Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and the U. Constitution , and he negotiated the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking. Franklin was born on January 17, , in Boston, in what was then known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Franklin was his 15th child and youngest son. Perhaps to dissuade him from going to sea as one of his other sons had done, Josiah apprenticed year-old Franklin at the print shop run by his older brother James.
James grew angry, however, when he learned that his apprentice had penned the letters. He escaped to New York before settling in Philadelphia and began working with another printer. Philadelphia became his home base for the rest of his life. Encouraged by Pennsylvania Governor William Keith to set up his own print shop, Franklin left for London in to purchase supplies from stationers, booksellers and printers. A self-taught swimmer who crafted his own wooden flippers, Franklin performed long-distance swims on the Thames River.
In , he was inducted as an honorary member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame. In Franklin published his first pamphlet, "A Dissertation upon Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain," which argued that humans lack free will and, thus, are not morally responsible for their actions. Franklin later repudiated this thought and burned all but one copy of the pamphlet still in his possession.
After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in , he discovered that Deborah had married in the interim, only to be abandoned by her husband just months after the wedding. The future Founding Father rekindled his romance with Deborah Read and he took her as his common-law wife in Around that time, Franklin fathered a son, William, out of wedlock who was taken in by the couple. The two times Franklin moved to London, in and again in , it was without Deborah, who refused to leave Philadelphia.
His second stay was the last time the couple saw each other. Franklin would not return home before Deborah passed away in from a stroke at the age of When the New Jersey militia stripped William Franklin of his post as royal governor and imprisoned him in , his father chose not to intercede on his behalf.
After his return to Philadelphia in , Franklin held varied jobs including bookkeeper, shopkeeper and currency cutter. In he returned to a familiar trade - printing paper currency - in New Jersey before partnering with a friend to open his own print shop in Philadelphia that published government pamphlets and books. In Franklin was named the official printer of Pennsylvania. In Franklin published another pamphlet, "A Modest Enquiry into The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency," which advocated for an increase in the money supply to stimulate the economy.
With the cash Franklin earned from his money-related treatise, he was able to purchase The Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper from a former boss. Under his ownership, the struggling newspaper was transformed into the most widely-read paper in the colonies and became one of the first to turn a profit. He had less luck in when he launched the first German-language newspaper in the colonies, the short-lived Philadelphische Zeitung.
Franklin amassed real estate and businesses and organized the volunteer Union Fire Company to counteract dangerous fire hazards in Philadelphia. He joined the Freemasons in and was eventually elected grand master of the Masons of Pennsylvania. In the s, Franklin expanded into science and entrepreneurship. His pamphlet "A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge" underscored his interests and served as the founding document of the American Philosophical Society , the first scientific society in the colonies.
In , he was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention. At the end of the convention, in September , he urged his fellow delegates to support the heavily debated new document.
The U. Franklin died a year later, at age 84, on April 17, , in Philadelphia. In his will, he left money to Boston and Philadelphia, which was later used to establish a trade school and a science museum and fund scholarships and other community projects. More than years after his death, Franklin remains one of the most celebrated figures in U. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. He only had two years of formal education. The man considered the most brilliant American of his age rarely saw the inside of a classroom.
Franklin spent just two years attending Boston Latin School and a private academy before joining the family candle and soap making While his support for protective tariffs led to rising prices for consumers and arguably paved Franklin Pierce , the son of a onetime governor of New Hampshire, entered politics at a young age. He served as speaker of the state legislature before winning election to the U.
House of Representatives in After two terms in the House and one in the Senate, When armed conflict between bands of American colonists and British soldiers began in April , the Americans were ostensibly fighting only Franklin D. With the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt immediately acted to restore public confidence, proclaiming a bank holiday and Thomas Paine was an England-born political philosopher and writer who supported revolutionary causes in America and Europe.
From to , the Continental Congress served as the government of the 13 American colonies and later the United States. The First Continental Congress, which was comprised of delegates from the colonies, met in in reaction to the Coercive Acts, a series of measures A member of a committee of five that also included John Adams of Live TV. This Day In History.
History Vault. Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Publisher. Recommended for you. One mystery about the manuscript begins brewing while only Part One exists, hypothetically in James's possession as executor of Mrs. Galloway's will: later unauthorized editions of Part One are easiest explained by supposing that one of James's clerks stealthily made a copy of it while it was still in James's office, and that the secret copy somehow got to England immediately after Franklin's death.
While in France, Franklin was visited by his close friend Benjamin Vaughan, who had been sent by the British government to discuss peace negotiations. Franklin showed Vaughan James's letter, asking his opinion of it, and Vaughan found even more reasons than James had for urging Franklin to continue. Both letters are inserted at the beginning of Part Two, apparently to explain why Franklin continued to write after being estranged from his son William Temple, for whom the Memoirs were planned originally.
