Benjamin Franklin was born on 17 January 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifteenth of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, a tallow chandler and soap-maker who had emigrated from Ecton, Northamptonshire. He attended school for only two years before apprenticing to his brother James, a printer, from whom he absorbed both the craft and a restless appetite for print. At seventeen he ran away to Philadelphia, arriving with a few coins and a Dutch dollar, and talked his way into work as a printer. By 1729 he owned the Pennsylvania Gazette; by 1733 he was publishing Poor Richard's Almanack under the pen name Richard Saunders, a phenomenal commercial success that ran for twenty-five years and disseminated his aphorisms — 'early to bed and early to rise,' 'a penny saved is a penny earned' — across the colonies. He retired from active printing in 1748 at forty-two, having accumulated enough wealth to pursue science. In June 1752, on the Champs de Mars outside Philadelphia, he conducted his famous kite experiment — or its equivalent — demonstrating that lightning was electrical in nature, a result he had already published in his 1751 Experiments and Observations on Electricity. The lightning rod he invented followed directly from that insight. The Royal Society of London elected him a fellow in 1756; the French Académie des Sciences made him a corresponding member. He served as Pennsylvania's agent in London from 1757 to 1762 and again from 1764 to 1775, becoming the colonies' most effective spokesman before Parliament during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765–66. His testimony before the House of Commons helped secure the act's repeal. He reached Philadelphia in May 1775, days after Lexington and Concord, and was immediately elected to the Second Continental Congress, which sent him to France in late 1776 as minister plenipotentiary. Franklin was already the most famous American in Europe — his Parisian fame eclipsed that of Voltaire — and he parlayed celebrity, charm, and brilliant diplomacy into the Treaty of Alliance with France, signed in February 1778, which brought French troops, the French fleet, and ultimately French credit to the American side. He negotiated the Treaty of Paris with Britain in 1783, ending the war. Back in Philadelphia, he presided over the Pennsylvania Executive Council from 1785 to 1788 and attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as its oldest delegate at eighty-one, offering the closing speech that urged unanimous adoption despite reservations. He submitted a petition against slavery to Congress in February 1790, the last public act of his life. He died on 17 April 1790, aged eighty-four; twenty thousand Philadelphians attended his funeral — then the largest public gathering in American history. His extraordinary range — printer, politician, writer, scientist, inventor, diplomat, civic organizer — makes him almost impossible to categorize, which is perhaps why he remains the most approachable of the Founders.
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Polymath · Founding Father · Diplomat · Inventor
Benjamin Franklin
1,706 CE – 1,790 CE
The Boston-born printer who became colonial America's first celebrity scientist, negotiated the French alliance that won the Revolutionary War, and charmed Enlightenment Europe with a combination of wit, electricity, and moral common sense.
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