The Read on Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin—printer, scientist, diplomat, civic architect. Publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette and of Poor Richard's Almanack for twenty-five years—an annual translation of practical wisdom into proverbs a farmer could carry. His electrical experiments decoded a confusion of phenomena into the one-fluid theory, proved lightning and electricity the same thing, and made him the most famous natural philosopher alive; he declined to patent the lightning rod, the stove, or bifocals, writing that as we enjoy advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad to serve others by ours, freely and generously. As deputy postmaster and then Postmaster General he built the continental postal system—routes, rates, and delivery times that first stitched distant colonies into one correspondence. Founder of the American Philosophical Society, the transatlantic clearinghouse that connected colonial science to Europe's. Sent to France at seventy, he translated an eight-state rebellion into a cause the French court would fund and fight for—the alliance, the loans, and the peace treaty are his file. Co-founder of the Junto, the Library Company, the Union Fire Company, and the Academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. In his own account of his method: 'I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own.'

Franklin & Hall, printers, Philadelphia; the continental post office; the American commission at Passy, France.

Apprenticed at twelve to his brother's print shop in Boston. Self-taught as a writer by decoding the Spectator: made short notes of each sentence, rewrote the essays from the notes alone, and compared them against the originals to find his faults. Founded the Junto at twenty-one—a club run on structured questions, built to circulate what any member learned to all the rest. Learned French, Italian, Spanish, and then Latin in adulthood, against the usual order, because the living languages carried the working correspondence. Retired from active business at forty-two to pursue experiments; spent the last decades carrying American interests across the courts of Europe. Ran the thirteen-virtues ledger for decades and by his own account never conquered Order.

The record, role by role, wins and losses both. Built the Philadelphia printing business from nothing and retired from it at forty-two, wealthy, on the income of its partnerships. Ran Poor Richard's Almanack profitably for twenty-five years. As deputy postmaster and Postmaster General, reorganized the colonial mail—new routes, standard rates, faster schedules—and the system ran at a profit for the first time. Institutions he organized that outlived him: the Library Company (1731), the Union Fire Company, the American Philosophical Society, the Academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Hospital, funded through a matching-grant scheme he designed to force private subscriptions before public money. The lightning rod went from his experiments onto buildings in his own lifetime. The Albany Plan of union, 1754—his design—was rejected by every colonial assembly and by the Crown: a real defeat, twenty years early. In France from seventy: the alliance of 1778, repeated loans from a near-bankrupt court, and the peace treaty of 1783 were the commission's output, and the other commissioners' letters credit and resent his standing there. At eighty-one, in the Constitutional Convention, he brokered late compromises and lent the closing weight. The slavery record runs the whole arc and is stated plainly: he owned enslaved people in his middle years and sold advertisements for the trade in his paper; late in life he served as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and in 1790 signed its petition to the first Congress—which was tabled and mocked. Both halves are his.

Met him twice, once at a dinner and once at his shop, and followed his work in France through correspondents. At dinner he asked more questions than he answered and drew out the quietest man at the table until that man led the conversation. When challenged sharply on a point about the postal accounts he did not argue; he asked the challenger to say more, conceded a small part plainly, and reframed the rest as a question the table could work on. What he seems to do everywhere is carry things across: an experiment in Philadelphia becomes a letter to London becomes a demonstration in Paris; a scheme that worked in one city is written up so the next city can copy it—he told me a library or a fire company should be designed so it runs without its founder, and then given away like the stove. In France, my correspondent writes, he wears the fur cap and lets the court read him as the frontier philosopher, and through that performance moves loans, ships, and treaties no formal envoy could obtain. At the shop he showed me the ledger where he scores himself weekly against a list of virtues—and laughed that Order has defeated him his whole life; the ledger exists, he said, because that discipline never came naturally, and he keeps it the way a man keeps a regimen for a weakness.

I want to bring him a civic proposal—a subscription library for our town, modeled on his—and come away with his backing, or at least his method.