A History of the American People

watch. He became president of its first fire-insurance company and its chief actuary, working out
the premiums. He took a leading part in paving, cleaning, and especially lighting the streets,
designing a four-sided Ventilated Lamp and putting up whale-oil street-lights. With others, he
founded the American Philosophical Society, equivalent of England's famous Royal Society, the
city's first hospital, and, not least, the Academy for the Education of Youth, which became the
great University of Pennsylvania. It had a remarkable liberal curriculum for its day-penmanship,
drawing, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and even a little Gardening, Planting, Grafting and Inoculating.' It was also used to cultivate English style, especiallythe clear and the concise.'
Franklin fathered two illegitimate children, took on a common-law wife, kept a bookshop
importing the latest pamphlets from London ('Let me have everything, good or bad, that makes a
Noise and has a Run'), became postmaster, and, from 1733, made himself a national figure with
his Poor Richard's Almanac, a calendar-diary with mottoes, aphorisms, and poems. He pinched
the idea from Swift but made it his own. It was original in two distinct senses, both highly
American. First, it introduced the wisecrack-the joke which imparts knowledge or street-wisdom,
as well as makes you laugh. Second, it popularized the notion, already rooted in America, of the
Self-Made Man, the rags-to-riches epic, by handing out practical advice. Franklin's Advice to a Young Tradesman written by an Old One' (1748) sums up the Poor Richard theme:Remember
that time is money ... remember that credit is money ... The way to Wealth is as plain as the Way
to Market. It depends chiefly on two words, Industry and Frugality.' The Almanac sold 10,000
copies a year, one for every 100 inhabitants, and a quarter-million over its lifespan, becoming the
most popular book in the colonies after the Bible. Extracts from it, first printed in 1757 under the
title The Way to Wealth, have gone through over 1,200 editions since and youngsters still read it.
By 1748 Franklin was able to put in a partner to run his business, retiring on an income of £476 a
year to devote the rest of his life to helping his fellow-men and indulging his scientific curiosity.
His activities now multiplied. He crossed the Atlantic eight times, discovered the Gulf Stream,
met leading scientists and engineers, invented the damper and various smokeless chimneys-a
vexed topic which continued to occupy him till the end of his life-designed two new stoves, but
refused to patent them from humanitarian principles, invented a new hearth called a
Pennsylvania Fireplace, manufactured a new whale-oil candle, studied geology, farming,
archeology, eclipses, sunspots, whirlwinds, earthquakes, ants, alphabets, and lightning
conductors. He made himself one of the earliest experts on electricity, publishing in 1751 an
eighty-six-page treatise, Experiments and Observations on electricity made in Philadelphia,
which over twenty years went into four editions in English, three in French and one each in
German and Italian, giving him a European reputation. As one of his biographers put it, He found electricity a curiosity and left it a science.' But he also had fun, proposing an Electricity Party:A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by an electric shock, and roasted by an electrical
jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle; when the healths of all the famous electricians
in England, Holland, France and Germany are to be drunk in electrified bumpers, under the
discharge of guns from an electrified battery.
Honors accrued: a Fellowship of the Royal Society, degrees conferred not only by Yale,
Harvard, and William and Mary but by Oxford and St Andrews. He corresponded with sages all
over the civilized world and in time belonged to twenty-eight academies and learned societies.
As Sir Humphry Davy acknowledged: 'By very small means he established very grand truths.' He
came to politics comparatively late. He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1751 and
two years later was appointed deputy postmaster-general for all the colonies. This made him, for
the first time, think of the American continent as a unity. But it was the British Act forbidding