Science Friday - What was science like in America 250 years ago?

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

If you hear “colonial America” and “science,” one name probably comes to mind: Benjamin Franklin. But he wasn’t the only one thinking big thoughts and asking big questions. Many other natural philosophers were also looking at the world in new ways, and trying to make sense of how it worked.   In honor of the nation’s 250th birthday, Host Ira Flatow traveled to Boston, the birthplace of the American Revolution, for a conversation with historian Robert Allison about scientific thought in early America. Guest: Dr. Robert Allison is a professor of history at Suffolk University, chair of Revolution 250, and president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.  Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, I'm I LaFleado, and you're listening to Science Friday. We're celebrating the nation's 250th, and we're better to have that conversation than in Boston, the birthplace of the American Revolution. You may not realize how connected science is to the birth of our country. The founders of our country found the role of science to be so important to our democracy that the founders specifically called for the support and promotion of science all the way up at the top of our Constitution, Article 1. one. So now if I say colonial America and science, probably the first name that comes up is Ben,

great. You all get A's. Ben Franklin, yes. Ben was one of America's greatest scientists, even to this day, but Ben wasn't the only one thinking big thoughts, asking big questions. There were plenty of natural philosophers looking at the world in new ways and trying to make sense of how the World Work. I'm here in WBUR's City Space, and joining me is Dr. Robert Allison, Professor of History at Suffolk University, is also chair of Revolution 250, and president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Thanks for being here with us. Thanks, Ira. It's great to be here. Okay, let's begin with Franklin. Why not? What made him such a great scientist? Because he was, actually the great thing about Franklin for scientists is he wrote things down.

He recorded a protocol. Franklin came to Boston. He left, he grew up in Boston. Philadelphia is going to say the revolution began there. We know it began here. We like to say the revolution happened in Massachusetts. They went to Philadelphia to fill out the paperwork. Franklin grew up in Boston, ran away from home when he was 16, went to Philadelphia,

and brought to Philadelphia a lot of the things he had learned in Boston. He develops in Philadelphia. But he comes back to Boston. in the 1740s, sees Dr. Spence demonstrating this electrical apparatus, we can talk about later, and he is fascinated with this, the electrical fluid. He buys the apparatus from Spence, goes to Philadelphia, he and a group of guys get together to experiment with the electrical fluid. And Franklin invented a lot of the words we still use for things involving the electrical fluid. Like, what do you call guys who work with electricity? That's what these guys were.

Franklin is experimenting with these things, along with a group of other guys who are doing things, and he writes down the protocols for everything they're doing so they can be replicated. So he takes electricity, which had been a parlor trick, and turns it into a science. And all of this can be verified, right? This is not just mythology. And you said he had a paper trail. He did leave an extensive paper trail. His experiments are being published in Europe, not here, but in Europe, where they're called the Philadelphia experiments. because this guy in Philadelphia, which to Europe was the edge of the universe,

was coming up with these things that then people in Europe are replicating, seeing how they work. So Franklin gets honorary degrees in Europe. When the famous experiment with electricity and the clouds is published, Emmanuel Kant calls Franklin the Prometheus of the modern age. it's really hard to overstate how important Franklin was, and actually much better known as a natural philosopher in Europe than he was in the American colonies.

And that was that famous kite flying experiment. That's right, yes, yes. And you say the whole story of the kite, he wasn't the first to do that. It was already done in France. So Franklin had written this protocol. In one of his books, it's published in Europe, It says, if you put a sentry box on top of a church steeple and you ran an iron pipe up from that, and you have a guy in the sentry box with a Leyden jar.

And Franklin also coined the term Laiden jar for something that a Dr. Mushenbrook had invented in the city of Leiden. He then can collect the electrical fluid if, in fact, the clouds contain electricity. The problem Franklin had in doing this experiment in Philadelphia, there were no church steeples. You grew up in Boston where there were plenty of church steeples. The pastor of Christ Church in Philadelphia, they're building a new church, probably was pleased when Benjamin Franklin

came to make a donation and probably was puzzled why Franklin said the steeple should be at least 150 feet tall. So he doesn't do it, but in France there are church steeples. In Germany, there are church steeples. In England, they're doing this in the summer after Franklin publishes this.

