9781422277591

Chapter The Printer Who Became a Scientist 1

A highly successful forty-two-year-old businessman, who had earned a comfortable living as a printer and publisher, would seem unlikely to become one of the world’s most influential scientists. But Benjamin Franklin did just that. Soon after his “retirement” from business, Franklin made discoveries that would prove vital to our present-day understanding of electricity and of physical substances. Moreover, within nine years of this astonishing change in his life, Franklin plunged into yet another world—politics. He set off for London to embark on a political crusade that would occupy him almost to the end of his life. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1706. Boston was then a small but growing seaport. It was home to many immigrants from Europe, who had made the arduous sea crossing to North America in search of a better life. Benjamin’s father, Josiah Franklin, was among them. In 1683 Josiah Franklin had sailed to Boston with his young wife, Anne, and their three children. He was a soap and candle maker from the Oxfordshire town of Banbury in England. Soon after arriving in America, he managed to establish a flourishing business. A few years later, Anne Franklin died and Josiah remarried. His second wife, Abiah Folger, was an American from Nantucket. Josiah had seventeen children from these marriages. Young Benjamin was the fifteenth.

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