 48, 49; Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York, 1957), 135; Maurice-Augustin Montgolfier to BF, [before Jan. 28, 1782], PBF, 36:486–487; BF to Montgolfier, Feb. 4, 1782, PBF, 36:533–534; account from Journal de Paris, Dec. 26, 1781, PBF, 36:lxii; ---Faesch to BF, July 25, 1782, PBF, 37:676–677.

  16 BF to Joseph Banks, Nov. 21, 1783, WBF, 9:117 (on witches and philosophers); Le Roy to BF, [1783] (two undated letters), Franklin Papers, APS.

  17 BF to Banks, Nov. 21, 1783, WBF, 9:114 (on flame), 116 (on car); BF to Banks, Dec. 1, 1783, WBF, 9:122 (on Vincennes); Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), 342.

  18 Gillispie, Montgolfier Brothers, 51; BF to Richard Price, Sept. 16, 1783, WBF, 9:100.

  19 Hallion, Taking Flight, 59–60; Brandon Brame Fortune and Deborah J. Warner, Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C., 1999), 122–123; BF to anonymous, June 20, 1785, WBF, 9:345.

  20 BF to Mme. Lavoisier, Oct. 23, 1788, WBF, 9:669; BF to Richard Price, July 29, 1786, WBF, 9:529; BF to Edward Nairne, Oct. 18, 1783, WBF, 9:109.

  21 Charles Coulston Gillespie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 15 vols. (New York, 1975), 12, s.v. “Soulavie, Jean-Louis Giraud.”

  22 BF to Soulavie, Sept. 22, 1782, WBF, 9:597–600, 601; Rhoda Rappaport, “The Earth Sciences,” CHS, 417–436; Dennis R. Dean, “Benjamin Franklin and Earthquakes,” Annals of Science 46 (1989), 481–495.

  23 BF, “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,” May 1784, WBF, 9:215, 217.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Thomas Pownall, “Hydraulic and Nautical Observations on the Currents in the Atlantic Ocean . . . ,” t.p., 13, 14, RS.

  26 Johann Reinhold Forster to BF, July 30, 1778, PBF, 27:181; JL to BF, [Aug. 1778?], PBF, 27:328–329; Stephen Sayre to BF, Mar. 21, 1779, and June 7, 1779, PBF, 29:181, 639; Benjamin Gale to BF, Aug. 7, 1775, PBF, 22:154–158. See also François-Marie Fyot to BF, Aug. 3, 1778, PBF, 27:209 (on longitude); Honoré-Sébastien Vial du Clairbois to BF, Aug. 14, 1778, PBF, 27:235 (on naval architecture); “Christin” to BF, Sept. 19, 1778, PBF, 27:425; Alexandre-Henry-Guillaume le Roberger de Vausenville to BF, June 29, 1779, PBF, 29:776–778.

  27 John Paul Jones to BF, Sept. 18, 1778, PBF, 27:421; Jones to BF, Sept. 24, 1778, PBF, 27:458; intelligence from Havana and other places, Nov. 13, 1778, PBF, 28:109; Landais to BF, Feb. 26, 1779, PBF, 28:620–621; BF to Landais, Mar. 4, 1779, and Mar. 6, 1779, PBF, 29:41, 59; BF to Jones, Feb. 19, 1780, PBF, 31:499. See also Mauer Mauer, “Coppered Bottoms for the Royal Navy: A Factor in the Maritime War of 1778–1783,” Military Affairs 14 (1950), 57–61; Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (New York, 1964), 51.

  28 Banks to BF, Mar. 29, 1780, PBF, 32:176–177; William Bell Clark, “A Franklin Postscript to Captain Cook’s Voyages,” APS Proceedings 98 (1954), 400–405; BF to Vaughan, July 26, 1784, WBF, 9:241; BF to Andrew Strahan, May 6, 1786, WBF, 9:510.

  29 Robert Glen, “Industrial Wayfarers: Benjamin Franklin and a Case of Machine Smuggling in the 1780s,” Business History 23 (1981), 309–326.

  30 “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” c. Sept. 1782, WBF, 8:603–607. Franklin had in fact helped concoct a scheme to offer U.S. land to Hessians who would desert the British. See Lyman H. Butterfield, “Psychological Warfare in 1776: The Jefferson-Franklin Plan to Cause Hessian Desertions,” APS Proceedings, 94 (1950), 234–241.

  31 “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” c. Sept. 1782, WBF, 8:604–605, 606.

