In Our Time - Benjamin Franklin

Episode Date: March 1, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Benjamin Franklin. A printer, statesman, diplomat, writer and scientist, Franklin was one of the most remarkable individuals of the eighteenth century. His discoveries relating to the nature of electricity, and in particular a celebrated experiment which involved flying a kite in a thunderstorm, made him famous in Europe and America. His inventions include bifocal spectacles, and a new type of stove. In the second half of his life he became prominent as a politician and a successful diplomat. As the only Founding Father to have signed all three of the fundamental documents of the United States of America, including its Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Benjamin Franklin occupies a unique position in the history of the nation. With:Simon MiddletonSenior Lecturer in American History at the University of SheffieldSimon NewmanSir Denis Brogan Professor of American History at the University of GlasgowPatricia FaraSenior Tutor at Clare College, University of Cambridge.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the early stages of the American War of Independence, an ambassador travelled from New York to negotiate an alliance with the French. His arrival in Paris caused a sensation.

The second US president, John Adams, later wrote, His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtes, nobility, clergy and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there were scarcely a peasant or citizen, a coachman or footman, a lady's chambermaid or a scullian in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend to humankind. This ambassador was Benjamin Franklin, one of the most brilliant minds of the 18th century. As a scientist, he made important discoveries about the nature of electricity

and invented the lightning conductor. He was the 15th of 17 children, apprenticed at the age of 12, to a printer. He became a successful businessman and a writer. But perhaps above all, he celebrated as one of America's founding fathers, a signatory to its constitution.

With me to discuss the remarkable life of Benjamin Franklin, a Simon Middleton, senior lecturer in American history at the University of Sheffield, Simon Newman, Sir Dennis Brogan Professor of American History at the University of Glasgow, and Patricia Farah, senior tutor of Clare College, University of Cambridge. Simon Middleton, Franklin has born in Boston in 1706. Can you give us some

idea of Boston at the time? Boston is a town of about 12,000 people in 1706 when Franklin is born. 14 years previously, there's been a very famous Salem witchcraft trials, and so Boston is on the cusp of leaving behind a 17th century of Calvinism and strict orthodox religion and moving into an 18th century, which is much more about trade, much more cosmopolitan, much more focused on the general Atlantic. It's also recovering from the disruptions of the glorious revolution and the end of the Stuart dynasty.

And it's on the, kind of in the foothills of the beginning of a long period of prosperity and for the middling classes, at least, a time of relative comfort through the rest of the 18th century going up to the American Revolution. You say 12,000 people in the city there in 1706, how does that rate with other American citizens?

at the time. It's, I think it's the largest. It's about to be overtaken by Philadelphia, which is one of the reasons that Franklin goes there. But let's stick with Boston. Yeah. It has been the predominant town through the 17th century since it's settled by the Puritans in the 1630s. And it's challenged by New York, and it's more particularly challenged by Philadelphia, particularly in the early 18th century. You talked about the Salem witch trials just a few years before. And Bosn, as I understand it, a Calvinist city. city, town, city, was it a cathedral? A town, I think. Town, yeah, okay. How deep was the Calvinism in the running of the city? Well, it had been very deep and one of the important things that's going on as Franklin is born is there is a shift and I think the Selim Witchstaff trials is a

good indication of that. There is a shift in the power base I guess within places like Boston away from the clerics and towards the merchants and the people who were of the new well. How did this affect Franklin's own religion, religious views.

He is famously critical of the orthodox and kind of fire and brimstone preaching of the Calvinist preachers and sees religion. And he becomes early on in his life becomes committed to the deist idea that turns away from the notion of divine providence. I'm getting on to Patricia's territory here really. And towards looking for God's work in the natural environment and the natural world, rather than following the Bible and falling out about the Bible, which is what the Calvinists have done throughout the 17th century.

Now, it came from a spectacularly unlikely family, didn't it? Is the 15th son of 17 children or the 17th child of 18 children? The 10th son of 15. I read different statistics in all your notes. They weren't my notes. Tenth child of 15 children. His father was a candlemaker. He was the 10th child of 17 children.