And French, Franklin doesn't know this. That all over Europe, they're proving him right, that the clouds do contain the electrical fluid. So he wants to, he doesn't know they've done it. So he wants to see. And this is why he thinks, maybe if I fly a kite. So he and his son, his son, William, who is in his 20s. I know the representation we see, in fact, on the Franklin statue in downtown Boston. It's young, young boy, William, but it's actually a 23-year-old guy and his middle-aged father. who are out there trying to fly a kite. I'm shocked, shocked, so to speak. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. And Frank, they're flying the kite. Think about it.

If you're going to fly a kite when you're a man of a certain age, and it looks like there's going to be a thunderstorm, you're probably not going to tell all of your neighbors, hey, I'm going to try to fly a kite. They're going to think you really are loony. So he doesn't tell anyone this. They go out to fly the kite, and nothing happens. but then they see the bristles on the kite string start to stick out straight.

And then they see a spark. He has a key tied with a silk thread to the kite string, and the key starts to glow, and then he holds up his knuckle to it and gets a small shock, and then holds up his laden jar, as he says, collected the electrical fluid copiously. So he has proven this to himself. It's already been proven to the science.

scientific world in Europe. So he becomes a celebrity in Europe, right? Oh, yeah. And Isaac Asimov wrote a book years ago called The Kite that won the revolution because it allowed the French, now he was a celebrity in France and when America was looking for aid. Right. He goes to France because they know him in France. They know his reputation. In fact, even before he goes to France, he goes to Montreal, because the Americans are trying to bring Canada into the cause. So they send a couple of of guys named Carol from Maryland, and their advantages, they're Catholic. And New England has been fighting against New France for about 80 years, but they think, okay, we'll send a Catholic priest and his brother, who are members of Congress, along with Franklin,

because everyone loves Franklin. So they go on a mission to Montreal doesn't work. Then at the end of 1776, when things are going badly for the Americans in the war, they've been kicked out of New York, the war itself seems to be a disaster. Franklin goes off to Europe, to France with his two grandsons. And the rest is history. The rest is history. Now that we have deified Franklin and us,

let's talk about some of the big questions of the times. What were scientists or were they called scientists back then? No, they were called natural philosophers. In fact, the first real American, well, we can have an argument of who was the first. This is probably a group that has lots of candidates for the first. I will say the first professor at Harvard to teach what we call science was a fellow named John Winthrop, who was the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. And Winthrop was one of the real thinkers about this.

He was a brilliant math teacher. By the way, he was given tenure at Harvard. He was given a named professorship at Harvard when he was 25 years old. Wow. Just like today. Just like today. He had a heavier teaching load than a professor has today. And what were Americans doing?

There's a famous historian named Silvio Berdini, Bendini, and he called early Americans a country of tinkers and experimenters. Is that what was going on in the States? That is pretty much what was going on. After Winthrop and Franklin, probably the next guy is David Rittenhouse. And Rittenhouse makes a clock. That is, he's a guy who knows how to do that to work with. his hands. And the other guys in Franklin's circle in Philadelphia, and remember, Franklin was a guy

who was, he was a printer. So he knew how to set type, and he was always proud of the fact that he could do this very fast. The other guys in his circle are guys who are artisans or they would call them manufacturers. They build things. So a guy who knows how to make glass jars, and a big facet of making electricity is making glass tube. So there's someone who is a glass maker. There's another guy, a watchmaker. Other people who work with their hands are skilled at this, are doing this. You're not going to merchants or the ministry. There are a couple of ministers involved in this. The more learned professions aren't the tinkerers, but they do, like Professor Winthrop, have certain ideas about things. And Winthrop is, I have to say, having read his lectures,

which he published at the time, he would have been a very good communicator because even I can understand what he is saying about how things work. Oh, yeah, go ahead. No, go on Ira. I was going to ask about, you talk natural philosophers. Does that mean that these amateurs were basically going into the woods and looking at nature and talking about it? They're thinking about why things are working in a certain way.

And by the way, this is what you would have called anyone who is a natural philosopher, Sir Isaac Newton or Voltaire is someone we probably don't think of as a natural philosopher, but it is thanks to Voltaire. We know how gravity works. What's the famous story about Isaac Newton? How does he discover Graeme? Voltaire wants to meet Newton. He's in London, but Newton has died.

He goes to Newton's estate. Newton's niece shows Voltaire around. This is in, I think, 1727 or so. And the niece says, oh, they're at the apple orchard. My uncle was sitting under that tree. He saw an apple fall. Then he saw the moon rise. And that's how he put together gravity being this force.

You know, I've looked at the moonrise now for almost 70 years. I've seen apples full. I could never put that together. Newton has a mind that could. Voltaire has a sense, this is the way you explain this, to those of us who could not understand, those of us who have not read Principia Mathematica, who here has.

