7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7simply from his many inventions but, more important,
from his fundamental contributions to the science of
electricity. If there had been a Nobel Prize for Physics in
the 18th century, Franklin would have been a contender.
Enhancing his fame was the fact that he was an American,
a simple man from an obscure background who emerged
from the wilds of America to dazzle the entire intellectual
world. Most Europeans in the 18th century thought of
America as a primitive, undeveloped place full of forests
and savages and scarcely capable of producing enlightened
thinkers. Yet Franklin’s electrical discoveries in the mid-
18th century had surpassed the achievements of the most
sophisticated scientists of Europe. Franklin became a
living example of the natural untutored genius of the New
World that was free from the encumbrances of a decadent
and tired Old World—an image that he later parlayed into
French support for the American Revolution.
Despite his great scientific achievements, however,
Franklin always believed that public service was more
important than science, and his political contributions
to the formation of the United States were substantial.
He had a hand in the writing of the Declaration of
Independence, contributed to the drafting of the Articles
of Confederation—America’s first national constitution—
and was the oldest member of the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 that wrote the Constitution of the
United States of America in Philadelphia. More important,
as diplomatic representative of the new American republic
in France during the Revolution, he secured both diplo-
matic recognition and financial and military aid from the
government of Louis XVI and was a crucial member of
the commission that negotiated the treaty by which Great
Britain recognized its former 13 colonies as a sovereign
nation. Since no one else could have accomplished all that