Benjamin Franklin — Noah Lisk

It was not unusual for men in colonial New England to outlive two or three wives. Of the first eighteen women who came to Massachusetts in 1628, for example, fourteen died within a year. (Location 308)
Frugality became for him not only a virtue but also a pleasure. “Industry and frugality,” he wrote in describing the theme of Poor Richard’s almanacs, are “the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.” (Location 367)
In Poor Richard’s almanac, Franklin would later put it more pithily: “Fish and guests stink after three days.” (Location 387)
Being “disputatious,” he concluded, was “a very bad habit” because contradicting people produced “disgusts and perhaps enmities.” Later in his life he would wryly say of disputing: “Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.” Instead, after stumbling across some rhetoric books that extolled Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert. “I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore, I took a delight in it.” (Location 543)
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” (Location 704)
His most notable trait was a personal magnetism; he attracted people who wanted to help him. Never shy, and always eager to win friends and patrons, he gregariously exploited this charm. (Location 711)
“A man [is] sometimes more generous when he has little money than when he has plenty,” he later wrote, “perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.” (Location 718)
people are more likely to admire your work if you’re able to keep them from feeling jealous of you. (Location 756)
“Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high. Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you’ll miss many hard thumps.” As Franklin later recalled to Mather’s son, “This advice, thus beat into my head, has frequently been of use to me, and I often think of it when I see pride mortified and misfortunes brought upon people by carrying their heads too high.” (Location 780)
A secret to being more revered than resented, he learned, was to display (at least when he could muster the discipline) a self-deprecating humor, unpretentious demeanor, and unaggressive style in conversation. (Location 798)
A pattern was emerging. Beginning with Collins and Ralph, Franklin easily made casual friends, intellectual companions, useful patrons, flirty admirers, and circles of genial acquaintances, but he was less good at nurturing lasting bonds that involved deep personal commitments or emotional relationships, even within his own family. (Location 836)
He lamented that because he had never outlined a design for how he should conduct himself, his life so far had been somewhat confused. “Let me, therefore, make some resolutions, and some form of action, that, henceforth, I may live in all respects like a rational creature.” There were four rules: It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe. To endeavor to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action—the most amiable excellence in a rational being. To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of suddenly growing rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty. I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever. (Location 907)
Franklin became an apostle of being—and, just as important, of appearing to be—industrious. Even after he became successful, he made a show of personally carting the rolls of paper he bought in a wheelbarrow down the street to his shop, rather than having a hired hand do (Location 982)
Franklin was the consummate networker. He liked to mix his civic life with his social one, and he merrily leveraged both to further his business life. (Location 994)
Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.” (Location 1013)
The other sins on his list were, in order: seeming uninterested, speaking too much about your own life, prying for personal secrets (“an unpardonable rudeness”), telling long and pointless stories (“old folks are most subject to this error, which is one chief reason their company is so often shunned”), contradicting or disputing someone directly, ridiculing or railing against things except in small witty doses (”it’s like salt, a little of which in some cases gives relish, but if thrown on by handfuls spoils all”), and spreading scandal (though he would later write lighthearted defenses of gossip). (Location 1029)
Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would help sell newspapers. (Location 1099)
went on to preach Franklin’s favorite theme: slow and steady diligence is the true way to wealth. (Location 1125)
Gossip can also, he noted, promote virtue, as some people are motivated more by fear of public humiliation than they are by inner moral principles. “ ‘What will the world say of me if I act thus?’ is often a reflection strong enough to enable us to resist the most powerful temptation to vice or folly. (Location 1249)
But he was, of course, only half-serious in his defense of gossip. The other part of his personality was more earnest: he continually resolved to speak ill of nobody. (Location 1266)
Franklin also perfected the art of poking fun at himself. He realized, as have subsequent American humorists, that a bit of wry self-deprecation could make him seem more endearing. (Location 1276)
Around that time, Franklin developed a method for making difficult decisions. “My way is to divide a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro and the other Con,” he later recalled. Then he would list all the arguments on each side and weigh how important each was. “Where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out; if I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three.” By this bookkeeper’s calculus, it became clear to him “where the balance lies.” (Location 1326)