  32 Ibid., 606.

  33 BF to Granville Sharp, July 5, 1785, WBF, 9:357.

  34 BF to Sarah Bache, Jan. 26, 1784, WBF, 9:163–165; see also BF to Conde de Campomanes, June 5, 1784, WBF, 9:222.

  35 Autobiography, 135, 141–244. Another Franklin protégé, “J. Hector St. John” de Crèvecoeur (the Michel-Guillaime Jean who had planned a Franco-American packet service), made the same point in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Franklin recommended the book to others. See BF to Crèvecoeur, c. Dec. 1783/Jan. 1784, WBF, 9:147–149; BF, “On Immigration,” c. 1783, WBF, 9:149–150; BF to Crèvecoeur, Feb. 16, 1788, WBF, 9:636.

  36 Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven, 1966), 91–96, 264–271; BF to John Jay and Mrs. Jay, Sept. 21, 1785, WBF, 9:466 (on litter); Benjamin Franklin Bache Diary, July 12, 1785, Bache Papers, APS.

  37 Anne L. Poulet, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment (Washington, D.C., 2003).

  38 B. F. Bache Diary, July 12 and 24; William Temple Franklin Diary, 1785, July 22, Franklin Papers, APS; Benjamin Franklin Diary, July 12–Sept. 14, 1785, July 25, Franklin Papers, APS.

  39 B. F. Bache Diary, June–July 1785; chronologies in Autobiography, 303–320, and PBF, 1:lxxxvii. The number of days for 1724 is an estimate but is, if anything, on the high side.

  40 “A Letter from Dr. Benjamin Franklin, to Mr. Alphonsus le Roy . . . Containing Sundry Maritime Observations,” APS Transactions 2 (1786), 328–329.

  41 B. F. Bache Diary, Aug. 23.

  42 BF to John Lathrop, May 31, 1788, WBF, 9:650.

  43 BF to JI, Apr. 29, 1785, WBF, 9:317–318.

  44 JA, June 23, 1779, 2:391.

  45 BF to David Hartley, July 5, 1785, WBF, 9:359; BF to John Bard and Mrs. Bard, Nov. 14, 1785, WBF, 9:476.

  46 John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames, Iowa, 1984), 3–12, quotation on p. 11.

  47 BF to James Bowdoin, Jan. 1, 1786, WBF, 9:479; BF to Jonathan Williams, Feb. 12, 1786, WBF, 9:486; Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 263–271.

  48 Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des . . . deux Indes (Maestricht, 1774), 7:92.

  49 Hindle, Pursuit of Science, chaps. 14 and 15; APS Charter (1780), APS Transactions , 2 (1786), xi–xii.

  50 APS Minute Book, June 11, 1784 (on balloons), Aug. 12, 1784 (on Lafayette), Dec. 9, 1784 (on Mesmer report), Feb. 4, 1785 (on Vergennes), APS.

  51 APS Minute Book, Sept. 16, 1785, Sept. 27, 1785, APS.

  52 Ibid., Sept. 27, 1785, APS.

  53 Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 271–272; BF diary, WBF, 10:346; BF to the “Princess Dashkow,” May 7, 1788, WBF, 9:649; Pascal Pontremoli, ed., Mémoires de la Princesse Dashkov (Paris, 1989).

  54 BF to JL, Apr., 18, 1787, WBF, 9:572–573.

  55 BF to Le Veillard, Mar. 16, 1786, WBF, 9:497; BF to Le Veillard, Apr. 15, 1787, WBF, 9:560; BF to JI, Apr. 29, 1785, WBF, 9:32 1.

  56 Editorial note, PBF, 1:xxi; Richard Bache to BF, July 14, 1778, PBF, 27:89–90, 90n.

  57 BF to MS, May 6, 1786, WBF, 9:512.

  58 APS Transactions 2 (1786), iii; APS Minute Book, Oct. 21, 1785, Nov. 4, 1785, Jan. 28, 1786, APS.

  59 APS Transactions 2 (1786), xxvii–xxviii.

  60 The letter’s recipient was misaddressed as “Alphonsus,” a medical Le Roy and no relation. See Le Roy to BF, Oct. 9, [1785/1786], Franklin Papers, APS.

  61 BF, “Maritime Observations,” 294–296 (on water and wind), 300–306 (on flooding, double hulls, lightning rods), 308–309 (on water jet propulsion), 311–313 (on
kite-brake), 319 (on landsmen).

