Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Meeting Bache

  Franklin had planned to stay longer with Hume, but two letters caught up with him while he was there. One was from his son-in-law, Richard Bache. Having missed Franklin in London, he wrote, he had gone to visit his own parents in Preston, a city in the north of England near Manchester. The other was from Polly. “Mr. Bache is at Preston, where he will wait with the pleasing expectation of seeing you on your return. We were all very much pleased with him.” So Franklin hastened his departure for London and decided to visit his new in-law on the way.

  Sally Franklin Bache, not surprisingly, was fretting back in Philadelphia about how her husband and father would get along. “If it should not be as cordial as I could wish,” she wrote Richard, “I know when you consider it is my father, your goodness to and affection for me will make you try a little to gain his esteem and friendship.” As it turned out, her fears were unfounded. “I can,” Bache joyously wrote Deborah, “with great satisfaction, tell you that he received me with open arms and with a degree of affection I did not expect.” He was particularly pleased that everyone told him he looked like Franklin, a revelation in those pre-Freudian times that was not seen as a reflection of Sally’s taste in a husband. “I should be glad to be like him in any respect,” Bache enthused.

  Indeed, the old charmer wowed everyone in Bache’s family, particularly his mother, Mary Bache, a “stately” and “serious” widow of 68, who had borne twenty children. During the visit, she stayed up until midnight talking to Franklin. A few weeks later, Franklin sent her a thank-you note with some oysters and (his vanity not fully conquered) a portrait of himself. Mrs. Bache carried it back and forth from the parlor to the dining room so she could view it all the time. “It is so like the original you cannot imagine with what pleasure we look at it, as we can perceive in it the likeness of my son as well as yourself.”10

  Bache traveled back to London with Franklin, stayed with him for a while on Craven Street, and tried hard to please. “His behavior here has been agreeable to me,” Franklin told Deborah. But his affection did not extend to offering Bache the help he sought in winning a public appointment, such as customs inspector. “I am of the opinion that almost any profession a man has been educated in is preferable to an office held…subject to the caprices of superiors.” Instead, he advised Bache to go home, become a merchant “selling only for ready cash,” and to “always be close” to his wife. This advice, it must be remembered, came from a man who had lived across an ocean from his wife for much of fifteen years and had been clinging to his appointment as a royal postmaster.

  As for Sally, he advised that she should learn accounting (always a theme) and help her husband out. “In keeping a store, if it be where you dwell, you can be serviceable to him as your mother was to me; for you are not deficient in that capacity, and I hope are not too proud.” The Baches, ever mindful, would end up living in Deborah’s house, opening a store in one of Franklin’s Market Street buildings, and advertising “for cash only” a variety of silks and textiles for sale. When this dry goods shop turned out to be, as Bache complained to Franklin, a “sorry concern,” he converted it to a “wine and grocery business,” which also fared poorly. It was not the status or situation a woman of Sally’s education and Bache’s ambition felt was their due, but they followed Franklin’s injunction to be not too proud.11

  Deborah wrote Franklin so often about their grandson Benny that one can detect a note of caution creeping into his responses: “I can see you are quite in love with him, and your happiness wrapped up in his.” He praised her for not stepping in during an argument when Sally was trying to discipline Benny: “I feared, from your fondness of him, that he would be too much humored, and perhaps spoiled.”

  He felt differently, however, about spoiling Polly Stevenson’s new son, William Hewson, who had been born that spring. “Pray let him have everything he likes,” he had written to Polly. “It gives [children] a pleasant air and…the face is ever after the handsomer for it.” In the same letter, he responded sanguinely to Polly’s teasing news that her mother had a new male friend. “I have been used to rivals,” replied Franklin, “and scarce ever had a friend or a mistress in my whole life that other people did not like as well as myself.”

  Within two years, Billy Hewson had become Franklin’s surrogate grandson. Responding to yet another letter from his wife describing their own grandson, Franklin wrote: “In return for your history of your grandson, I must give you a little of the history of my godson. He is now 21 months old, very strong and healthy, begins to speak a little, and even to sing. He was with us a few days last week, grew fond of me, and would not be contented to sit down to breakfast without coming to call Pa.” He did deign to add, however, that watching Billy “makes me long to be at home to play with Ben.”12

  More Science and Invention

  When he poured the teaspoon of oil on the pond in Clapham and noted that it spread for a half acre, Franklin had come close to a discovery that would not be made for another century: determining the size of a molecule. If he had taken the volume of the teaspoon of oil (2 cubic centimeters) and divided it by the half-acre area it covered (2,000 square meters), he would have arrived at a ballpark figure (10-7centimeters) for the thickness of an oil molecule. As Charles Tanford noted in his wonderful book, Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves, “Franklin had actually correctly determined the scale of magnitude of molecular dimensions, the first person ever to do so, but he did not recognize it.”