“Frugality is an enriching virtue, a virtue I could never acquire in myself, but I was lucky enough to find it in a wife, who thereby became a fortune to me.” (Location 1385)
First he made a list of twelve virtues he thought desirable, and to each he appended a short definition: Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; (i.e., waste nothing). Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation. (Location 1581)
This battle against pride would challenge—and amuse—him for the rest of his life. “You will see it perhaps often in this history. For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I would probably be proud of my humility.” (Location 1622)
The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him. (Location 1651)
Poor Richard’s Almanack, which Franklin began publishing at the end of 1732, combined the two goals of his doing-well-by-doing-good philosophy: the making of money and the promotion of virtue. It became, in the course of its twenty-five-year run, America’s first great humor classic. (Location 1665)
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.” (Location 2001)
“I experienced,” he recalled, “the truth of the observation, that after getting the first £100, it is more easy to get the second.” (Location 2205)
“I would rather have it said,” he wrote his mother, “ ‘He lived usefully,’ than, ‘He died rich.’ ” (Location 2208)
His scientific interests would continue throughout his life, with research into the Gulf Stream, meteorology, the earth’s magnetism, and refrigeration. (Location 2241)
“As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” (Location 2278)
Also, by pouring out the water and metal inside a charged Leyden jar and not being able to elicit a spark, he found that the charge did not actually reside in them; instead, he correctly concluded, it was the glass itself that held the charge. So he lined up a series of glass plates flanked by metal, charged them up, wired them together, and created (and gave a name to) a new device: “what we called an electrical battery.” (Location 2344)
The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him the “new Prometheus” for stealing the fire of heaven. He quickly became not only the most celebrated scientist in America and Europe, but also a popular hero. In solving one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, he had conquered one of nature’s most terrifying dangers. (Location 2500)
The academy opened in January 1751 as the first nonsectarian college in America (by 1791 it came to be known as the University of Pennsylvania). (Location 2535)
“Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of providence,” Franklin wrote, “we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.” Perhaps even welfare for the poor was an example. He asked whether “the laws peculiar to England which compel the rich to maintain the poor have not given the latter a dependence.” It was “godlike” and laudable, he added, “to relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures,” but might it not in the end “provide encouragements for laziness”? (Location 2556)
Franklin’s own idea was more expansive: he believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and ambition. (Location 2573)
White people also sometimes feel this preference for the Indians’ way of living, Franklin noted. When white children were captured and raised by Indians, then later returned to white society, “in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.” (Location 2633)
He blamed the French success “on the present disunited state of the British colonies.” Next to the article he printed the first and most famous editorial cartoon in American history: a snake cut into pieces, labeled with names of the colonies, with the caption: “Join, or Die.” (Location 2731)
He also speculated, correctly, that summer breezes do not by themselves cool people; instead, the cooling effect comes from the increased evaporation of human perspiration caused by the breeze. (Location 3276)
young lion cub and a large English dog traveling together on a ship. The dog picked on the lion cub and “frequently took its food by force.” But the lion grew and eventually became stronger than the dog. One day, in response to all the insults, it smashed the dog with “a stunning blow,” leaving the dog “regretting that he had not rather secured its friendship than provoked its enmity.” (Location 4238)
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. (Location 4510)
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. (Location 4567)
For as people say when they are angry: ‘If he strikes me, I’ll strike him again’; I sometimes think it might be right to say: ‘If he flatters me, I’ll flatter him again.’ ” (Location 4633)
On December 16, 1773, after a mass rally in the Old South Church, some fifty patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians went down to the wharves and dumped 342 chests of tea worth £10,000 into the sea. (Location 4700)
When the redcoats reached Lexington, seventy American “minutemen” were there to meet them. “Disperse, ye rebels,” the British major ordered. At first they did. Then a shot was fired. In the ensuing skirmish, eight Americans were killed. The victorious redcoats marched on to Concord, where, as Emerson put it, “the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world.” (Location 4947)
Franklin was selected a member of the Congress the day after his arrival. Nearing 70, he was by far the oldest. Most of the sixty-two others who convened in the Pennsylvania statehouse—such as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry from Virginia and John Adams and John Hancock from Massachusetts—had not even been born when Franklin first went to work there more than forty years earlier. (Location 4960)
