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Key insights from
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
By
Walter Isaacson
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What you’ll learn
“Well done is better than well said.” “You may delay, but
time will not.” Ben Franklin is known for his witty homespun aphorisms and
creative inventions, but there’s so much more to explore in the life of one
of America’s most influential sons.
Read on for key insights from Benjamin Franklin.
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1. The Franklin
family maintained a proud tradition of free thinking and independence going
back to the 1500s at least.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, a new demographic began
to emerge in rural England. They were neither nobility nor peasants, but
they were wealthy and owned land. They were not loyal to a lord or bound to
a plot of his land, but were known as “frankeleyns” or freemen. In those
days, nobility would use their realm as a last name, whereas laborers and
craftsmen identified themselves by their profession, like Smith or Taylor.
The Franklins were recognized by their independence.
The earliest record of Benjamin Franklin’s forebears dates
back to his great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Francklyne, born in the
mid-1500s in a hamlet near Ecton. His reputation for rejecting arbitrary
political and religious authority became something of a legend among the
Franklins, and almost got him in trouble at times.
When Mary Queen of Scots reinstated the authority of the
Catholic Church in England, Thomas Francklyne insisted on holding on to his
own Bible to read and interpret for himself. He created a compartment on
the underside of a stool that could be readily hidden in the event that a
nosy civil servant happened to check in on the family.
This strain of subversion, inventiveness, and freethinking
lived on in subsequent generations. Many of Thomas’ descendants were
non-conformists, handy craftsmen, voracious readers, talented writers, and
lovers of learning. They often had firm beliefs, but these were wrapped in
a winsome levity.
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2. The Franklin
family's move to America was both religiously and economically motivated.
When Benjamin Franklin’s father, Josiah was a young man,
there was a deep schism between the Anglican Church and the Puritans. The
Franklin house was a house divided, but there remained a mutual respect
that refused to mirror the bitter animosity prevailing in the town at
large. Josiah sided with the Protestant dissenters, and Benjamin Franklin
attributed his father’s decision to move to America to the desire for
religious freedom that Cromwell was hampering.
This was certainly part of the story. Indeed, it is
partially true of the great American myth more generally, which is
invariably expounded upon in textbooks. Certainly, people did cross the
Atlantic in hopes of greater religious freedom, but there was also an
economic rationale in the case of Josiah Franklin and the pilgrims more
generally. Josiah’s brother more accurately attributed the move to
economics than faith. The two went together for the Franklins. Faith and
business did not need to be in conflict. Productivity is next to godliness,
as far as the Franklins and many a Puritan were concerned.
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3. Benjamin
Franklin exhibited qualities of leadership, inventiveness, and thrift from
an early age.
Benjamin Franklin was born and baptized on January 17, 1706.
By this time, Boston had been around almost 80 years. It was not a
backwater settlement, but a thriving township full of merchants, sailors,
ministers, and harlots. There were over 1,000 homes and as many ships
registered with the harbor. Boston’s population was 7,000, and this number
would double every 20 years.
Even as a young boy, Franklin was usually the ring-leader
and instigator among the boys. They lived along the Charles River and
explored its banks and depths. Franklin recalled one incident when he
convinced his friends to rendezvous in the middle of the night to help him
steal large stones from a nearby building site in order to build a stone
wharf. They successfully constructed a small wharf, but were found out and
punished. Franklin waxed moralistic at the anecdote’s end, but it was
perhaps with a twinkle in his eye and a spark of pride at his ability to
galvanize people into action that he hoped would stick with his reader.
Franklin also showed his penchant for practical creativity.
He loved to swim, and would experiment with methods of increasing speed.
One day, he stripped and waded into a pond with a kite he’d made. The kite
caught a strong breeze, and gently pulled a floating Franklin across the
pond.
Franklin’s habit of frugality also began from an early age.
Toward the end of his life, he recounted to his friends in Paris an
incident when he found a boy with a whistle. So enthralled was Franklin
with its shape and sound that he gave the boy all the money he had on hand.