Sorry, he was the 10th son of 17th children and the 15th child. His father was a candlemaker and soap boiler from Ecton outside of Northampton apparently. And as I understand it, he had about two years formal education, and then at 12 he was apprenticed. Apprentice to his pretty disciplinarian brother James, yeah. But it's in James' print shop where he also really gets the opportunity to read and also to begin to write and also to learn how to set the type and run the press. Simon Newman We've just heard

from lots of Simons on the programme We've just heard that he started to work as a printer Can you tell us how Was this, as has been intimated, the chance to educate himself? Was this the beginning of his rise and rise? That's exactly what it was. Books were a precious commodity.

He'd only had two years education, as you said, and he's in one of the two print shops in Boston. So he has the opportunity to read everything that's being printed. His brother's newspaper is the oppositional newspaper. A lot of people congregate there and talk about what's going on in Boston and more generally in Massachusetts and the Atlantic world. So it's a source of information. They're printing books and pamphlets as well.

He's reading those. He's trading them with other people who come in, who want things printed. So he's spending all of his free time, not just reading, but then writing. It's where he learns to write. And so he's going to define himself as a printer for the rest of his life. even as a wealthy man who no longer has to work,

he'll sign himself Benjamin Franklin printer. He'll continue printing into his 60s, 70s and 80s. He'll always have a printing press. So he started to write and get published. I think that's important. The confidence of getting published must have been enormous. In his teens. What was he writing about?

Well, he first writes poetry. His brother recognises that he's actually quite a talented poet and has him write poems anonymously for the New England current, the newspaper. But he then wants to write opinion pieces, which in that time would have always been, signed. His brother thinks that's a terrible idea. He's only 15 or 16. So he sends them in anonymously. And the first ones are by a venerable Boston widow, Silence Do Good. They're very, very

funny. They really were laugh out loud funny. And so he's getting these published. And he thinks he should be doing better than his brother is allowing. Is he getting paid for these anonymous contributions? No, he's not. So he's losing birthplace, really. So he's doing that. He's reading a lot. And then he illegally just quits. because he doesn't think his brothers, recognizing him well enough. Now, he could have been put in jail. He's an outlaw. He's a criminal. He runs away. He's legally bound as an apprentice,

and that means that he could have been arrested by anyone, by any citizen, taken to a jail, and that citizen would then get the reward money for his return. So he's taking a big risk. He is right at the bottom as a runaway of society with very little options. All he has is his skill as a printer. And do we know precisely why he runs?

anyway? No, he says in the autobiography that it's because of the harsh and tyrannical treatment. Those are his words of his brother. Whether there was more to it than that, we don't know. But he says he wanted the opportunity to strike out for himself. And he took off for Philadelphia. Why did he make for Philadelphia? Well, he made initially for New York, but didn't see any options there. And then goes on to Philadelphia. By the time he arrives, he has no money left. Philadelphia will, as Simon Middleton pointed out, become the largest city in America. But it's at that point very small. It's only been settled a generation.

about 5,000 people. It's very, very small. So he sees the opportunity to really make his mark here. And how does he go about that? He looks for a job as a printer, and he ends up working for a variety of different printing houses. He's recognized fairly quickly as being very talented, and it actually is sent, or it's advised to go to London to improve his training as a printer, which he does for a short while,

then comes back to Philadelphia, and within a decade has his own printing business, newspaper, and printing all kinds of things. So we're talking about, we can use the word meteorotic without exaggerating here. In his mid-late 20s, he's owning newspapers, writing for newspapers, he's writing for almanacs, which are the best-selling, next to the Bible,

the best-selling books in America at the time. His poor-rich's an alman. And he's buying property in the town. He's well-under-a-wealthy, well-known, successful mover and shaker. Exactly. Poor Richard's Almanac has a circulation of about 10,000, which is about by the 1750,

about one for every 50 adult white Americans. So it's a tremendously large circulation just for his ormanac. So we have a blazing order diaduct, somebody who's made a professional success in a difficult or in a different time, somebody who's made a lot of money and knows how to make even more money. Does he have political ambitions at this stage? Initially, not so much. He invests a lot of his energy in civic work within the city

before he really becomes political. So he found the American Philosophical Society, the Junto. It's a group of working men, craftsmen like himself. They want to get together and talk about the issues of the day. He founds the library company, the first lending library, so he and others can have more books. He's getting involved in society, the first volunteer fire company. And if you walk around Philadelphia today...