  Franklin was always better at practical applications than theoretical analysis. Rather than speculate about the size of molecules, he looked for uses for his oil-and-water experiments. Might it be possible to save ships from dangerous waves by dumping oil into the ocean? With three friends from the Royal Academy, he went to Portsmouth to see. “The experiment,” Franklin reported, “had not the success we wished.” The surface ripples were smoothed, but not the force of the underlying surges (another metaphor, perhaps). His report on his failed experiment was deemed useful enough, however, to be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.13

  Throughout his time in England, whenever he could escape the demands of politics, he continued his scientific inquiries. After he wired some lightning rods on St. Paul’s Cathedral, the keepers of the royal munitions asked him to propose ways to protect their buildings from lightning as well. This again embroiled Franklin in a dispute over whether lightning rods should have pointed or rounded tops; Franklin insisted on pointed ones, but (perhaps for political reasons) King George changed them to rounded ones after the American Revolution. Franklin also devised a system of hot-water pipes to keep the House of Commons warm.

  Other excursions into science and invention during his years in London included:

  The Cause of Colds: Although germs and viruses had yet to be discovered, Franklin was one of the first to argue that colds and flu “may possibly be spread by contagion” rather than cold air. “Traveling in our severe winters, I have often suffered cold sometimes to the extremity only short of freezing, but this did not make me catch cold,” he wrote the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush in 1773. “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms, coaches, etc., and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration.” The best defense was fresh air. Throughout his life, Franklin liked good ventilation and open windows, even in the midst of winter.14

  The Study of Exercise: One way to prevent colds, he argued, was regular exercise. The best way to measure exercise, he argued, was not by its duration but “by the degree of warmth it produces in the body.” This was one of the first theories linking exercise to calories of heat. For example, he explained, walking a mile up and down stairs produced five times more body warmth than walking a mile on a level surface. When swinging weights, Franklin calculated that this raised his pulse from 60 to 100 beats per minute. Again, he rightly calculated that body “warmth generally increases with quickness of pulse.”15r />
  Lead Poisoning: As a printer, Franklin had noticed that the handling of hot lead type often caused a stiffness or paralysis. He also noticed that people in certain trades were prone to a severe illness called “dry belly ache.” A friend added a clue by noting that people who drank rum from stills that used metal coils also got the disease. Acting as an epidemiologist, Franklin became one of the first to discover the cause of this malady. “It affects among tradesmen those that use lead, however different their trades, as glazers, type-founders, plumbers, potters, white-lead makers and painters.” He suggested, among other things, that the coils of stills should be made of pure tin, instead of pewter that includes lead.16

  Ships in Canals: When visiting Holland, Franklin and his friend Sir John Pringle, president of the Royal Society, were told that ships passing through shallow canals went more slowly than those in deeper canals. This was because, Franklin surmised, each time a boat moved one length of distance, it would have to displace an amount of water equal to the space that her hull took up under the water. That water would then have to pass alongside or underneath the boat. If the passage underneath was constrained by being shallow, more water would have to rush past the sides of the boat, thus slowing her down. Here was a scientific theory that had enormous practical importance. So Franklin reacted accordingly. “I determined to make an experiment of this,” he wrote Pringle. He built a fourteen-foot wooden trough that was six inches wide and deep, and in it he put a little boat that was tugged by a silk thread. The thread was placed over a pulley and pulled by the weight of a small coin. He repeatedly timed how fast the toy boat moved when the water was at various depths. The results showed that it took 20 percent more power or time to move a boat through a shallow canal than a deeper one.17

  The Saltiness of Oceans: At the time, the prevailing opinion about why the oceans were salty was that they had originally been filled with fresh water, but over the eons they accumulated the salts and minerals that were dumped into them by rivers. Franklin surmised, in a letter to his brother Peter, that there was just as much evidence for the other hypothesis: “All the water on this globe was originally salt, and the fresh water we find in springs and rivers is the produce of distillation.” As it turns out, Franklin was incorrect in this case. The oceans, over the centuries, have been getting saltier.18

  The Armonica: Among the most amusing of his inventions was a musical instrument he called the armonica. It was based on the common practice of bored dinner guests, and some musicians, of producing a resonant tone by moving a wet finger around the rim of a glass. Franklin attended a concert in England of music performed on wineglasses, and in 1761 he perfected the idea by taking thirty-seven glass bowls of different sizes and attaching them to a spindle. He rigged up a foot pedal and flywheel to spin the contraption, which allowed him to produce various tones by pressing on the glass pieces with his wet fingers. In a letter to an Italian electrician, Franklin described the new instrument in minute detail. “It is an instrument,” he said, “that seems peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind.” Franklin’s armonica was quite a rage for a while. Marie Antoinette took lessons on it, Mozart and Beethoven wrote pieces for it, and its haunting tones became popular at weddings. But it tended to produce melancholia, perhaps from lead poisoning, and it eventually went out of fashion.19

  Social Philosophy

  Over the years, Franklin had been developing a social outlook that, in its mixture of liberal, populist, and conservative ideas, would become one archetype of American middle-class philosophy. He exalted hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, and self-reliance. On the other hand, he also pushed for civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes. He was equally distrustful of the elite and the rabble, of ceding power to a well-born establishment or to an unruly mob. With his shopkeeper’s values, he cringed at class warfare. Bred into his bones was a belief in social mobility and the bootstrap values of rising through hard work.