  62 Ibid., 318–319 (on Cook, compass), 320–323 (on food, etc.).

  63 Ibid., 321, 323.

  64 Ibid., 314, 315.

  65 Ibid., 315–316.

  66 BF to Jonathan Williams Jr., Jan. 19, 1786, WBF, 9:480 (see also 398n).

  67 BF to JI, Apr. 29, 1785, WBF, 9:317.

  68 On the Mississippi, see Gerald Stourzh, Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy (Chicago, 1954), 145–146, 169–179; BF to Charles Pettit, Oct. 10, 1786, WBF, 9:544.

  69 Remarkably, Franklin only once used the term balance of power, despite the prevalence of that political concept. And he strongly backed Pennsylvania’s experiment, starting in 1776, with a unicameral form of government, thus rejecting a long tradition in Anglo-American politics that stressed balance between political interests, principally the few (the elite) and the many (the people). See Stourzh, Franklin and American Foreign Policy, 24–28, 254–256.

  70 BF, “Maritime Observations,” 314–315.

  71 Ibid., fig. facing p. 328.

  72 Ibid., 316.

  73 Ibid., 329.

  74 Thomas Paine to George Washington, May 1, 1790, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), 2:1303; J. B. Hewson, A History of the Practice of Navigation (Glasgow, 1951), 240. See also Ellen Cohn, “Benjamin Franklin, Georges-Louis Le Rouge and the Franklin/Folger Chart of the Gulf Stream,” Imago Mundi 52 (2000), 139.

  75 On Franklin pointing and interacting with nonhuman entities, see BFP, Illus., 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 32, 33.

  76 A partial collection of Franklin’s final philosophic works would appear in 1787, but he would not write any new pieces for it; “Maritime Observations” was the last. See B[enjamin] Franklin, Philosophical and Miscellaneous Papers (London, 1787).

  77 BF to the Abbé Morellet, Apr. 22, 1787, WBF, 9:577.

  78 Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1911), 3:91.

  79 SFF, 238–243.

  80 Autobiography, 192; BF to Whatley, May 23, 1785, WBF, 9:337–338.

  81 Andrea Sutcliffe, Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention (New York, 2004), esp. 10, 30, 40–42, 46, 59, 83; Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 374–377; SFF, 242; BF to Benjamin Vaughan, May 14, 1788, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Library of Congress; BF to JL, Oct. 25, 1788, WBF, 9:679.

  82 Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (New York, 1965).

  83 Farrand, Federal Convention, 1:197–200, 523; Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1996), chaps. 4 and 8.

  84 William M. Fowler Jr., Rebels under Sail: The American Navy during the Revolution (New York, 1976), 284; Farrand, Federal Convention, 2:208; Rakove, Original Meanings, 225.

  85 Franklin’s Sept. 17, 1789, speech at the Constitutional Convention, in The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue, ed. Alan Houston (Cambridge, 2004), 362.

  86 Ibid.

  87 [BF], “An Address to the Public,” WBF, 10:67, 68. Franklin would never meet excellent proof of the power of education, African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, whose first almanac appeared in 1791, one year after Franklin’s death.

  88 Thomas Walpole to Edward Bancroft (extract), [July 14, 1778], PBF, 27:86; BF to Vaughan, July 26, 1784, WBF, 9:247.

  89 BF to Samuel Elbert, Dec. 16, 1787, WBF, 9:625.

  90 Autobiography, 198–199.

  91 BF to Morellet, Dec. 10, 1788, WBF, 9:691.

  92 Ibid.; Autobiography, 161, 240–246.

  93 Autobiography, 256–257.

  94 [BF], “To the Editor of the Federal Gazette,” Mar. 23, 1790, WBF, 10:88–89.

  95 BF to Jane Mecom, Aug. 3, 1789, WBF, 10:33; BF to Mecom, Mar. 24, 1790, WBF, 10:91–92.

  96 BF to Thomas Jefferson, Apr. 8, 1790, WBF, 10:92–93.

  97 Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 151.

  98 Adams cited in Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage (New York, 1993), 66.

  99 Epitaph, 1728, PBF, 2:111; BF will and testament, [June 22, 1750], PBF, 3:482.

  Chapter 10

  1 Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York, 1957), 221.

  2 On Franklin will and codicil, see WBF, 10:493, 506–508.

  3 Ibid., 493–494, 499, 503–508.

  4 Ibid., 495–499, 508, 509; Richard Bache to BF, Oct. 17, 1779, PBF, 30:551 (on Lewis Bache).

  5 Richard Price to BF, Apr. 3, 1769, PBF, 16:107; Samuel Fayerweather to BF, Dec. 5, 1768, PBF, 15:283–284, 285.

  6 BF to Joseph Banks, July 27, 1783, WBF, 9:74–75; BF to John Lathrop, May 31, 1788, WBF, 9:651.

  7 BF to Samuel Danforth, July 25, 1773, PBF, 20:324; BF to JB, [end of Apr.? 1773], PBF, 20:190 (“d’être entonné avec quelques amis dans des muids de Madere . . . pour être alors rendu à la vie par la chaleur du soleil de ma chere patrie”) .