That's happening that early in his train. Yes. If you walk around the city today, you can see the library company, the historical society, the Pennsylvania Hospital. All of these institutions he created are all still there. So he really does make his mark on 18th century Philadelphia. And this business of, can we turn now, Patricia Farrow, to one aspect of his life, perhaps is, if the single thing he's best known for, is electricity and the lightning conductor, the great scientific pursuit of that time, this new thing, not new thing, electricity, how did you, and they were right to go for it because it has subsequently totally changed the world. Where did his interest in it come from?

It seems so, you can understand reading, printing, businessman, politics, all the things. Then all of a sudden, we've talked about a scientific intellectual. Well, in a way, I think there's a lot of connection with his printing life. Because you have to remember that America at that time wasn't a separate country. It was still part of Britain. It was a British colony. And there was the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, this associate correspondence network of learned gentlemen all over Europe.

And that extended over to America. So just as there were slaves and all sorts of material goods, going backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, knowledge was travelling in the form of books. books. And the first thing that Franklin knew about electricity was he went to a lecture from a visiting Scott, who was doing a tour of the East Coast of America. And he also read about electricity in journal articles that were sent over. And when he first heard about electricity, there was just one electrical machine available, and that made static electricity. And when he

went to the demonstration by the visiting Scott, there was one which I think must have struck him enormously. It was when the man, this was a standard experiment, you take a little boy and you string him up from the ceiling by silken threads, and then you charge him up with electricity, and then if he stretches his hands out, he'll attract brass filings to his hands, but also if you touch the little boy, you too will get a bit of electric shock and there'll be sparks. So that was one of the experiments that I'm sure attracted his attention. And then an article came over from Germany, and he heard about the electrical Venus, and I imagine that. I imagine that must have interested him.

And the idea with that is that you get a woman and you stand her on her on an insulated block and charge her up electrically. And then you get to kiss her on the lips and of course there's a sort of electric discharge through the lips. And the hanging boy in the electrical venus were just two of the entertainments

that were devised to teach people about electricity but also obviously to captivate their interest. Yes, because circus and scholarship seemed to be running in parallel for a while. Did he get the transactions of the Royal Society from London? He didn't at that stage, but he certainly did later in his life, yes, but not at that stage, no. So he's doing all these things at the same time, isn't he? I mean, he's being a politician, he's being a printer, he's being this.

So how did he develop his scientific interest in electricity at the point where he was making a difference? He's almost working on his own, despite this stuff coming in from Europe. Well, in a way, working on his own, I think, was quite an advantage because he wasn't too influenced by the theories that were happening in Europe. But in 1745, he got a letter from a trader, Peter Collinson, who used to go backwards and forwards between America and Britain. And he told Franklin, they had to tell him about this marvellous invention

that news had come over from Laden. Laden was then one of the biggest universities in Europe. And a professor of Muchenbrook had discovered by accident how it is that you can store electric charge and carry it around from place to place in a device which later became known as the laden jar. And Mushanbrook wrote a marvellous letter off to his friends in Paris and said, look, the most awful things happened to me.

I nearly killed myself. This is terribly exciting. This is terribly dangerous. Whatever you do, don't ever repeat it. And then he gave the full instructions of how to do it. So, of course, within weeks, everybody was doing it all over Europe. Any survivors? There were some survivors.

There were some people who suffered enormously. It became quite a tourist attraction. and people used to go over to Paris to learn, find out what it felt like, to have a severe electric shock. And what it feels like sometimes is you get nosebleeds, you get convulsions, you get terrible headaches. My favourite story is one man who went over

and he tried it out for himself. And he wasn't quite sure whether it had the right effect. So he just asked his wife to do it again, and she was knocked out for a week instead. So that's great. We're having a lot of fun here, but I want to know, This man became very serious in this.

So what's he got hold of that's taking him forward intellectually? Right. And this is great stuff, but it's sort of circus. So where does it happen? It's not exactly circus. There's a very important sort of principle in the Enlightenment that you learn through entertainment. You capture your audience to entertainment,

but also that is a way of learning about the phenomena. And the laden jar is a glass flask which effectively stores electricity. is what we would now call an electrical capacitor. And according to the laws of electricity that had been devised at that time, the laden jar should not have worked. Nobody could explain it. And what Franklin did was overturn all the previous theories

and provide a new theory which did explain the operation of the laden jar satisfactorily. And it was from then that he became very well known. And what was that theory? The previous theory had been that there's two separate fluids called resinous and vitrius. or plus and minus. And that was what the French believed. And Franklin said, no, there aren't two fluids, there's only one. And he used the example of a bank account.