“The Name of the Confederacy shall henceforth be The United Colonies of North America,” Franklin’s detailed thirteen articles began. “The said United Colonies hereby severally enter into a firm League of Friendship with each other, binding on themselves and their posterity, for their common defense against their enemies, for the security of their liberties and properties, the safety of their persons and families, and their mutual and general welfare.” (Location 5096)
Franklin was also put in charge of establishing a system of paper currency, one of his long-standing passions. As usual, he immersed himself in many of the details. Using his botanical knowledge of the vein structures of different types of leaves, he personally drew the leaf designs for the various notes to make them harder to counterfeit. (Location 5133)
Back in Philadelphia, a group of Marine units were being organized to try to capture British arms shipments. Franklin noticed that one of their drummers had painted a rattlesnake on his drum emblazoned with the words “Don’t tread on me.” In an anonymous article, filled with bold humor and a touch of venom, Franklin suggested that this should be the symbol and motto of America’s fight. (Location 5190)
Christopher Gadsen, a delegate to the Congress from South Carolina, picked up the suggestion in Franklin’s article and subsequently designed a yellow flag with a rattlesnake emblazoned “Don’t Tread on Me.” It was flown in early 1776 by America’s first Marine units and later by many other militias. (Location 5195)
Jefferson also, it should be noted, borrowed freely from the phrasings of others, including the resounding Declaration of Rights in the new Virginia constitution that had just been drafted by his fellow planter George Mason, in a manner that today might subject him to questions of plagiarism but back then was considered not only proper but learned. (Location 5300)
At the official signing of the parchment copy on August 2, John Hancock, the president of the Congress, penned his name with his famous flourish. “There must be no pulling different ways,” he declared. “We must all hang together.” (Location 5344)
The smaller states had argued that they would be overwhelmed by the larger ones if there was proportional representation. Franklin replied that some Scots had said, at the time of the union with England, that they would meet Jonah’s fate of being swallowed by a whale, but so many Scots ended up being part of the government “that it was found, in the event, that Jonah had swallowed the whale.” (Location 5361)
Another ultrademocratic proposal Franklin made to the Pennsylvania convention was that the state’s Declaration of Rights discourage large holdings of property or concentrations of wealth as “a danger to the happiness of mankind.” That also ended up being too radical for the convention. (Location 5379)
The experience in Europe would be good for his grandchildren, he hoped, and their presence would be comforting to him. Two years later, writing of Temple but using words that applied to both boys, Franklin explained one reason he wanted them along: “If I die, I have a child to close my eyes.” (Location 5535)
The French even tried to claim him as one of their own. He always assumed, as noted at the beginning of this book, that his surname came from the class of landowning English freemen known as franklins, and he was almost surely correct. But the Gazette of Amiens reported that the name Franquelin was common in the province of Picardie, from which many families had emigrated to England. (Location 5579)
Others were awed by the fact that he dressed so plainly and wore no wig. “Everything in him announced the simplicity and the innocence of primitive morals,” marveled one Parisian, who added the perfect French compliment about his love of silence: “He knew how to be impolite without being rude.” (Location 5586)
do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. (Location 5661)
be concerned in no affairs I should blush to have made public, and to do nothing but what spies may see and welcome. When a man’s actions are just and honorable, the more they are known, the more his reputation is increased and established. (Location 5734)
The New Jersey Gazette went further: Franklin was inventing an electrical apparatus that could shift landmasses and a method of using oil that could still the waves in one place while stirring up tempests in another. (Location 5809)
Still, the British surrender at Saratoga was a great turning point on the battlefield and—because Franklin knew that power on the battlefield correlated to power at the bargaining table—it was a great turning point for his diplomatic efforts. (Location 5859)
They were both very smart, but otherwise they had quite different personalities. Adams was unbending and outspoken and argumentative, Franklin charming and taciturn and flirtatious. Adams was rigid in his personal morality and lifestyle, Franklin famously playful. Adams learned French by poring over grammar books and memorizing a collection of funeral orations; Franklin (who cared little about the grammar) learned the language by lounging on the pillows of his female friends and writing them amusing little tales. Adams felt comfortable confronting people, whereas Franklin preferred to seduce them, and the same was true of the way they dealt with nations. (Location 5974)
One of Franklin’s French friends put a more positive spin on his work habits: “He would eat, sleep, work whenever he saw fit, according to his needs, so that there never was a more leisurely man, though he certainly handled a tremendous amount of business.” (Location 6007)
