BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)

Book: The Beginner's American History

Chapter: XIII | Benjamin Franklin

Author: D. H. Montgomery

Growth of Philadelphia; what a young printer was doing for it.

By the year 1733, when the people of Savannah were building their first log cabins, Philadelphia had grown to be the largest city in this country,—though it would take more than seventy such cities to make one as great as Philadelphia now is.

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Next to William Penn, the person who did the most for Philadelphia was a young man who had gone from Boston to make his home among the Quakers. He lived in a small house near the market. On a board over the door he had painted his name and business.

Franklin's newspaper and almanac; how he worked; standing before kings.

Franklin was then publishing a small newspaper, called the Pennsylvania Gazette. To-day we print newspapers by steam at the rate of two or three hundred a minute; but Franklin, standing in his shirtsleeves at a little press, printed his with his own hands. It was hard work, as you could see by the drops of sweat that stood on his forehead; and it was slow as well as hard. The young man not only wrote himself most of what he printed in his paper, but he often made his own ink; sometimes he even made his own type. When he got out of paper he would take a wheelbarrow, go out and buy a load, and wheel it home. To-day there are more than three hundred newspapers printed in Philadelphia; then there were only two, and Franklin's was the better of those two.

Besides this paper he published an almanac, which thousands of people bought. In it he printed such sayings as these: "He who would thrive must rise at five," and "If you want a thing well done, do it yourself." But Franklin was not contented with simply printing these sayings, for he practised them as well.

Sometimes his friends would ask him why he began work so early in the morning, and kept at it so many hours. He would laugh, and tell them that his father used to repeat to him this saying of Solomon's: "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men."

At that time the young printer never actually expected to stand in the presence of a king, but years later he met with five; and one of them, his friend the king of France, gave him his picture set round with diamonds.

Franklin's boyhood; making tallow candles; he is apprenticed* to his brother; how he managed to save money to buy books.

Franklin's father was a poor man with a large family. He lived in Boston, and made soap and candles. Benjamin went to school two years; then, when he was ten years old, his father set him to work in his factory, and he never went to school again. He was now kept busy filling the candle-molds with melted grease, cutting off the ends of the wicks, and running errands. But the boy did not like this kind of work; and, as he was very fond of books, his father put him in a printing-office. This office was carried on by James Franklin, one of Benjamin's brothers. James Franklin paid a small sum of money each week for Benjamin's board; but the boy told him that if he would let him have half the money to use as he liked, he would board himself. James was glad to do this. Benjamin then gave up eating meat, and, while the others went out to dinner, he would stay in the printing-office and eat a boiled potato, or perhaps a handful of raisins. In this way, he saved up a number of coppers every week; and when he got enough laid by, he would buy a book.

But James Franklin was not only a mean man, but a hot-tempered one; and when he got angry with his young apprentice*, he would beat and knock him about. At length the lad, who was now seventeen, made up his mind that he would run away, and go to New York.

*Apprenticed: bound by a written agreement to learn a trade of a master, who is bound by the same agreement to teach the trade.

*Apprentice: one who is apprenticed to a master to learn a trade.

Young Franklin runs away; he goes to New York, and then to Philadelphia.

Young Franklin sold some of his books, and with the money paid his passage to New York by a sailing-vessel—for in those days there were no steamboats or railroads in America. When he got to New York, he could not find work, so he decided to go on to Philadelphia.

He started to walk across New Jersey to Burlington, on the Delaware River, a distance of about fifty miles; there he hoped to get a sail-boat going down the river to Philadelphia. Shortly after he set out, it began to rain hard, and the lad was soon wet to the skin and splashed all over with red mud; but he kept on until noon, then took a rest, and on the third day he reached Burlington and got passage down the river.

Franklin's Sunday walk in Philadelphia; the rolls; Miss Read; the Quaker meeting-house.

Franklin landed in Philadelphia on Sunday morning (1723). He was tired and hungry; he had but a single dollar in the world. As he walked along, he saw a bake-shop open. He went in and bought three great, puffy rolls for a penny* each. Then he started up Market Street, where he was one day to have his newspaper office. He had a roll like a small loaf of bread tucked under each arm, and he was eating the other as though it tasted good to him. As he passed a house, he noticed a nice-looking young woman at the door. She seemed to want to laugh; and well she might, for Franklin appeared like a youthful tramp who had been robbing a baker's shop. The young woman was Miss Deborah Read. A number of years later Franklin married her. He always said that he could not have got a better wife.