You're either in credit or you're overdrawn. But it's the same thing. It's money. You've either got a plus of money or you've got a minus of money. And so in a way he was bringing his business experience into the world of science. And he was saying it's the same with electricity. You store up the electrical charge inside. There's a definite outset.

and when you touch the inside and the outside simultaneously, then equilibrium is restored, the electrical charge who rushes through your body, and that's why it has such a dramatic effect on you. Simon Middleton, and I'd like to keep as many balls as I can in the area, in this extraordinary man. At the same time, he became heavily involved in politics. Everything seems to happen at the same time, Benjamin Franklin,

where he raised in militia. He got an army together in Philadelphia, because he was annoyed that the Quakers then ran Philadelphia, believed in pacifism, and they wouldn't support the British and their war with the French and the Native Indians. Can you tell us how he went about that and how he was successful? I can. I think we have to be careful not to get swept along a little bit too much by Franklin's, kind of the aura that's put around Franklin, and he doesn't do all of this stuff at the same time. He very positively leaves behind his printing career and gives the business to a colleague

and then engages in his scientific career. And the same with politics. He's around politics from early on because as a newsman and a publisher and a writer, he's a friend to a politician and he's sponsored by politicians. But he only really formally enters politics in a very open way in 1747. And it is about the defense of Pennsylvania, which is becoming increasingly a colonial prize. And the French are moving down in the West with their Indian allies and threatening Western Pennsylvania and Western Virginia.

And Franklin, who's ambivalial. throughout his life is to see a greater America as part of a greater British Empire, gets up a campaign, a lottery, uses his newspaper, uses all of the talents that he has as a publisher to popularise and ultimately also organise and fund this Pennsylvania militia, which is very popular with the Western farmers and very popular with ordinary middling artisans in Philadelphia, very unpopular with the proprietary interest in Pennsylvania

and the Quaker pacifists. although he has allies in the Assembly. And what's really going on with his political career is he enters the political scene against the proprietary interest in Pennsylvania and on behalf of the Assembly. And ultimately that's what takes him to London in 1757 to try and wrestle control of Pennsylvania away from the proprietary interest. And this is all wrapped up, as you say, with this problem of defence,

which after 1754 and the beginnings of what the colonists will know as the French and Indian War and what the English will know as the seven years war, or the Great War Against France for the North American Empire. He's very much involved in that. Can we just flick back to you for a moment, Patricia? When he got to London, he was swept up by the intellectual excitement in London. He was taken up in London, that lovely little house behind Charing Cross Station,

which is now a museum, the Metropolitan Museum. I lived there and got on with a great deal there. It was much fated and lauded. The most famous scientific experiment, this kite, Can you tell us how that sort of landed in the forefront of the London Enlightenment scene? There's an enormous amount of mythology surrounding the Kite experiment and it's all mixed up with Franklin's status as a leader of the American Revolution and as a rival to Newton, a sort of reversal of power,

that this colonial man can upstage all the London people. But the basic idea was he devised, what he called a sentry box. And the idea was that a sharp point went up from a little hut right up into the sky. And a laden jar, the device for storing electricity, would be inside the sentry box, which was totally insulated from the ground. And the idea was that lightning would come down this little sharp spike and into the laden jar.

And the point, the whole objective at that stage was to demonstrate that the electricity that you produce artificially in a laden jar is exactly the same as the electricity that's produced in storm clouds. So that was the first stage was to demonstrate that the two kinds of electricity are the same. Now this experiment was first carried out in France, and it was outside Paris, and it was very successful, and they managed to prove the identity of the electricity in the clouds and the electricity in a laden jar.

And then a few months later, over in America, Franklin did his own famous experiment when he flew a kite up into the sky and drew the electricity down the wet string of the kite and again demonstrated that it did exactly the same as the electricity that you make in a laden jar. Can we, no, I know I've rushed you on a bit,

but I just want us all to know the comprehensiveness of this man's life because it is remarkable. I've already missed quite a few things are, but let's keep going. Let's pause a little for a moment as he paused. He came for London, sort of fell in love with London, Lely, really, and there with him. And this man who was powerfully wealthy,

he sold half his newspaper business, he'd got lots of property, he could live on his income, he'd done quite a lot of politics and so and so forth. So he came here and he stayed for quite a while, Simon Newman. What really held him in London? Quite a while, many years. Yeah, he comes in 1757, he goes back briefly, but he's basically there for 18 years until 1775, the outbreak of the war for independence.