  His innate conservatism about government intervention and welfare was evident in the series of questions he had posed to Peter Collinson in 1753 (see pp. 148–49). Back then, he had asked whether laws “which compel the rich to maintain the poor have not given the latter a dependence” and “provide encouragements for laziness.”20

  To Collinson these points were raised as questions. But in his essays in the late 1760s and early 1770s, Franklin asserted his conservatism more forcefully. Most notable was an anonymous piece entitled “On the Laboring Poor,” which he signed “Medius,” from the Latin word for “middle,” and published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in1768. In the essay, he chastised writers who stirred up the rabble by claiming that the poor were oppressed by the rich. “Will you admit a word or two on the other side of the question?” he asked. The condition of the poor in England was the best in Europe, he argued. Why? Because in England there was legislation to help support the poor. “This law was not made by the poor. The legislators were men of fortune…They voluntarily subjected their own estates, and the estates of others, to a payment of a tax for the maintenance of the poor.”

  These laws were compassionate. But he warned that they could have unintended consequences and promote laziness: “I fear the giving mankind a dependence on anything for support in age or sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends to flatter our natural indolence, to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to cure.”

  Not only did he warn against welfare dependency, but he offered his own version of the trickle-down theory of economics. The more money made by the rich and by all of society, the more money that would make its way down to the poor. “The rich do not work for one another…Everything that they or their families use and consume is the produce of the laboring poor.” The rich spend their money in ways that enrich the laboring poor: clothing and furniture and dwellings. “Our laboring poor receive annually the whole of the clear revenues of the nation.” He also debunked the idea of imposing a higher minimum wage: “A law might be made to raise their wages; but if our manufactures are too dear, they might not vend abroad.”21

  His economic conservatism was balanced, however, by his fundamental moral belief that actions should be judged by how much they benefit the common good. Policies that encouraged hard work were good, but not because they led to great accumulations of private wealth; they were good because they increased the total well-being of a community and the dignity of every aspiring individual. People who acquired more wealth than they needed had a duty to help others and to create civic institutions that promoted the success of others. “His ideal was of a prosperous middle class whose members lived simple lives of democratic equality,” writes James Campbell. “Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.”22

  To this philosophical mix Franklin added an increasingly fervent advocacy of the traditional English liberal values of individual rights and liberties. He had not yet, however, completed his evolution on the great moral question of slavery. As an agent for some of the colonies, including Georgia, he found himself awkwardly and unconvincingly defending America against British attacks that slavery made a mockery of the colonists’ demands for liberty.

  In 1770, he published anonymously a “Conversation on Slavery” in which the American participant tries to defend himself against charges of hypocrisy. Only “one family in a hundred” in America has slaves, and of those, “many treat their slaves with great humanity.” He also argued that the condition of the “working poor” in England “seems something a little like slavery.” At one point, the speaker’s argument even lapses into racism: “Perhaps you imagine the Negroes to be a mild tempered, tractable kind of people. Some of them are indeed so. But the majority are of a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious,
revengeful and cruel in the highest degree.”23

  In his desire to defend America at all costs, Franklin had produced what was one of the worst arguments he ever wrote. Even his facts were wrong. The proportion of slave-owning families in America was not one in a hundred, but close to one in nine (47,664 families out of a total 410,636 American families owned slaves in 1790). Making his argument morally as well as factually weak was the fact that, even as he tried to argue that slave owning was an aberration, Franklin’s own family was among those who still kept slaves. Although the two slaves who had accompanied him on his first trip to England were no longer with him, one or two continued to be part of Deborah’s Philadelphia household.24

  His views, however, were still evolving. Two years after he wrote the “Conversation,” Franklin began corresponding with the ardent Philadelphia abolitionist Anthony Benezet. He used some of Benezet’s arguments in a 1772 piece he wrote for the London Chronicle in which he decried, using stronger language than ever, the “constant butchery of the human species by this pestilent detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men.” He even edged closer to Benezet’s argument that slavery itself—not merely the importation of new slaves—had to be abolished. “I am glad to hear that the disposition against keeping Negroes grows more general in North America,” he wrote Benezet. “I hope in time it will be taken into consideration and suppressed by the legislature.”

  Franklin wrote in a similar vein to his friend the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush. “I hope in time that the friends to liberty and humanity will get the better of a practice that has so long disgraced our nation and religion.” Yet it is important to note that, both to Benezet and to Rush, Franklin included the same qualifying phrase: “in time.” For Franklin, support for complete abolition of slave ownership (rather than merely ending the importation of slaves) would come only in time, only after the Revolution.25