Inventors: Benjamin Franklin

Author, scientist, philosopher, and statesman. Franklin published Poor Richard's Almanack (1732–37) and the Pennsylvania Gazette (1729–48). He organized the American Philosophical Society and improved the postal service while he served as deputy postmaster general for the colonies. As a scientist and inventor he experimented with electricity, devised the lightning rod, created the Franklin stove, and developed bifocals. His significant contributions as a statesman included the Albany Plan in 1754; in 1766 he helped convince the British Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. Franklin, who was a member of the Second Continental Congress, served on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. He then became the first American minister to France during the American Revolution and successfully acquired French aid against Great Britain. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain in 1781–83. As a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he served as a calming influence and broker of compromise between the large and small states and the free and slave states. Franklin was the only person to sign all four of the great documents of the period: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris with Britain, and the U.S. Constitution.

No one in the 1780s defined the idea of an "American" as much as Benjamin Franklin. Here, explore the many roles Franklin played in the formative years of the republic: as independent printer, public "gentleman," nobleman of nature, and tradesman cynical of the wealthy and powerful.

The world was experiencing a major revolution in the 18th century thanks to the printing press. The rise in literacy, the spread of ideas, and the creation of communities across oceans and colonial boundaries re-shaped the world's intellectual landscape. Delve into Franklin's career as a printer, where he was at the center of this revolution.

Unpack Franklin's greatest scientific contributions, which were in the field of electricity. As one of his biographers put it, Franklin found electricity as merely a curiosity but he left it a science. Review his most important discoveries, experiments, and contributions, and reflect on the lasting legacy of Franklin as a scientist.

Begin your course with a look at Franklin's unfinished autobiography, a book in which he consciously created a persona for himself as a role model others may follow. Although there is more to Franklin than he showed on the page, surveying the Autobiography offers some foundational insights into his life, his worldview, and the times in which he lived.

Americans developed cultural forms in both music and art that were uniquely American. The most important cultural transition, part of the European Enlightenment, was from a religious to a scientific and secular understanding of the world. Three illustrative figures of this transition are Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Edwards.

The only other source of hard currency came from trade that brought in foreign coins, such as the fabled "pieces of eight" that were valued by how much silver or gold they contained. On April 3, 1729, Franklin published a pamphlet with the falsely humble title A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency.\n In January 1776, in the first use of counterfeiting as a weapon of war, the British set up a printing press aboard the Royal Navy's HMS Phoenix, anchored in New York Harbor. Microfibers, colored threads, fluorescing inks and the rest, the arsenal of modern anti-counterfeiting tricks currently used by the U.S. government, can be traced to that Philadelphia master printer, whose pictures of leaves helped launch a paper money society.

Benjamin Franklin, mostly known for his participation in writing The Declaration of Independence and work on electricity, was also one of the first scientists to seek to understand the properties of oil monolayers on water surfaces. During one of his many voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, Franklin observed that oil had a calming effect on waves when poured into rough ocean waters. Though at first taking a backseat to many of his other scientific and political endeavors, Franklin went on to experiment with oil, spreading monomolecular films on various bodies of water, and ultimately devised a concept of particle repulsion that is indirectly related to the hydrophobic effect. His early observations inspired others to measure the dimensions of oil monolayers, which eventually led to the formulation of the contemporary lipid bilayer model of the cell membrane.

In life, Benjamin Franklin sought to manage debt, organize credit, build capital and promote virtue. After death, he continued this work by leaving a codicil to his last will and testament, bequeathing £2,000 to Boston and Philadelphia. This study examines Franklin's codicil and the financial history of America over the 200 years since his death.