The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (64 page)

Another force was less mighty but more frequent. Many years earlier Franklin had noted the seeming paradox that northeasterly storms were felt first in the southwest. (The occasion was a strong northeaster that obscured his view in Philadelphia of a lunar eclipse but left observers in Boston—who communicated the fact to him—several hours more of clear sky to see the event.) Although Franklin had since corroborated the phenomenon, he had never been able to explain it. Now he thought he could. He employed two analogies. “Suppose a long canal of water stopped at the end by a gate. The water is quite at rest till the gate is open, then it begins to move out through the gate; the water next the gate is first in motion, and moves towards the gate; the water next to that first water moves next, and so on successively, till the water at the head of the canal is in motion, which is last of all.” In other words, lowered pressure at the end of the canal propagated up the canal to the head, opposite the motion of the water itself. “Again, suppose the air in a chamber at rest, no current through the room till you make a fire in the chimney. Immediately the air in the chimney, being rarefied by the fire, rises; the air next the chimney flows in to supply its place, moving toward the chimney; and, in consequence, the rest of the air successively, quite back to the door.” This latter was the closer analogy to the actual phenomenon. “Thus to produce our North-East storms, I suppose some great heat and rarefaction of the air in or about the Gulf of Mexico; the air thence rising has its place supplied by the next more northern, cooler, and therefore
denser and heavier air; that, being in motion, is followed by the next more northern air, &c &c. in a successive current, to which current our coast and inland ridge of mountains give the direction of North-East, as they lie N.E. and S.W.”

Franklin’s meteorological perspicacity—his explanation here was modern and accurate—was not matched in matters geographical. Like nearly all American and European natural philosophers of his era, Franklin was fascinated by the outstanding question of North American geography: Was there a water passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific? By all evidence no such passage existed in temperate latitudes. Yet the straits to the north of Canada remained unexplored, and might include the long-sought Northwest Passage. In the early 1750s Franklin himself had joined the search vicariously and financially, helping to sponsor two voyages of the ship
Argo
from Philadelphia to the vicinity of Hudson Bay.

That the
Argo
found nothing of note did not discourage Franklin, in part because he had what he took to be independent evidence that a passage did indeed exist. In 1708 a London journal had published a letter ascribed to a Bartholomew de Fonte, said to be an erstwhile admiral of New Spain and Peru and a present prince of Chile. The Fonte letter recounted a journey by water from the Pacific, in the latitude of the 53rd parallel, to Hudson Bay. It was a remarkable journey, and utterly fanciful.

But Franklin did not know it was fanciful; he thought the opposite. And at a moment when the British papers and members of Parliament were pondering whether to retain Canada, the prospect of a Northwest Passage just beyond the territory in question made that territory all the more valuable. Such a passage would enable British merchants and explorers to reach the Pacific without sailing near or through Spanish waters around South America; Britain’s recent victories over France in the East Indies would become doubly valuable.

In the spring of 1762 Franklin was requested to comment on the Fonte account by John Pringle, who had connections to George III’s favorite, Bute. Franklin proceeded to compose a detailed defense of the Fonte account. Perhaps because his own hoaxes were of a much higher literary quality than this one, the very lack of literary sophistication in the Fonte piece seemed evidence of its authenticity. “Entertainment does not appear to be aimed at in it,” Franklin said. “’tis in short a mere dry account of facts, which, though all possible and probable, are none of them wonderful like the incidents of a novel.”

Franklin adduced additional corroboration. The flora and fauna
described by Fonte comported with those mentioned by other travelers. The skin-covered boats employed by the natives he said he saw exactly matched the boats Russian traders encountered in the far-northern Pacific. That the Spanish now disavowed the voyage hardly discredited Fonte’s account; Spain had no desire to broadcast knowledge of a northern route to the Pacific—a route that could only imperil Spain’s Pacific possessions. Nor did an evident discrepancy between sea level at the western end of Fonte’s passage and at the eastern end (the eastern end appeared to be downstream from the western) disqualify the account, in Franklin’s judgment; quite the contrary. “One would think no writer of a feigned voyage, who desired to have it received as true, would of choice invent and insert a circumstance so objectionable.”

Though Franklin was fooled in this case, he had company. Other authorities shared his respect for the Fonte account, and not till many more years had passed was it proven to be a fake. His defense of the spurious story is notable not merely for showing that the most astute minds can be mistaken but for including his first mention of the Gulf Stream. Sailors, he said, had christened it thus, and knew whence and whither it flowed—from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic. But they did not know why. Franklin proposed a mechanism: a differential in height of sea level occasioned by the trade winds. Although this was only partly right, it pointed him in the right direction.

What most
amazed his friends about Franklin was his breadth, his competence in a daunting diversity of fields of human knowledge. A true polymath, he was at home with experts in electricity, meteorology, geology, linguistics, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and politics. That he became one of a relative handful of people in history to invent a popular musical instrument simply added to the luster of his reputation.