And in fact, Voltaire's lady friend, the Marquisa de Chatelle, does the first transatlée, does the first translation of the Principia into any other language. So these are natural philosophers. You don't need a college degree to do this. You know, I mentioned before about how the founding fathers decided to put science in the Constitution and way up there at the top. And one of those people was Thomas Jefferson.

Yes. Right? And if you go to Monticello and look at Jefferson's house, you can see all the stuff. He's like, he was really prolific as a tinkerer, wasn't it? He was. He definitely loved to tinker with things. Yes, he was always inventing. and he didn't patent things

because these should be free use, anyone who wants to use this. So the clock, other things. Some of them, he called a polygraph so he could make copies of his letters. So he has a pen here and is attached to a rod here and then there's another pen

so he could make copies while he was writing. Because one reason, by the way, we know so much about what Jefferson thought and John Adams thought is they saved everything. everything, and they made copies of everything. They would have loved Xerox machines. Yeah.

But, so Jefferson has this polygraph so he can make copies as he is writing. And really fascinated in how things work, the mechanics of things. Yeah. We need to take a quick break, and we'll be back with more on history, science, and early America. Stay with us. We think of science as coming up with a question or an idea, and then going out to collect data. Yes. Right. Did these scientists, these early natural philosophers, also collect data? Oh, they did. Definitely. I mean, Franklin does when he's doing these different experiments and the other people in a circle are experimenting. They're seeing what works, what doesn't, and it has to be able to be replicated. Wynthrop, there's an earthquake in 755 in the late fall here. It's about a month or so before there's a massive earthquake in Lisbon. And he is looking at how far the bricks from the,

buildings at Harvard fell. And he deduces from this, the higher bricks fell further. So this means the buildings would have been swaying like this, which is what throws them further. Therefore, the earthquake is an undulation or a wave. And then he has a theory about what's underneath the earth. By the way, there's a rival theory. A minister in Boston, the Reverend Prince, who's at the old South meeting house, says, the problem is, we've put up all these electrical rods. because this isn't another. Franklin's innovation, we can stop lightning from burning down houses

by putting up lightning rods. The Reverend Prince says, those are retracting the electrical fluid. This is what caused the earthquake. We have too many electrical rods. And so Professor Winthrop has to counter that particular theory, which it does very gently,

but it's an argument about what is making this happen. We don't hear very much about Winthrop. We don't. But did he conduct a, scientific expedition, observe the transit of Venus, right? Yeah, the big, big news for us in the 1760s was Venus is going to transit across the sun. And by the way, the next time this is going to happen, for those of you who think, boy, it happened in, I think, 2005, 2011, the next time's going to be in 2117.

I'm writing that down. And, yeah, and after that it'll be 21, 25, and then it's going to be in the 2200s, the next one. So this is a big, this is something that brings together all of the countries of the world to try to chart this. In fact, in the 1740s, Franklin publishes something in French about the transit of mercury can be observed, sends it up to Canada. This is at a time when the British and the French are at war. So he's telling the enemy, look out for this. And then in 1761, different countries launch expeditions. And here in Massachusetts, the governor, Governor Francis,

Bernard and the Massachusetts Provincial Assembly authorize money for an expedition, loaning. There's a ship that belonged to the province, the Massachusetts, to take Professor Winthrop up to Newfoundland, where it'll be more visible. And Harvard allows him to take along the various telescopes. He has a 24-foot-long telescope he takes up. He brought that himself. He brought that himself. I hope it collapsed into something smaller. He and two guys, and they set this up off of Newfoundland. realize the town itself is kind of surrounded by mountains, so they go off to one, which they call Venus Hill, and set this up so they can focus on the sun. And you're probably wondering, okay, you're going to look through a telescope at the sun. No, they have a glass plate that is

then under it. So on the glass plate, you will see the sun and you will see Venus transiting across it. You then can measure how fast it goes, as well as the parallax. Now, I'm a historian, and not a scientist. One good thing about Professor Winthrop is he didn't consider himself a scientist either, so he spoke in words that people like me could understand. You can then gauge the size of the sun, but the other thing you can get, if you have people doing measurements from different places, how far the sun is from the Earth, and that will give us a sense of the scale of the solar system, as well as the size of the different planets. So this is a very, exciting thing. He does this in 1761. 1769, the plan is he's going to go out to the western end of Lake

Superior. By this time, his health isn't good enough to do that. David Rittenhouse in 1769, by the way, does have a telescope put in the cupola of what is today called Independence Hall, and he is going to lie down under it so he can track this. He is so overwhelmed by the thought that he is going to see Venus transiting across the sun, and no one will see this again for about a hundred and eight, 50 years, he faints. He does recover. But if you've been to Providence, Rhode Island, there is a transit street because that is where they observe the transit of Venus.