Franklin kept on in his walk until he came to the Delaware. He took a hearty drink of river water to settle his breakfast, and then gave away the two rolls he had under his arm to a poor woman with a child. On his way back from the river he followed a number of people to a Quaker meeting-house. At the meeting no one spoke. Franklin was tired out, and, not having any preacher to keep him awake, he soon fell asleep, and slept till the meeting was over. He says, "This was the first house I was in, or slept in, in Philadelphia."

*Penny: an English coin worth two cents.

Franklin finds work; he goes back to Boston on a visit; he learns to stoop.

The next day the young man found some work in a printing-office. Six months afterward he decided to go back to Boston to see his friends. He started on his journey with a good suit of clothes, a silver watch, and a well-filled purse.

While in Boston, Franklin went to call on a minister who had written a little book* which he had been very fond of reading. As he was coming away from the minister's house, he had to go through a low passage-way under a large beam. "Stoop! Stoop!" cried out the gentleman; but Franklin did not understand him, and so hit his head a sharp knock against the beam. "Ah," said his friend, as he saw him rubbing his head, "you are young, and have the world before you; stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps." Franklin says that this sensible advice, which was thus beat into his head, was of great use afterward; in fact, he learned then how to stoop to conquer.

*The name of this book, written by the Rev. Cotton Mather, was Essays to do Good.

Franklin returns to Philadelphia; he goes to London; water against beer.

Franklin soon went back to Philadelphia. The governor of Pennsylvania then persuaded him to go to London, telling him that he would help him to get a printing-press and type to start a newspaper in Philadelphia.

When Franklin reached London, he found that the governor was one of those men who promise great things, but do nothing. Instead of buying a press, he had to go to work in a printing-office to earn his bread. He stayed in London more than a year. At the office where he worked the men were great beer-drinkers. One of his companions bought six pints a day. He began with a pint before breakfast, then took another pint at breakfast, then a pint between breakfast and dinner, then a pint at dinner, then a pint in the afternoon, and, last of all, a pint after he had done work. Franklin drank nothing but water. The others laughed at him, and nicknamed him the "Water-American"; but after a while they had to confess that he was stronger than they were who drank so much strong beer.

The fact was that Franklin could beat them both at work and at play. When they went out for a bath in the Thames, they found that their "Water-American" could swim like a fish; and he so astonished them that a rich Londoner tried to persuade him to start a swimming-school to teach his sons, but Franklin had stayed in England long enough, and he now decided to go back to Philadelphia.

Franklin sets up his newspaper; "sawdust pudding."

After his return to America, Franklin labored so diligently that he was soon able to set up a newspaper of his own. He tried to make it a good one. But some people thought that he spoke his mind too freely. They complained of this to him, and gave him to understand that if he did not make his paper to please them, they would stop taking it or advertising in it.

Franklin heard what they had to say, and then invited them all to come and have supper with him. They went, expecting a feast, but they found nothing on the table but two dishes of corn-meal mush and a big pitcher of cold water. That kind of mush was then eaten only by very poor people; and because it was yellow and coarse, it was nicknamed "sawdust pudding."

Franklin gave everybody a heaping plateful, and then, filling his own, he made a hearty supper of it. The others tried to eat, but could not. After Franklin had finished his supper, he looked up, and said quietly, "My friends, any one who can live on 'sawdust pudding' and cold water, as I can, does not need much help from others." After that, no one went to the young printer with complaints about his paper. Franklin, as we have seen, had learned to stoop; but he certainly did not mean to go stooping through life.

Franklin's plan of life; what he did for Philadelphia.

Not many young men can see their own faults, but Franklin could. More than that, he tried hard to get rid of them. He kept a little book in which he wrote down his faults. If he wasted half an hour of time or a shilling of money, or said anything that he had better not have said, he wrote it down in his book. He carried that book in his pocket all his life, and he studied it as a boy at school studies a hard lesson. By it he learned three things,—first, to do the right thing; next, to do it at the right time; last of all, to do it in the right way.