When Franklin, back in Philadelphia, finally began writing again in , he apparently reread and probably revised his draft of Part One. Then he had his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, make two copies of his first three parts and sent them to Benjamin Vaughan in England and to his friend Le Veillard in France, asking them for their suggestions and comments.
At this point another mystery is born, for we have no way of knowing to what extent Franklin personally authorized the many changes in Bache's copies, and to what extent they were editorial corrections Bache himself supplied. To complicate matters further, though the first authorized edition of the Autobiography was based on one of Bache's copies, neither copy survives today.
The exact wording of Bache's versions must be reconstructed from printed editions of the book and from translations supposedly based on Bache's copies rather than the original manuscript.
Le Veillard began translating the Autobiography into French as soon as he received one of Bache's copies. He proceeded meticulously, attempting to render as exactly as possible Franklin's English expressions and comparisons into French. But Franklin, after adding the last short section before his death, left the publication rights for the book to his illegitimate grandson, William Temple Franklin, Jr. And Temple, hoping to make a great deal of money out of a book for which the public was clamoring, forbade its publication in English or French, except in authorized editions which he himself would edit.
But Temple found working from the original manuscript difficult, since the handwriting was often illegible, so at some point he apparently exchanged manuscripts with Le Veillard, taking to his printer Bache's neater copy to use, and failing to notice that Part Four had been added at the end of the original.
He did not bring out his edition until Within a year after Franklin's death in , an unauthorized French translation of Part One appeared, followed two years later by London editions which were supposedly unauthorized re-translations into English from the poor French translation. Several mysteries arise because of these works: first, from what possible text was the French translation made Le Willard convincingly denied having anything to do with it ; and second, what sources were used for the English re-translations, since occasional wordings resemble the original manuscript more than the supposed French source?
The simplest explanation is that all these pirated editions were taken from a copy of Part One made in Abel James's office. Le Willard died on the scaffold during the French Revolution, and Temple Franklin dawdled so in publishing Franklin's papers that gossips suggested he had been bribed by the British government to suppress them.
But finally he brought out the first three parts of the Autobiography in , the text based on Bache's copy. Years later, in , the American minister to France, John Bigelow, located and brought from Le Willard's heirs the original manuscript.
He then noted how widely it differed from the official edition and brought out what he claimed was the definitive edition of the Autobiography , in the process reviling Temple Franklin on a number of grounds.
But since Bigelow simply made corrections on a printed copy of the Temple Franklin edition, his own "definitive edition" has as many errors as he claimed the original definitive edition contained. Temple Franklin was unjustly accused of bowdlerizing his grandfather's powerful prose. Of course, since neither of Bache's copies exists, it is impossible to know for sure what changes each grandson contributed in the version.
But neither can anyone know whether many of these changes were not made by Franklin himself, when he directed Bache's copying. Consequently, no absolutely foolproof and totally authoritative text representing Franklin's final wishes will probably ever exist.
In many ways, Franklin's Autobiography stops when it approaches the period of activity that made such memoirs most desirable. Although his scientific and philosophical reputations were based largely on the electrical experiments he mentions briefly in the Autobiography , his most significant political contributions were made after , when the Memoirs ended.
Considering both aspects of his career, Turgot coined for Franklin the Latin motto Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis: "He snatched the lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants. Franklin's first mission to England to negotiate about the taxes that the Pennsylvania Proprietors refused to pay lasted from to During this time Franklin, with his son William, visited the homes of their ancestors, as Franklin reminded William at the beginning of the Autobiography , and in was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of St.
Thereafter he was addressed as "Dr. He also continued his experiments and perfected a musical instrument called the armonica, which involved glasses filled with varying amounts of water and played with a wet finger rubbed round the rims. The instrument was so popular that Mozart and Beethoven, as well as others, composed music for it. Franklin arrived home in Philadelphia on November 1, , settled hopefully into domestic routine, prepared to serve as an Assembly member, and began to build a new house for his family.
But in early winter of the following year he was again embroiled in public controversy. Frontiersmen, inflamed by Indian uprisings, killed two groups of friendly Indians; and Franklin wrote a pamphlet strongly condemning this massacre. The same settlers then decided to march on Philadelphia to murder the friendly Indians being guarded there. But Franklin met them outside the city, talked with them, reminded them of the three companies of soldiers defending Philadelphia, and persuaded them to go home without causing further trouble.
At this point bitterness increased against the Proprietors, who controlled Pennsylvania under Royal chatters inherited from William Penn.
A faction led by Franklin convinced a majority of the Assembly to petition the King to take direct control of the Province. Opponents argued that the King's representatives would govern as corruptly as the Proprietors' men, and that to lose the Proprietors would be to lose the excellent Pennsylvania charter.
Franklin's allies won the vote to petition the King, but on October 1, , after a bitter and vituperative campaign, Franklin lost his seat in the Assembly.
By the end of the month.
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