Franklin’s genius generally consisted in observing commonplace phenomena and applying the principles behind them in a novel or peculiarly productive way. His “armonica” fit the pattern. Like any number of other bored dinner guests, Franklin had occasionally amused himself by rubbing a wetted finger over the rim of a wineglass, thereby evoking a musical tone. At the time of Franklin’s arrival in London, a transplanted Irishman named Pockrich gave concerts playing glasses tuned to different notes by the different amounts of water in them. But his career was
cut short by a fire in his room, which killed him and destroyed his apparatus. A friend of Franklin’s and a fellow of the Royal Society, Edward Delaval, extended the experiments of Pockrich, contriving a set of glasses better tuned and easier to play.

“Being charmed with the sweetness of its tones, and the music he produced from it,” Franklin explained, “I wished only to see the glasses disposed in a more convenient form.” This letter was to Giambattista Beccaria, an Italian priest and electrician. Beccaria had inquired about Franklin’s latest electrical work; Franklin responded that his research into electricity had lapsed for the present but that he had devised a curious musical instrument that might interest the good father.

Franklin described in considerable detail the construction of the instrument. His principal improvement was the elimination of the water and the rearrangement of the glasses. Franklin’s glasses were actually hemispheres of increasing diameter, from three inches to nine. Thirty-seven in all, they achieved by their differing size—and careful grinding—three octaves’ worth of tones, including semitones. The glasses were fitted onto an iron spindle, each one nesting partially inside the next; as the spindle turned, all the glasses did too. The spindle was mounted horizontally in a wooden case and attached to a flywheel, which in turn was attached to a foot pedal that powered the mechanism. The player sat in front of the case, spun the spindle with his foot, and drew wetted fingers across the rims of the turning glasses. “The advantages of this instrument,” Franklin told Beccaria, “are that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued to any length; and that the instrument, being once well tuned, never again wants tuning.” Franklin added, “In honour of your musical language, I have borrowed from it the name of this instrument, calling it the Armonica.”

Franklin did not exaggerate when he described the armonica’s tones as “incomparably sweet.” They had a haunting, ethereal quality, much like that which would characterize “New Age” music more than two hundred years later. Franklin quickly became adept at playing, and took to entertaining guests on the instrument. Others followed his lead. Marianne Davies, a singer who played flute and harpsichord—and who was another young woman charmed by Franklin—became proficient enough to offer public performances. For a time the armonica achieved a genuine vogue. Royal wedding vows were exchanged in Vienna to armonica
accompaniment; some of the greatest composers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Mozart and Beethoven, wrote for Franklin’s instrument.

Like most vogues, that for the armonica eventually passed. Certain performers, including Marianne Davies, were afflicted with a melancholia attributed to the plaintive tones of the instrument. More tellingly, the sound-producing mechanism did not generate sufficient power to fill the large halls that became home to modern stringed instruments, brass, woodwinds, and percussion. That it was glass, and subject to easy breakage, did not help either.

In the summer
of 1761 Franklin visited continental Europe for the first time. France would have been the obvious destination, but the war was still on; consequently Franklin and William, accompanied by Richard Jackson, contented themselves with Holland and Flanders. “We saw all the principal cities and towns,” William explained to his sister, Sally. The Roman Catholic cathedrals at Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp impressed the travelers; less impressive but more curious were the convents. “We went and saw the nuns,” William said, “but they being at their devotions we could have no conversation with them. Indeed they did not look very inviting but on the contrary appeared like cross old maids who had forsaken the world because the world had first forsaken them.”

Franklin was treated with as much respect as on his triumphal tours of England and Scotland. At Leyden they were greeted by the pioneer electrician Pieter van Musschenbroek, the inventor of the Leyden electrical jar. The British ambassador at The Hague hosted a dinner for the Franklins with the diplomatic corps. At Amsterdam, Thomas Hope, one of the most powerful merchants in Europe, put a coach and driver at their disposal. At Brussels the brother-in-law of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa entertained them.

The Dutch were a cleanly people, fastidiously so—which made a certain national habit almost shocking in its incongruity. William was especially offended. “I don’t recollect that I saw more than one Dutch man without a pipe in his mouth, and that was a fellow who had hung in chains so long that his head had dropped off,” William wrote. “Their very children are taught smoking from the moment they leave sucking, and the method they take to teach them is to give them when they are cutting their teeth an old tobacco pipe which is smoked black and
smooth to rub their gums with instead of coral. But what surprised me most of all was the seeing at one of the houses a man of ninety drag out his partner and dance a minuet smoking most solemnly a long pipe the whole time.”

Franklin preferred to comment on another national practice, encountered in Flanders. Writing to Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut, where a rigid observance of the Sabbath was a matter of law, Franklin explained:

When I travelled in Flanders I thought of your excessively strict observation of Sunday, and that a man could hardly travel on that day among you upon his lawful occasions, without hazard of punishment; while where I was, every one travelled, if he pleased, or diverted himself any other way. And in the afternoon both high and low went to the play or the opera, where there was plenty of singing, fiddling and dancing.