There's a Venus point in Tahiti because the British send Captain Cook to go to Tahiti to get a sense of this. The French are also sending expedition. So this is the transit of Venus. And then that does allow us to know how far the Earth is from the sun. I should say, Professor Winthrop on his 1761, he estimates it's about, what, 73 million miles. Close. It is close.

Yeah. So you have guys who are thinking about earthquakes, some people are thinking about Venus. Anything else come to mind of the kinds of things that natural philosophers were thinking about in those days? They're really thinking about how does the world work? work. What holds the world together? The gravity is for Newton. And this is replacing the Descartian idea about vortices that hold things up. But it's really, how does the world work? How do we rationalize things? This is why we call the period the enlightenment, partly because of Kant, but also because of Newton's book Optics, where he's writing about the nature of light.

You reminded me of something, and that was another New England thinker, Cotton Mather. Yes. Smallpox. Tell us about that. So Cotton Mather, as you know, was a minister in Boston. His father was a minister in Boston. And Mather was also a fellow of the Royal Society. This is the leading scientific organization in the English-speaking world. The French have the Royal Academy of Science. And Mather in 1714, we know he read the proceedings of the Royal Society. that year because that was the year he was inducted. It was because he wrote an essay published in the proceedings about some of the natural curiosities in America. This is something that fascinated Europe.

What is different about America? So Mather read this. There's also an account in it of something that had happened in Izmir, a city in Turkey, where there was a smallpox outbreak, and people were inoculated, taking some of the pus from someone. who has a mild case of smallpox, and then you cut a little bit of your skin in your chest, put some of that in it, mix it with a blood, cover it with a walnut shell, keep it warm. And what will happen is after a few days, you will get a few very minor pock marks there, which then will then will dry up and fall off, and you won't get smallpox then or ever. Mather says, if this ever happens in Boston, he sends a letter to the Royal Society,

I will make sure we do this. So there had not been a small, but there have been a smallpox outbreak in Boston roughly every 13 years since 1630. And it's a devastating disease. And in 1721, a ship from the West Indies arrives, and there are reports that some members of the crew are ill. They get off the ship, their renting rooms in the north end,

and then after about a week they heard, these guys have smallpox. And by this time, everyone who is on the ship, everyone they have encountered, many of the people encountered by those people, will get the smallpox. So a panic starts in Boston. Mather comes to the selectmen and says, I know what to do because I've read about this. Also, Mather has a slave named Onesimus from West Africa. And Onesimus had confirmed what Franklin read in the reports of the Royal Society. In West Africa, someone gets the smallpox. He says, you cutty, cutty skin, take some of the pox, mix it up, and nobody gets smallpox.

So Mather on the testimony of the Royal Society, as well as Omnisimus, goes to the selectmen and says, we should start inoculating. Oh. And they say, that is the craziest idea we have ever heard. What they selectmen do, they say, no, no to this. They say, what we'll do is we'll hire some free people of colors to sweep the street. So people will see we're actually doing something. And then because Mather, Mather is a prolific writer. He's the most prolific writer in the history of Boston.

He published over 300 books. He writes about the smallpox, what should be done about it. Now, this gives rise to a new newspaper in town. James Franklin starts a newspaper, the New England Current, with a purpose of countering this ridiculous idea of self-procurement of smallpox. And by the way, Franklin's younger brother Benjamin is, apprentice and the New England current says what do these things have in common the persecution of the Quakers in 1660 the execution of the witches in 1693 the self

procurement of smallpox in 1721 the common denominator is cotton Mather was involved in all of these things and now he wants us to inject ourselves with a disease that's going to kill us so this doesn't make sense to Bostonians someone actually throws a bomb through Mather's window It doesn't go off. So we can read the note which says, Mather, you dog, inoculate yourself with this.

A pox on you. What a story. It is quite a story. You know, I think about great scientists. You think about Newton and people's scientists, Galileo, they're closest to religion and the church. How did the church influence what was going on with natural philosophers in America?