As he was never tired of helping himself to get upward and onward, so, too, he was never tired of helping others. He started the first public library in Philadelphia, which was also the first in America. He set on foot the first fire-engine company and the first military company in that city. He got the people to pave the muddy streets with stone; he helped to build the first academy,—now called the University of Pennsylvania,—and he also helped to build the first hospital.

Franklin's experiments with electricity; the wonderful bottle; the picture of the king of England.

While doing these things and publishing his paper besides, Franklin found time to make experiments with electricity. Very little was then known about this wonderful power, but a Dutchman, living in the city of Leyden in Holland, had discovered a way of bottling it up in what is called a Leyden Jar. Franklin had one of these jars, and he was never tired of seeing what new and strange thing he could do with it.

He contrived a picture of the king of England with a movable gilt crown on his head. Then he connected the crown by a long wire with the Leyden Jar. When he wanted some fun he would dare any one to go up to the picture and take off the king's crown. Why that's easy enough, a man would say, and would walk up and seize the crown. But no sooner had he touched it than he would get an electric shock which would make his fingers tingle as they never tingled before. With a loud Oh! Oh! he would let go of the crown, and start back in utter astonishment, not knowing what had hurt him.

The electrical kite.

But Franklin's greatest experiment was made one day in sober earnest with a kite. He believed that the electricity in the bottle, or Leyden Jar, was the same thing as the lightning we see in a thunder-storm. He knew well enough how to get an electric spark from the jar, for he had once killed a turkey with it for dinner; but how could he get a spark from a cloud in the sky?

He thought about it for a long time; then he made a kite out of a silk handkerchief, and fastened a sharp iron point to the upright stick of the kite. One day, when a thunder-storm was seen coming up, Franklin and his son went out to the fields. The kite was raised; then Franklin tied an iron key to the lower end of the string. After waiting some time, he saw the little hair-like threads of the string begin to stand up like the bristles of a brush. He felt certain that the electricity was coming down the string. He put his knuckle close to the key, and a spark flew out. Next, he took his Leyden Jar and collected the electricity in that. He had made two great discoveries, for he had found out that electricity and lightning are the same thing and he had also found how to fill his bottle directly from the clouds: that was something that no one had ever done before.

Franklin invents the lightning-rod; Doctor Franklin.

But Franklin did not stop at that. He said, If I can draw down electricity from the sky with a kite-string, I can draw it still better with a tall, sharp-pointed iron rod. He put up such a rod on his house in Philadelphia; it was the first lightning-rod in the world. Soon other people began to put them up: so this was another gift of his to the city which he loved. Every good lightning-rod which has since been erected to protect buildings has been a copy of that invented by Franklin.

People now began to talk, not only in this country but in Europe, about his electrical experiments and discoveries. The oldest college in Scotland* gave him a title of honor and called him Doctor—a word which means a learned man. From this time, Franklin the printer was no longer plain Mr. Franklin, but Dr. Franklin.

Dr. Franklin did not think that he had found out all that could be found out about electricity; he believed that he had simply made a beginning, and that other men would discover still greater things that could be done with it. Do you think he was mistaken about that?

*The University of St. Andrews.

Franklin in the Revolutionary War; Franklin and the map of the United States.

When the war of the Revolution broke out, Dr. Franklin did a great work for his country. He did not fight battles like Washington, but he did something just as useful. First, he helped write the Declaration of Independence, by which we declared ourselves free from the rule of the king of England; next, he went to France to get aid for us. We were then too poor to pay our soldiers; he got the king of France to let us have money to give them.

Franklin lived to see the Revolution ended and America free. When he died, full of years and of honors, he was buried in Philadelphia. Twenty thousand people went to his funeral.

If you wish to see what the country thinks of him, you have only to look at a large map of the United States, and count up how many times you find his name on it. You will find that more than two hundred counties and towns are called FRANKLIN.

Summary.

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston nearly two hundred years ago. He went to Philadelphia when he was seventeen. He started a newspaper there, opened the first public library, and did many other things to help the city. He discovered that lightning and electricity are the same thing, and he invented the lightning-rod to protect buildings. In the Revolution, he got large sums of money from the king of France to pay our soldiers and to help Washington fight the battles which ended in making America free.