Franklin, Benjamin, pseudonym Richard Saunders 1706-90
US statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, inventor and scientist

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, the youngest son of a chandler and the fifteenth of 17 children. He was apprenticed at the age of 12 to his brother James, a printer, who started a newspaper, the New England Courant, in 1721. The two brothers later fell out and Benjamin drifted to Philadelphia, where he secured work as a printer. During 1724-26 he worked for 18 months in London, before returning to Philadelphia to establish his own successful printing house, and in 1729 he purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette. A year later, he married Deborah Read, by whom he had two children, a son who died young, and a daughter, Sally. He also had an illegitimate son, William (later a Loyalist and the last royal governor of New Jersey).

In 1732 Franklin commenced the publication of Poor Richard's Almanac, which became popular for its witty aphorisms and attained an unprecedented circulation. He was an energetic citizen of Philadelphia, taking the lead in founding its first subscription library, paid police force and hospital, volunteer fire department, as well as its academy (later the University of Pennsylvania). He was appointed Clerk of the Assembly (1736), Postmaster of Philadelphia (1737), then deputy Postmaster-General for the colonies (1753), being elected and re-elected a member of the Assembly almost uninterruptedly until his first mission to England.

His invention of the Franklin stove and its commercial success encouraged him to turn from printing to the natural sciences in the 1740s, and in 1746 he commenced his famous researches in electricity. He brought out fully the distinction between positive and negative electricity, proved that lightning and electricity are identical, and he suggested that buildings could be protected by lightning-conductors. Furthermore, he discovered the course of storms over the North American continent, the course of the Gulf Stream, its high temperature, and the use of the thermometer in navigating it; and the various powers of different colours to absorb solar heat.

A staunch advocate of colonial rights, he proposed to the Albany Congress a Plan of Union for the colonies in 1754, and in 1757 he was sent to England where he successfully insisted upon the right of the province to tax the proprietors of land held under the Penn charter for the cost of defending it from the French and the Native Americans. In 1764 he was again sent to England to contest the pretensions of parliament to tax the American colonies without representation. The differences, however, between the British government and the colonies became too grave to be reconciled by negotiation, and in 1775 Franklin returned to the USA, where he helped draft the Declaration of Independence.

To secure foreign assistance in the war Franklin was sent to Paris in 1776. His skill as a negotiator and his personal popularity, reinforced by the antipathy of French and English, favoured his mission, and in February 1778 a treaty of alliance was signed, while munitions of war and money were sent from France that made possible the American victory in the Revolutionary War. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1783), ending the war with Great Britain, and remained US Minister in Paris till 1785, when he returned to Philadelphia.

In 1787, frail and elderly, he was a delegate to the convention which framed the Constitution of the USA. He retired from public life in 1788, but his mind remained active, and at the age of 83 he invented bifocal eyeglasses. His classic Autobiography, not published in its entirety until 1868, reflects the wide-ranging interests and passion for self-improvement that generated his achievements, although it reveals little of the irreverant temperament that makes Franklin one of the most appealing of the US founding fathers.

Bibliography: E Wright, Benjamin Franklin: His Life As He Wrote It (1990); T Fleming, The Man Who Dared The Lightning (1964); Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed L Larabee et al (1964).