That's a very good question. because there wasn't that big of a divide between them. Because people like Cotton Mather, he is a fellow of the royal society. He is trying to understand God's creation. And so is John Winthrop. But you have this idea that we're trying to understand the workings of God's world. Yeah. And that was harmony there.

It was not conflict like with these others. And Newton the same way. And they're definitely thinking about this in the context of a And the idea of gravity, there's this idea that there's different gravitational pulls in different places. Well, no, there's one gravitational pull. They do, by the way, had gotten away from the idea that the sun revolved around the earth. So you see in the almanacs in the 17th century and 18th century, just an assumption. This isn't an assumption everywhere in the world that the sun is the center of the solar system as opposed to the earth. Right. So speaking of center, at the this time, Europe is still the center of science. Yes. And they're looking at all these young upstarts in the colonies. How did the Europeans view them as real scientists, or what was their attitude toward them?

They viewed someone like Franklin as a real scientist because of his contributions, but when he starts venturing into the world of politics, opinions about him change in England, not so much in France, which is one reason he goes to France, where he meets Voltaire and meets with others. So, yes, there is a change. It's hard to believe their perspectives on how the world works might be tinged by their political leanings. I can't believe that. It's shocking. I hope I never lived to see that.

Oh, yes. Were there different schools of thought in natural philosophy? You know, there's, when you get two sciences, you get three arguments about that. That's true, yeah. There were. In fact, Franklin, he's in Paris, and he reads an account of a British, natural philosopher who is arguing that Franklin is all wrong that the lightning rods should have a round point. This guy says, no, they should have a straight point. And Franklin thinks, well,

this is a scientific argument. Maybe I should write in defense of the round point. But then he thinks, well, why? Because if the other one works better, why am I trying to defend something that doesn't work? Let people experiment. So there are many different. ideas about this. I mentioned Descartes, thinking that vortices hold things up. The Newtonians believe, though, that gravity is this unifying thing that pulls things together. And the French officially are very much committed to the Descartian idea. And the reason Franklin's experiment is carried out in Paris is there's a French natural philosopher who wants to prove the Descartian's wrong, including the guy who is the royal experimenter for the king. So there is

that not only let's prove this wrong, but there's a certain petty jealousy among these characters. Speaking of which, as we're running out of time here, is there a way for you to sort of sum up the mood of the time and show how science or natural philosophy fit in to that mood? Thomas Payne, and by the way, Thomas Payne also has a patent. He's developed a suspension bridge or a piling bridge. but that's a story for another day, that we have it in our power to begin the world over again. And we are trying to start something. And the Constitution, which Ira mentioned, is also an experiment.

You know, David Urim wrote an essay that politics may be reduced to a science, thinking, okay, we understand how this natural world is working. What about the world of politics? and the American constitutions and the American independence is really an experiment in what happened when we leave the human mind free and untrammeled by the coercive power of the state or by old ideas. So you definitely have in this period an idea that we are creating the world over again. And Payne says no one has had this opportunity since the days of Adam and Eve.

And John Adams asks, when before have three million people had the ability to make an election of government, any more than they can make an election of climate or soil? So they understand that this is a remarkable moment they are in, and they're able to take advantage of it because they are beginning to think anew. So, I mean, to sum up where we started with the Constitution, would you say then you really can't have legitimate science, unless you're, have the idea of free thinking. Exactly, yes. Yeah, and you can't have free thinking without having science to prove what, or to test out what you're thinking about. To argue to prove it wrong or to prove it right. That is, it's an experiment. It's amazing how many times they refer to this as an experiment. And in the summer of 1787, when the delegates are at Philadelphia drawing up the constitution, a guy named John Fitch, shows an experimental steamboat going,

up the Delaware River against the current, a machine that will go of itself, which is also what they're thinking about with the Constitution and this other ideas. They're beginning something. So the idea of experimentation fits right in. You're experimenting with a country. Yes. And you know that's the way you get to prove whether it works or not. That's right. And each state does devise a constitution and some of them work better than others. That is, they are trying something. And in the debates over, the Constitution itself. John Dickinson says that experience must be our guide. Reason may mislead us. That is, we have theories about things, but we also have to understand how things work.

Well, thank you for telling us how things work this evening, because this has just been a fascinating deep dive into our Constitution and Science. Thank you very much. Dr. Robert Allison, Professor of History at Suffolk University, also chair of Revolution 250, and the president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Thanks to everybody at WBUR and City Space for making this conversation possible. This podcast was produced by Charles Berkwist, and of all the Franklin and Lightning Talks spark something in your mind, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ira Flato.

Thank you for listening.