The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin And the Pursuit of Genius

Justin McHenry, Research Director for IndexCreditCards.com


I've always been a Benjamin Franklin fan, but I guess I've always admired the caricature of Franklin: from the rags-to-riches Poor Richard writing witty sayings in his almanacs to the benevolent old founding father who charmed the ladies in France. Sure, I knew he flew a kite in a thunderstorm having something to do with electricity, and I've heard of the Franklin stove, but I always saw Franklin as just sort of a scientific dabbler, an eccentric Renaissance Man who did experiments as a hobby.

A new book that focuses almost exclusively on Franklin's scientific achievements, The First Scientific American by Joyce E. Chaplin, shows me how little I knew. The truth is, although Franklin was an industrious man who came from nothing to be a successful printer and businessman in America, we wouldn't know him as a hero of the American Revolution if not for his many groundbreaking scientific achievements, which made him legendary throughout Europe. In fact, Franklin's contribution to the Revolution wasn't on the battlefield, it was in France, where he spent the entire war using his fame as a means to continually lobby the French for more help, more help, more help.

Of course it was Franklin's work ethic and skill with words that first got him noticed, most famously with his Poor Richard's Almanac, offering words of wisdom such as "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." And his work made him quite wealthy, so much so that he was able to retire from daily work by about age 40 and pursue his interest in the sciences.

Chaplin makes it clear that Franklin wasn't content with money — he wanted recognition for his scientific skills from the other great minds of the day. So he worked as hard on cultivating the right relationships as he did in doing experiments, and in the end, he was very good at both. It's difficult to comprehend today, but in Franklin's day, plenty of people played amateur scientist — "natural philosophy" was their phrase for science — and, if you knew the right people, you could make a name for yourself. This is exactly what Franklin did. Conducting experiments in America while
continually trading notes with the great minds of Europe (who took a while to take him seriously), Franklin was able to slowly but surely squeeze into the club.

From a fireplace that uniformly heated rooms (which eventually became the Franklin stove we still know today) to discovering the idea of positive and negative electrical charges to mapping the Gulf Stream to inventing lightning rods to inventing bifocals to flying a kite in a thunderstorm to prove atmospheric electricity - once Franklin's accomplishments were known in Europe he quickly dwarfed the other learned society members and became the most famous of them all.

It is interesting to note that Franklin came to be loved by many but also feared by some who believed he had something akin to supernatural powers - an ability to harness nature and do with it what he would. One fan wrote to Franklin telling him his next duty was to secure us from the "Power of Death." A 1779 painting in France shows the elderly Franklin clothed in robes, looking absolutely godlike as he repels both natural and man-made dangers while seated on a cloud. The guy was a freaking superstar.

It was this superstardom that made Franklin the perfect ambassador to France, a country that made the new America possible by its massive assistance in the Revolution. It's fair to say that America would not have come to be without France, France would not have given the help it did without Franklin's credibility, and Franklin would not have had that credibility if not for his huge contribution in the sciences. If we think today of Franklin as a charming political mastermind, we need to remember that his scientific genius was the leverage that gave him the opportunity to have such an impact.

Chaplin makes the argument in The First Scientific American that Franklin was also in the right place at the right time. During his lifetime, one could be respected as a scientist while maintaining other careers and unrelated interests.

Later, scientists became specialists, and were no longer able to be well-rounded individuals making contributions across many walks of life. (Chaplin sees Einstein as perhaps the lone exception to this rule, the only other scientific superstar since Franklin.) Perhaps this is why Franklin's name still has such meaning for people today - he was a man who could do it all, and people like that don't come along very often.

Justin McHenry is Research Director for IndexCreditCards.com ( http://www.indexcreditcards.com ) and a frequent contributor to Blogcritics.org ( http://blogcritics.org ), where this review first appeared.

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