His siblings later mocked him for paying quadruple what the whistle was
worth. His embarrassment was deep and shaped him into the
penny-saved-penny-earned advocate of thrift we’ve come to know.
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4. Franklin only
received two years of formal schooling.
Franklin’s father, Josiah, was not formally educated, but he
owned several books and enjoyed the life of the mind. He would often invite
people to the Franklin home and initiate intellectual discussions among his
guests. By design, young Benjamin would listen attentively to the
discussions. This was a formative element of his early, informal education.
Benjamin was Josiah’s tenth and youngest child, and so
Josiah dedicated him as his tithe to God—the one who would take up the life
of the cloth. Franklin was to study divinity at Harvard and become a
minister. Josiah was a poor candlestick maker, but he enrolled Franklin in
a private school at the age of eight with the children of Boston’s elite.
Franklin quickly climbed to the top of his class and even skipped a grade,
but Josiah removed him from school quite suddenly.
Insufficient finances was the reason given, but this seems
thin. The Latin school was tuition-free, and by that time young Benjamin
would have been one of only a few children still under Josiah Franklin’s
roof. The family had gotten by fine with far more mouths to feed. What is
more, it was not impossible to get scholarships to Harvard. In fact, more
than a tenth of the university’s budget was dedicated to offering financial
aid. It wasn’t just the elite admitted into Harvard either. A large
proportion were the sons of tradesmen, and some were even orphans.
A far more probable explanation is that Josiah discovered
that his son was not a good fit for the cloth. In all likelihood,
Franklin’s spontaneity, skepticism, inquisitive nature, and, at times, his
irreverence would not have jived well with the more rigid clerical
structures; and his worldly practicality would have quickly exhausted his
patience with theorizing and theologizing.
What would have become of Franklin had he gone to Harvard?
Some historians have speculated that it would have ruined him for creative
thinking and curiosity. This, however, seems a gross underestimation of
both Harvard and Franklin.
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5. Franklin hated
the simplicity of his father’s candle trade, but hit his stride working in
printing and publication.
After two years of formal education, Franklin began to work
for his father making candles and soap. The monotony of the tasks grated on
him, and he quickly grew to despise the profession. His father began to
take Franklin for long walks, where he could observe the various craftsmen
at work.This slight familiarity with various crafts would later aid him in
turning his invention ideas into reality.
When he was 12, Franklin began an apprenticeship with his
older brother, James, who had been training as a printer. This would be a
tremendous boon to Franklin. He was a voracious reader, and it set him up
with a profession he would utilize to effective ends. For the rest of his
life, he would refer to himself as Benjamin Franklin, Printer. Whatever
money he made at the print shop with his brother, he would spend on books.
Even as a teenager, Franklin showed himself to be not only
an industrious, smart worker, but also a talented writer. With just two
years of formal schooling, he worked vigorously to excise any deficiencies
in style and vocabulary. In time, he established a flair for writing with
tremendous subtlety and wit. He submitted a number of pieces under a
pseudonym, Silence Dogood. The name was an allusion to the writings of
Cotton Mather, particularly his book Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good
and a sermon he wrote called “Silentiarius: The Silent Sufferer.”
Franklin would later write that any usefulness to the public was a
result of lessons from Mather. Franklin’s Silence Dogood was as an old but
vivacious, opinionated widow who offered humorous satirical pieces on
issues of the day. One question that “she” raised was whether the religious
hypocrite or the shameless profligate does more harm to society. There was
a small circle of writers at the print shop called the Courant.
They would collectively decide which pieces would be published in the local
paper. Franklin recalls flushing with pleasure overhearing them enjoy and
discuss his pseudonymously submitted pieces.
Franklin’s writing was pioneering in many ways. It
represents some of the first examples of written American humor, and was an
inspiration to prolific writers like Mark Twain and Will Rogers.
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6. Lack of formal
training was ultimately to Franklin’s advantage in his pursuit of
inventions for the common good.
