In January 1706, one of the most consequential figures in American history was born. Benjamin Franklin, the 15th child of an English immigrant father and an American mother, grew up in the city of Boston. At the age of 17, he fled to Philadelphia, an emerging and fast-growing city, to escape the increasingly unfavorable apprenticeship in his brother’s printing shop and to enjoy the more religiously tolerant environment of Pennsylvania.
Franklin, who had only two years of formal schooling, was a polymath. He was a gifted writer, first putting words to paper under a pseudonym, “Silence Dogood,” before founding the Pennsylvania Gazette and publishing the still widely read book of pithy sayings, Poor Richard’s Almanac. By the age of 42, his printing business had become so profitable that he retired, but printing was just the beginning of his endeavors. He turned his attention to science and to building civic institutions. Franklin invented the lightning rod, bifocals, swim fins, the Franklin stove, the catheter, and a musical instrument called the armonica. He founded the Philadelphia Library, Philadelphia’s first fire department and first police department, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania. He also improved mail service as England’s postmaster for the American colonies.
But Franklin’s greatest work was the country he helped establish. As an agent for the colonies serving in London, Franklin was originally indifferent about the rising tension between the colonies and the crown and sanguine toward the growing calls for independence. Yet he eventually saw the merits of the American cause and became a leading figure shaping the future nation. Franklin was on the drafting committee for the Declaration of Independence, purportedly changing Thomas Jefferson’s line: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And, after putting his name to this historic document, he was said to have said, “We shall all hang together or we shall all hang separately”—though historians disagree on the veracity of that quote. Nevertheless, he understood the risk he and his peers were taking.
Click here to read more (Originally Published at World Magazine)