But in France, where the appearance of pleasure was more valued, Franklin knew how to adopt the style. As Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.” (Location 6010)
most histories of the invention of Daylight Savings Time credit the idea to this essay by Franklin, even though he wrote it mockingly and did not come up with the idea of actually shifting clocks by an hour during the summer. (Location 6367)
Those who study hard, he wrote, “live comfortably in good houses,” whereas those who are idle and neglect their schoolwork “are poor and dirty and ragged and ignorant and vicious and live in miserable cabins and garrets.” Franklin liked the lesson so much that he made a copy and sent it to Sally, who gushed that “Willy shall get it by heart.” Benny, on the other hand, did not even acknowledge receiving it. So Franklin sent him another copy and ordered him to translate it into French and send it back to assure he understood it. (Location 6472)
Jones was able to lash the Bonhomme Richard into a death grip with the Serapis, and his men scrambled up the masts to lob grenades into the ammunition holds of the enemy ship. After a three-hour battle, in which half of his three hundred crew members were killed or wounded, Jones captured control of the Serapis just before the Bonhomme Richard sank. “The scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language,” he wrote Franklin. “Humanity cannot but recoil and lament that war should be capable of producing such fatal consequences.” (Location 6650)
Even if a person borrows money from another and then repays it, he still owes gratitude: “He has discharged the money debt, but the obligation remains.” (Location 6873)
Franklin had been instrumental in shaping the three great documents of the war: the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, and the treaty with England. Now he turned his thoughts to peace. “All wars are follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones,” he wrote Polly Stevenson. “When will mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their differences by arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the cast of a die, it would be better than by fighting and destroying each other.” (Location 7119)
A scientist named Jacques Charles launched a twelve-foot-diameter silk balloon filled with hydrogen produced by pouring oil of vitriol over fiery iron filings. With great fanfare, it took off from Paris in front of fifty thousand spectators and floated for more than forty-five minutes before landing in a village more than fifteen miles away. “The country people who saw it fall were frightened,” Franklin wrote Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, “and attacked it with stones and knives so that it was much mangled.” (Location 7172)
first, he was reluctant to guess what practical use might come of balloons, but he was convinced that experimenting with them would someday, as he told Banks, “pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception.” There could be, he noted in another letter, “important consequences that no one can foresee.” More famous was his pithier expression of the same sentiment, made in response to a spectator who asked what use this new balloon thing could be. “What is the use,” he replied, “of a newborn baby?” (Location 7189)
“It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter until we can see to what use that power may be applied,” he replied. “When we have learned to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.” (Location 7196)
That provoked one of Franklin’s most famous riffs about America’s values and the question of a national bird: I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character, he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, near the river where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labors of the fishing-hawk… The turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and a true original native of America… He is (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards. (Location 7216)
Franklin’s affection for the middle class and its virtues of hard work and frugality meant that his social theories tended to be a blend of conservatism (as we have seen, he was dubious of generous welfare laws that led to dependency among the poor) and populism (he was opposed to the privileges of inheritance and to wealth idly gained through ownership of large estates). (Location 7240)
In his spare time, Franklin perfected one of his most famous and useful inventions: bifocal glasses. Writing to a friend in August 1784, he announced himself “happy in the invention of Double Spectacles, which, serving for distant objects as well as near ones, make my eyes as useful to me as ever they were.” (Location 7278)
When word spread, a few months later, that he was being tapped to replace Franklin, Jefferson gave his famed reply: “No one can replace him, Sir, I am only his successor.” (Location 7320)
It was typical of Franklin. Throughout his life, he loved immersing himself in minutiae and trivia in a manner so obsessive that it might today be described as geeky. (Location 7547)
Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age; all the operations of nature he seems to understand, the very heavens obey him, and the clouds yield up their lightning to be imprisoned in his rod. But what claim he has to be a politician, posterity must determine. It is certain that he does not shine much in public council. He is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary man, and tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard. (Location 7631)
He was the only person to sign all four of its founding papers: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, the peace accord with Britain, and the Constitution. (Location 7862)