A dearth of formal education in science did not keep
Benjamin Franklin from exploring everything from topography to meteorology,
from anatomy to mechanical sciences. His lack of theoretical grounding
meant he was never going to be a world-class physicist, but this turned out
to benefit him as he pursued what he referred to as his “scientific
amusements.” Such phraseology typifies Franklin’s good-natured
self-deprecation, but it also fails to capture the impact that his
tinkering had on the world. He truly was an inventor of the highest
caliber.
He was most immersed in the world of invention and
innovation in his late 30s and early 40s. During this time, he developed
appliances that exist around the world in some form today. The wood stove,
for instance, was Ben Franklin’s idea. Designed to maximize heat and reduce
billowing, Franklin’s model was eventually modified because the convection
mechanism couldn’t effectively expel excess smoke, but at the time of its
invention, it was a sensation. The Boston Evening Post jubilantly
declared that a statue should be erected in Franklin’s honor. The governor
of Philadelphia offered Franklin a patent for his work, but Franklin
declined. He believed that the purpose of inventing is for the advancement
of the common good, and that people should do this “freely and generously.”
Another example of Franklin’s ingenuity was his improvement
of the catheter. His brother wrote him from Boston, telling him that he was
deathly ill and in need of some kind of apparatus to help him urinate.
Franklin approached a silversmith, and together they designed a small,
flexible tube with a screw-like shape to allow for effortless insertion
with a condensable feature to make withdrawal less painful.
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7. Views of
Franklin have changed significantly over the past several centuries.
In 1868, The Nation stated that people either love
or hate Benjamin Franklin. Over the 300 years since he was born, opinions
of Franklin have run the gamut. His practicality, irreverence, and wit
endeared him to many, but annoyed plenty of others. In the time immediately
following his death, those who had squabbled with him in life took a more
conciliatory view of his life and contributions. The politician, William
Smith, who had locked horns with Franklin on a number of occasions, brushed
aside their contentions, and gave a beautiful eulogy in tribute to
Franklin’s love of his fellow man and contributions to science. John Adams,
who had his share of political and religious disagreements with Franklin in
America as well as in France, sang Franklin’s praises, approbating his
skill in the practical sciences, his gifts of satire and storytelling, his
wit, and imagination.
Ben Franklin was a man of the people, and his fight for the
middle class has prevailed against the concerns that it would lead to a
Visogothic descent into vulgarization. He hoped that the middle class would
embody the civility of the aristocracy and the work ethic of the working
class. The cultural shift from rationality to romanticism was not kind to
Franklin. The new emphasis was on subjective aesthetic experience and
emotion over rationality. In the early 1800s, romantic poets like Keats
derided Franklin (along with Swift and Voltaire and other Enlightenment
notables) for failing to appreciate the loftier, more sublime things of
life. American transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson expressed a
similar aversion.
The vacillations have continued. Shortly after the Civil
War, when the Industrial Age was gathering steam, his ideas about thrift,
efficiency, and wealth creation became sacrosanct. Franklin’s heyday ended
again in the 1920s, as thinkers like Max Weber began to view Franklin’s
views on business as overly utilitarian and his book Poor Richard’s
Almanac as epitomizing the “philosophy of avarice.”
The pendulum of popular opinion has swung from one extreme
to the other over the centuries, and has forged Franklin into its various
images. He has been co-opted to represent the central preoccupations of
each subsequent generation. In our own, Franklin has returned to enjoy the
vogue among self-help gurus like Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey. In
contemporary culture, he is generally seen as a jovial, likeable, if
harmless, man with a kite, tempting the forces of nature. One commentator
described the popular view of Franklin as the nation’s “Founding Yuppie.”
It is true that Franklin is a far more approachable figure
than many of his more stodgy contemporaries (having a lively conversation
with Franklin over ales at a bar is readily imaginable), but we should not
let these sentiments detract from the fact that Franklin was among the most
influential men of his day.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Benjamin
Franklin here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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