Joyce Chaplin - The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius
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Famous, fascinating Benjamin Franklin-he would be neither without his accomplishments in science. In this authoritative intellectual biography of Americas most brilliant and cosmopolitan Founding Father, Joyce Chaplin considers Franklins scientific work as a career in its own right as well as the basis of his political thought. The famous kite and other experiments with electricity were only part of Franklins accomplishments. He charted the Gulf Stream, made important observations in meteorology, and used the burgeoning science of political arithmetic to make unprecedented statements about Americas power. Even as he stepped onto the world stage as an illustrious statesman and diplomat in the years leading up to the American Revolution, his fascination with nature was unrelenting.
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Table of Contents
Praise for The First Scientific American
For those with only vague notions about [Franklins] role as a founding father and particularly his importance as a scientist, her emphasis can be eye-opening.
Publishers Weekly
In describing Franklins scientific path, Chaplin... captures the impact of Franklins gifts on the development of his countrys intellectual infrastructure... This is a well-written, extensively footnoted, and finely illustrated biography. Because of the focus on Franklins scientific life, it will add a new perspective to the body of myths that surrounds the great man in this tercentennial year of his birth.
Library Journal
Chaplin describes in detail Franklins other achievements, including charting the Gulf Stream and describing the aurora borealis, and argues that if not for his foray into U.S. politics, Franklin might have a body of scientific discoveries the likes of that accomplished by Isaac Newton.
Science News
[W]onderfully fresh look at this truly remarkable man.... Chaplins book is exhaustively researched and superbly narrated. Her vivid descriptions of the intricacies of life as a colonial tradesman in the 1750s paint a world that the reader can almost step into.
New Scientist
The key to understanding the genius of Franklin is through his science, and Joyce Chaplin provides a brilliant and thoroughly-researched account. She shows his mind at work, and its fascinating to behold.
WALTER ISAACSON
Joyce Chaplins book is as electrifying as her subject. For those alarmed by the current rift between scientists and our political leaders, Franklins life reminds us that a much more enlightened relationship is possible.
CHRIS MOONEY, author of The Republican War on Science
In this admirably researched and crafted book, Joyce Chaplin explores the incredible variety and scope of Franklins scientific pursuits. With engaging verve, insight, and wit, she shows why Franklin was among the most esteemed scientists of his time and why that greatly enhanced his diplomatic efforts, so vital to success of the American Revolution.
DUDLEY HERSCHBACH, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science, Harvard University and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemisty
Benjamin Franklinprinter, scientist, revolutionary, statesman, by turns charming, ruthless, intellectually curious, and self-promotionally ambitious. Chaplin convincingly integrates all the facets of the multiply talented man into a compelling portrait, restoring the man behind the icon to full vitality. Her book is a tour de force, captivating in content and a delight to read.
DANIEL J. KEVLES, Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and co-author of Inventing America
This is a brilliant and compelling book that restores science to its rightful centrality in Benjamin Franklins thought and career, and that makes us think anew about the changing nature of scientific genius.
LINDA COLLEY, Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University
The First Scientific American shows how Benjamin Franklin became a statesman because of his science and offers a fresh perspective on one of Americas founding fathers in a brilliant analysis of the seesaw between science and politics two centuries ago. Joyce Chaplin takes us back to an era when science was in societys mainstream, when there were no specialists. She has written an engaging, literate portrait of Franklin that changes traditional perceptions of this remarkable genius. This is an important, ground-breaking work which places the history of early American science on a new footing.
BRIAN FAGAN, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of California, and author of Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World
This delightful portrait of Benjamin Franklin is unlike any recent study of the original American genius. In contrast to other biographers, the historian Joyce Chaplin rightfully portrays Franklin first and foremost as a man of science, curious not only about electricity but about ocean currents, winds, and mapsindeed, about virtually all the phenomena of heaven and earth. In convincing detail, she demonstrates how the ambitious printer and natural philosopher from Philadelphia parlayed his scientific fame into an internationally acclaimed career as a gentleman and statesman.
RONALD L. NUMBERS, Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison
FOR CLINT
A Brothers a Treasure
Poor Richard
A Brothers a Treasure
Poor Richard
Chapter 1
GENIUS
FAMOUS, fascinating Benjamin Franklinhe would be neither without his accomplishments in natural science. Yet science, his lifes central feature, is also its most mysterious aspect, the one least understood now and a part of a world we have lost. In his lifetime, science illuminated him with a brilliant electrical flash. We seem to have been blinded by that light. Not so Franklins contemporaries, who saw at its burning center something, and someone: a unique and remarkable manthe first scientific American.
By the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin (17061790) was one of the most recognized people in the Western Hemisphere. The youngest son of a Boston candle- and soap-maker, Franklin won fame through printing, writing, politics, and especially the sciences. Once he was famous, his likeness proliferated in nearly every medium imaginable. Franklin could admire himself printed on paper, carved in marble, transferred onto china, modeled in wax, fired in clay, painted onto canvas, cast in metal, and, perhaps most appropriately, electrically burned into silk. In 1779, he chuckled to his daughter that his face had become as well known as that of the moon.
He had become an international pop icon in his own lifetime. Only one other individual who worked in the sciences has ever achieved this status: Albert Einstein. So here they are, the pair of celebrities in modern science, the Founding Father who invented the lightning rod and the Swiss physicist who claimed that E = mc. Indeed, each mans array of icons is uncannily like the others, showing just how extensively they entered homes, lives, and consciousnesses. Choose your poison: take snuff from a box topped with Franklins face or drink coffee from a mug bearing Einsteins image. Decorate your interior with a mezzotint of the Master Electrician or a thumbtacked poster of the master of relativity. Wear your hero with a cameo brooch of the eighteenth-century American or a T-shirt of the twentieth-century European.
Why have only Franklin and Einstein attained this status? Other people who labored at science enjoyed celebrity (Marie Curie adorns posters, too), though none to the same degree, not even the man who started it all, Isaac Newton. Newton was the first modern figure in the sciences who had a cult following. His acolytes claimed that in his ability to divine the secrets of the cosmos, he seemed second only to God. Newton cultivated his image by making sure that his work was printed and reprinted and that he himself was painted and commemorated. And he exercised political power through a position at the Royal Mint. But he largely avoided public life.
Franklin was not so shy. He recognized Newtons achievements in the sciences and followed suit, if on a smaller scale. But he then parlayed his fame in natural science into a reputation for political influence, until he managed to shoot past his role model and become as recognized as the moon. A lull would follow before Einstein would occupy a similar cultural position; he would become internationally celebrated for an uncanny gift in science and was therefore believed to have extraordinary wisdom that might help to solve the problems of the day.
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