He stays in London because he goes from a city in Philadelphia of, by that point, it's still only about 12,000, to a city of three quarters of a million people. And he comes to London and England at such an exciting time. He's already well known because of some of the things we've been talking about. He's had honorary degrees in America. He'll soon get honorary degrees from Cambridge, Oxford, St. Andrews. So he's well known, and that means he is welcomed by all of the great minds, and London is such an exciting place to be, and he'll go up to Scotland and meet the great intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment too. He meets Josiah Wedgwood.

All of the people you would want to know in 18th century England welcome him. It's so exciting for him. And he changes his life. Instead of being in Philadelphia, he would have looked like a lower gentleman. He would have dressed like that. People dressed plainly in Philadelphia at that time. He comes to England and becomes a gentleman, and the David Martin portrait of him shows him looking like an English aristocrat.

He embraces this lifestyle. And I think it's important to, he loves London because he's also in love with the British Empire. He's a big, big fan of the empire. I mean, it's no problem that the first thing, it's no surprise that the first thing he does when he gets to London, he's go and visit the ancestral family home in Northampton that he's never seen. And he loves to travel around the English counties. and to see England, which has always existed for him only in letters and journals and so forth.

And he is a big fan of the empire, which makes his journey through the American Revolution, which we're going to talk about in a minute, so powerful and profound. And he even considers moving to live in England in 1716 and breaking and moving from America completely. Sorry, please. Although he is a huge fan of the British Empire, but he's an American Britain. He publishes a pamphlet in the 1750s observations concerning the expansion of mankind, natural increase of mankind,

in which he points out that the American population is going to double every 20 years, and within 100 years there'll be more Britons in America than there will be in Britain. Now, he doesn't see that as a problem. He says, what a great amassing of power for the British Empire this will be. But it means he sees himself as an American Britain.

He thinks the British Empire is the best state around, but he has an American perspective on it. Just to put a full stop to this, Simon Middleton, he thinks it's not only the best time. He thinks it's the best way of governance, doesn't it? He's very taken with it indeed. And I think most colonists are. They celebrate their English liberty.

They look at the French. They look at the Spanish. They look at elsewhere and they see, they celebrate their Protestantism as well, first and foremost, also their English liberty. And also the English empire is booming and is a big success, mostly on the back of the plantation products coming out of the Caribbean,

produced by slaves in the 18th century. I mean, the country houses that parents take their children around on the weekend today, many of those are built in the 18th century, and the TV shows about the 18th century, which are very common today, celebrate this time of plenty. And the colonists are thrilled to be a part of that, and thrilled to think of themselves as English. Matrushafarian, coming back to the Royal Society,

he was much, I've said it often enough, but he had a dispute there, which was quite famous at the time. And it illustrates very well indeed how close the electricity and politics were tied together, both metaphorically, in the sense that over in America you talked about the contagion of revolution spreading electrically. There were loads of images like that. But also when Franklin was in England, he was known as an American-Briton as someone who was associated with radical politics. And he belonged to something called the Club of Honest Wigs, which is where British radicals were there. as well.

Just to be formal, he was Pennsylvania's representative in Britain, and then he was a representative of other colonies. So he was a sort of ambassador. Yeah, right, true sure. So the dispute you're talking about is after he developed the lightning rod, which came after he realised that the lightning in the clouds is really electrical, he had this inspiration of putting a very sharp spike on the top of tall buildings and then a wire going down into the ground so that the electricity could be just funneled down

to the ground. And that caught on very quickly in America, less so in England. And there were various disasters with buildings either with or without lightning conductors, and a big dispute broke out. Franklin said that the lightning rod should have a point at the top. And his rivals, particularly a man called Wilson, who was a very conservative, he was an ally of the king, he was a staunch royalist as opposed to Franklin, said that the lightning rod should have a round top. So this is sort of rather like Gulliver's travels on which way up you put your egg when you eat it. And so they staged this enormous

experiment in a dance hall where they simulated clouds with big electrical cylinders and they had a guy wandering around with a torch acting like the lightning and they had a little mock building with pointed rods or else with round knobs at the top of the point

and that the little building could travel backwards and forwards it was all incredibly elaborate and they spent days and days carrying out this experiment and the results were completely inconclusive. But the king, who was on the Wilson side, was very, very convinced, and he immediately took down all the lightning conductors off Buckingham Palace and put ones with round points on instead, with round tops on instead.