  8 BF to George Whatley, May 23, 1785, WBF, 9:334; BF to CC, Oct. 16, 1746, PBF, 3:92; Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (New York, 1977), 66, 106, 318. Luckily, the Bartrams cultivated the tree, which has not been seen in the wild since 1803.

  9 BF to George Whatley, May 23, 1785, WBF, 9:333–334.

  10 Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley, 1971), chap. 6.

  11 Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 212–215.

  12 Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, 1968), 170–171; Albert Henry Smyth, “The Life of Benjamin Franklin,” WBF, 10:493.

  13 Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 225, 228.

  14 Hahn, Anatomy of a Scientific Institution, 150–151, chaps. 7 and 8; Henry Guerlac, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier: Chemist and Revolutionary (New York, 1975), 124–131.

  15 Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress: A Study in the Intellectual and Political History of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1964), chap. 12; Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 13.

  16 Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 130.

  17 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1953), 303–312; cf. David Knight, “Romanticism and the Sciences,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge, 1990), 13–24; William Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 3 (London, 1850); Sergio Perosa, “Franklin to Frankenstein: A Note on Lightning and Novels,” in Science and Imagination in Eighteenth-Century British Culture ( Scienza e immaginazione della cultura Inglese del settecento), ed. Sergio Rossi (Milan, 1987), 321–328.

  18 Smyth, “Life of BF,” 489–490; Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), 144.

  19 Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 85–86.

  20 Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790–1990 (Philadelphia, 1994), 26–30.

  21 John Adams to Benjamin Rush, Apr. 4, 1790, cited in David G. McCullough, John Adams (New York, 2001), 420.

  22 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963), esp. chaps. 2 and 6, quotations on p. 147; Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, chaps. 2 and 3.

  23 John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames, Iowa, 1984), chap. 1; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Nature and Nation: Natural History in Context,” APS Transactions 93 (2003), 75–95.

  24 Carla Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory,” NEQ 72 (1999), 419–421.

  25 Ibid., 421–425; Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, chap. 2; Proceedings of the Right Worshipful Grand Lodge . . . at Its Celebration of the Bicentenary of . . . Brother Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 1906), 10, 35.

  2
6 Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin,” 428–434; Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, chap. 2.

  27 Mulford, “Figuring Benjamin Franklin,” 428–434, 441.

  28 [BF], Journal of Paris, Apr. 26, 1784.

  29 BFS, 12–13; Charles Tanford, Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves . . . (Durham, N.C., 1989), chap. 8.

  30 Most published scholarship on Humboldt is in German or Spanish. But see Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (New York, 1975).

  31 Thomas Truxtun, Remarks, Instructions, and Examples . . . (Philadelphia, 1794), “Explanation of Chart,” n.p.; Margaret Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 1650–1900: A Study of Marine Science (London, 1971), 203–204.

  32 Jonathan Williams, Thermometrical Navigation . . . Through the Gulf Stream . . . (Philadelphia, 1799), iii–ix, 1–10, 13–15.

  33 Anita McConnell, “Six’s Thermometer: A Century of Use in Oceanography,” in Oceanography: The Past, ed. Mary Sears and Daniel Merriman (New York, 1980), 252–265; Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 208–210, 222–223.

  34 Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

  35 A. D. Bache, “Lecture on the Gulf Stream,” American Journal of Science and Arts 30 (1860), 1–17; Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 291; Hugh Richard Slotten, Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the United States Coast Survey (New York, 1994), chaps. 4 and 5, quotations on pp. 72, 162.

  36 Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 291, 293–295; Frances Leigh Williams, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Scientist of the Sea (New Brunswick, N.J., 1963), 150–157, 178–195, 258–268, quotations on pp. 260, 261; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “oceanography.”

  37 Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992), 326.

  38 Greene, American Science, chaps. 1, 10, 11.

  39 Editorial note, PBF, 14:25–28; BF to George Croghan, Aug. 5, 1767, PBF , 14:222 (on Franklin’s belief that fossils were signs of climate change, not extinction); Rhoda Rappaport, “The Earth Sciences,” CHS, 419–435; Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Independence (New York, 2000); Erasmus Darwin to BF, July 18, 1772, PBF, 19:210–212; Robert Waring Darwin to BF (Paris), Franklin Papers, APS.