And then the president of the Royal Society resigned, and he said even the king can't make the laws of nature. And so it's a very good illustration of how electricity had enormous political significance as well as scientific significance. And it also carried great religious significance as well. Did, I have to come back to that if we've got time, because we're missing out the religious thing and his preoccupation with Anglican Methodism in America when it went there.

Never mind. Simon Newman, Franklin's in London. Did his view of America change while he's in London? We know we've been told very eloquently how powerfully in favour he was of the British Empire. What about America? I think what really happened, for Franklin, having moved from Boston to Philadelphia and then spending 18 years in London, is he has an understanding of America as a whole. If we talk about someone like Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson, when he says my country, the second president, he means Virginia. John Adams thinks

of himself as a Massachusetts man. Franklin thinks of himself as an American. He sees America as a whole and as part of this British Empire. So I think he's beginning to see America as a united entity long before most Americans, long before most of the colonists do. In that sense, his idea of America changes very much. But he's happy with the British Empire for most of the time. It's only after the end of the Seven Years' War that that begins to change, and that will then affect his longing

for America, his defence of America. The Seven Years' War being the War with France, where this country became extremely broke and looked to tax as much as they could because they were broke and wanted to tax the colonies, wanted to tax those out there. Right. That led to Franklin leaving England,

I've summed up a lot because there's still a way to go, Simon Riddleton, but that's the basis of, that began his dispute. It does. I mean, very briefly, he begins, as do most colonists in the mid-70s, he's thinking, this is a misunderstanding that we will sort out. It's a bad policy, badly conceived, but once we've explained to London the impression that they're giving, which seems to be increasingly arbitrary and unfair,

they'll change their mind, whereas in London they're thinking these colonists should pay what we need in order to pay off our war debts. After all, the war has freed them of the French threat in the north. And Franklin begins as, you know, he's not interested in all the talk about rights and so forth necessarily, so much as working out this problem within government, right? He's turned by the arrogance and kind of supercilious attitude of the English ministers towards the colonies. Every time he suggests what will be a good and workable solution, they ignore him. He writes to Lord Keymes and says that every man in England, you know, considers themselves a sovereign over America. this attitude of the mother country to the colony.

The mother country that he loves, and the king that he respects, but he loses that such that by the end of the 1760s he's supporting the importation boycotts in the colonies. When that invites a more coercive response from people like Lord Hillsborough, he writes a pamphlet damning the English policy saying rules on how to turn a very great empire

into a very small one. And what finally sees him almost thrown out is the controversy over the release of a set of letters. Thomas Hutchinson is the anti-radical governor of Massachusetts in 1772 some letters come into Franklin's hands in which Hutchinson has written to London in the late 1760s and urge London to step in to Boston

to suspend civil and political rights and really stamp down the radicals. When this becomes known that this has been going on secretly, it's equivalent to lighting the blue touch paper and Franklin becomes known as the source and is dragged before the Privy Council and humiliated. So he publishes these letters? He passes them on, yes, and he tries to stay in the background, but he's out here, basically.

There's a big story about a duel and two guys are shooting each other, blaming each other for doing it, and Franklin comes out and says, it was me actually, you know. And when he's humiliated before the Privy Council, and then straight after that, there's the Tea Party, famously, in 1773. Hold on, let's see with the humiliation of the Privy Council. The newspapers of the Times that they called, they spoke to him in such language as was not fit to print, and he never said a word. Yeah, I mean, he was, you know, I think that was the insults. in the cockpit, as it's called, when he's questioned repeatedly in front of people

and insulted and blamed for all kinds, and called a kind of, you know, for stirring up the trouble which he's been working very hard to try and dampen down and disagree with. He disagrees with the tea party. He even offers to pay back the tea bill himself, you know, if it will write things with the authorities. But with our fine tradition of diplomacy,

we try to arrest him but let him go just and he goes back to America. I mean, he's instrumental. In organising the continent of the armour. Doesn't he get his own bank? He does rather. He does rather. Is Patricia, is politics, Patricia Farrow, is politics sweeping him along now,

politics in his own writing and has him to stop writing? Or is science still an interest near the forefront of his mind? I think he retains his interest in science right through his whole life. When you look at the amazing list of inventions that he produced and they seem to keep coming at every period. So quite late in his life, he invented bifocal glasses. And then whenever you go to a conference now and you have that little desk that swings around that you can write on,

that was thanks to Franklin. He became famous much earlier in America for the Franklin stove. He invented a flexible urinary catheter. I mean, he had interest in absolutely everything. In that little house in Sharon Cross, the top floors, it's a glass organ he made out of glass. Oh, that is called an harmonica. And if you've ever heard one played, it's a beautiful, it's very, very sort of eerie.

And the basic prince was like when you wet your finger and you run it around the top of a wine glass, and it makes a sort of whistling sort of noise. And his harmonica, he had, I think it was about 30 glass sort of tubes on a spindle, and you could play it a bit like a piano. It was incredibly popular. The reason that it didn't catch on is because there's nothing you can do to increase the volume. And when big orchestral music came in, the noise was just swamped.

But in a private house, in Mesmer's magnetic seances, for example, they always had an harmonica playing because it's this sort of celestial, eerie sound. Can we turn back to the revolution, Simon Newman? The revolutionaries send him to France. Now, there's a war going on. If France were to come in on the side of the Americans, they would make a substantial difference.

Their army, their money, their heft, their connections already in North America. sent Franklin over to Paris. He was welcomed like a hero, as we heard at the very beginning of the programme, took him two years to persuade them to come over, but they did. Now, can you just say that better than I did? France has to come in. America cannot really have a hope of winning the war for independence without French hope. They might fight to a stalemate, but they're not going to easily secure independence. So this is the most important mission. He's the only choice. He's the oldest delegate at the Continental Congress. He's 70 when he's sent to France. So

when he and Jefferson sit writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson's only 33. This is a young man's revolution in many ways, and they send the oldest man. But he's the logical choice. He's well known in France. He's already met the French king while he lived in London. And they recognise that he will be able to negotiate with them as no one else. And the electricity gave him that ringing reputation that Adams talked about, which we quoted at the beginning of the British. And he then changes if he had played the role. of aristocrat or very wealthy gentleman in London, he realizes quickly in France that he should play the role of rustic Pennsylvania, frontiersman, which he's never been. He'd never

worn a coonskin hat before. He wears one in Paris. He plays the role and he'll be in the most elite salons, but he'll also wear this kind of clothing because it works. He'll do what's necessary. And as you say, within two years, he's negotiated the treaty. And as I understand it, he learns French. He does. He'd already had some knowledge of French, but he learned he becomes very fluent. He takes both of his grandsons with him, his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, he goes over with him at the age of seven, and he trains him as a printer, which again shows. He's a gentleman, he's wealthy, but that's what he wants him to have an honest trade. And he goes on to become the most famous, a successful printer in America. Yes, so he knew it

to train people as well. Patricia, Patricia Farah, was Adams being hyperbolic about Franklin's reputation? in France when he got there? Oh, no, like the quote you read at the beginning. Everybody knew who he was. There was the equivalent of a celebrity culture with pictures of Franklin on biscuit tins and things like that. And I think it's also very striking.

There's a picture of him in France at that stage wearing those very, very plain clothes and the distinctive bifocals and the grey hair without a wig. But interestingly, there's a big flash of lightning in the sky. And Turgh, who was the French finance minister, said that Franklin seized the lightning from the sky, but he also seized the scepter from the hand of the tyrant.

So there was this very strong link between electricity and politics. Franklin, thanks to Emmanuel Kant, was known as the new Prometheus, who was cast out of heaven by Zeus for stealing the spark of divine creation. So this sort of symbolic association of flashes of lightning and radical French revolutionary politics was very, very strong. And there's some people who point to the similarity of the name Franklin and Frankenstein. Frankenstein famously was the new Prometheus. Simon Minnolton, can I come back to this persuading France?

In one way, you say he took him two years. That shows how dogged he was and how determined he was. In other way, why did it take him so long? But basically, how did he persuade the French to do what he persuaded him to do? You would go. The other side, Simon. By convincing the French government that America has a chance, the French are rankled by their defeat in the seven years war.

They've lost Canada. They have a large debt too, and so they don't want to risk another war with Britain unless they think there's a chance of success. Franklin is very good at channeling information back from America. Look at this military victory. Look at this standoff. Look at the fact that the British Army aren't getting anywhere. And he, because of his role as a newspaperman, as a postmaster, he has access to a great deal of information, and he knows how to channel it. And he is diffusing information around the French.

court. How are they regarding him in London at this time? Would you take that one up? He's over in France. He must know what's going on. What do they think? I think he has friends and acquaintances. He's going right back who still see him as a friend and an acquaintance. I think the American Revolution is in many respects a civil war within the family. And there are people who have got, and some people see it as a radical cause that's worthy of support. And people like Thomas Payne and others will come over from England because they see it as a great war against the aristocracy and the monarchy. So I think there is all ranges of opinion.

You know, certainly in the ministerial circles of London, he's considered to be, you know, a colonial traitor. So he got the French onsides, as it were, on the American side and went back to America. How's, what happened to when he went back to America, Patricia? Do you want to talk about it? No, you didn't talk about it. Well, he's involved in the, he's involved in organizing the army. He's very much a kind of behind-the-scenes kind of guy, you know,

getting munitions to where they need to be. working out because as Simon says he's getting on in age at this point now and then he's and once the peace is agreed is an attender

at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 although John Adams rather disparaging he says that he thinks that Franklin slept through a lot of that because he is very old by then

and as Simon said a minute ago this is becoming very much a young man's revolution and one gets the sense that he's almost deferring a little bit to those younger men by that stage of his life but he does play a role

in 1776 he is instrumental in the Pennsylvania state constitution, which is the most radical, essentially gives all white men the vote, the first state to do that. And then after he comes back from Paris, he serves as the president of the council, which is effectively governor of Pennsylvania for three years. He's a very elderly man, and he's still doing this. He gets involved in anti-slavery. So he sees himself as having an influence and a prestige which can be valuable, and he's not afraid to step forward to do things. Can you give this any view, Patricia, of his His status in America as an intellectual after this expedition to London first and then to France?

His status as an intellectual was extremely high because he was a colonial who'd succeeded in ways that the homeland hadn't. But I think in America his reputation focused more on his inventions and the fact that he never asked to be paid for them. And I think his reputation in Britain was more to do with his natural, philosophy is scientific theories. And I think the attitude to invention in Britain and in America during the 18th and 19th centuries were very, very different.

In America, they fated Edison, who famously said that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. In Britain, that was an approach that people loathed. Invention and engineering were associated with the lower classes and with that sordid activity of earning money. What people valued in Britain was the great man of ideas who was inspired. to have a great theory. So I think that his reputation in America and England were very different. His autobiography, which we're told, still the best-selling autobiography in the Western world,

is the American dream, isn't it? He was, but he didn't say God has guided me. He said, this is what I did. I worked very hard. I was frugal and successful. I pretended to be more frugal and successful than I was. And it was the first articulated example of the American dream. Is that right?

Exactly. that in America, one with hard work and application can make it and improve oneself and rise in society. And it's required reading in American schools for most of the 19th century and most of the 20th century. And Mark Twain said it spoiled the lives of a lot of American schoolboys. But then David Crockett has a copy in his pocket when he's killed the animal. So pick your apocryphal story.

For British youth, it's more about utopianism. So Shelley, for example, dreamed of Franklin and because he was the man who drew the lightning from the sky and he was going to introduce central heating to keep poor people warm right through the winter. So he was very much associated with a utopian vision for British youth, which is rather different from the American vision, I think. And in a few sentences, what sort of man do you think he was, Simon Lee?

I think he was likable. I think he was entertaining. I think he was incredibly smart. But I also think he was very clever and very canny. He plays politics very well and he retains sponsors very well. And actually he was quite extraordinary, wasn't it? We got through about a third of it, really. Well, thank you all very much, Patricia Ferris, Simon Middleton and Simon Newman. Next week we'll be going right at the same time, really.

1798, the publication of the political ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as the Forum, the discussion programme about global ideas? To find out more, visit BBCworldservice.com slash forum.