The Society for Useful Knowledge (5 page)

b
The term “scientist” was not adopted until the mid-nineteenth century or so, and the practitioners of science of Franklin's era referred to themselves as natural philosophers. However, in deference to modern usage, I employ the terms interchangeably.

c
The essay, circulated first in manuscript form and then published in 1755, was framed as an attack on a new law that restricted iron manufacture in the colonies in order to prop up British exports. Franklin argued that inexpensive land would keep America a rural, agricultural society into the foreseeable future, thus posing no threat to British industry. His demographic projections were to prove far more prescient than his social and economic analysis.

d
The Library of Congress, where the present volume was completed, lists hundreds of titles devoted to distinct aspects of Franklin, his life, and his times, in addition to the flood of general biographies that appear with startling regularity.

The great Uncertainty I found in Metaphysical Reasonings disgusted me, and I quitted that kind of Reading & Study, for others more satisfactory.
—Benjamin Franklin

Even by the relatively unhurried standards of early eighteenth-century sea travel, Benjamin Franklin's return voyage from London to Philadelphia in the summer of 1726 was a long and trying affair. Franklin set off with his mentor and would-be business partner, the Quaker merchant Thomas Denham, aboard the
Berkshire
on July 21. Flush with the excitement of the impending journey home, Franklin reveled in the early days at sea: “Sitting upon the quarter-deck, I have me thinks one of the pleasantest scenes in the world before me. 'Tis a fine clear day, and we are going away before the wind with an easy pleasant gale.… On the left hand appears the coast of France at a distance, and on the right is the town and castle of Dover, with the green hills and chalky cliffs of England, to which we must now bid farewell.”
¹

But Franklin's valedictory note was struck in haste. Poor weather imposed a series of delays, and it was almost three weeks before the
Berkshire
, its small cluster of passengers and crew growing more restless by the day, was able to catch the favorable winds, free itself from the covetous grip of England's port towns, and at last reach the open sea. Yet despite the tedium—or, perhaps, because of it—Franklin churned out a “Journal of Occurrences” that relentlessly catalogued almost three months at sea.

Franklin, Denham, and their fellow passengers spent most of these first days touring the little settlements where the ship was forced repeatedly to anchor. When possible, they passed the nights in inns and took their meals in nearby taverns, all the while fending off what Franklin had no doubt were the usurious predations of local merchants dedicated solely to fleecing stranded travelers.
This was particularly the case in their first stop, that “
cursed biting
place” known as Gravesend: “If you buy anything of them, and give half what they ask, you pay twice as much as the thing is worth. Thank God, we shall leave it tomorrow.”
²
Periodically, the passengers were rousted from their cozy landlubbers' beds and ferried back in rowboats after word that the
Berkshire
was about to set sail, only to find themselves becalmed once again.

On the Isle of Wight, the party marveled at the grandiose gravesite of a former governor who had drafted his own epitaph for a tomb fashioned from royal porphyry that had once been intended for use by the French king at Versailles. “One would think either that he had no defect at all, or had a very ill opinion of the world, seeing he was so careful to make sure of a monument to record his good actions and transmit them to posterity,” sniffed Franklin.
³
Two years later, he took a page from the late governor's lesson in public relations and wrote the words that he proposed adorn his own gravestone. Such matters, Franklin had realized at a very early age, were too important to be left to the whims of history or the vagaries of public sentiment.

Once the
Berkshire
finally got under full sail, Franklin put the long hours of enforced leisure to good use. His nineteen-month stay in England had taught him many things—the fickle ways of love and friendship, the pitfalls of business, the social value of intellectual discourse, the raw power of ideas. Most of all, it had revealed the ways in which the pursuit of useful knowledge as practiced by the London virtuosi, carefully cultivated, documented, and communicated, could both contribute to society at large and advance his own prospects.

Franklin's shipboard activities set a pattern he was to follow in each of the six subsequent Atlantic crossings that he made in his lifetime. In fact, his last voyage—at the age of seventy-nine, after his diplomatic triumphs in Paris on behalf of the newly independent American states—yielded separate scientific papers on the phenomenon of the Gulf Stream, faster and more efficient rigging for sailing ships, and proposed life-saving equipment for mariners and their passengers.
⁴
For now, he bombarded the experienced officers and crew of the
Berkshire
with questions about naval science, navigation in particular, and placed wagers with his shipmates on the first sighting of land. He diligently recorded the ship's position across the Atlantic, tracked the prevailing winds and other meteorological details, studied an eclipse of the moon, and kept a tally of the fish and seabirds that came and went.

Franklin noted the particular beauty of dolphins, whose “glorious appearance” contrasted so markedly with the “vulgar error of the painters, who always
represent this fish monstrously crooked and deformed, when it is in reality as beautiful and well shaped a fish as any that swims.” Caught with lures made of candles and feathers to resemble their preferred prey, the flying fish, these creatures also “tasted tolerably well.” And he ruminated on the psychological states of his fellow passengers under the stress of a long sea voyage, which, he concluded, reveals the true nature of a man better than any bout of heavy drinking could ever do.
⁵

Franklin also made his first tentative foray into the realm of experimental science, a journey he would pursue for the rest of his life. As the ship gradually approached American shores, he fished a strand of seaweed from the ocean and found it encrusted with what he surmised to be embryonic crabs. To find out, Franklin began one of his earliest-known scientific investigations. “I have resolved to keep the weed in salt water, renewing it every day till we come on shore, by this experiment to see whether any more crabs will be produced or not in this manner,” he recorded in his diary for September 28, 1726.
⁶

The next day, Franklin notes, he “found another crab, much smaller than the former, who seemed to have newly left his habitation. But the weed begins to wither, and the rest of the embryos are dead. This newcomer fully convinces me, that at least this sort of crabs are generated in this manner.”
⁷
This flurry of scientific activity drew to an end two weeks later, when Franklin and his fellow passengers, their bread ration long since reduced to two and a half biscuits per day, reached Philadelphia, exhausted but ecstatic that their ordeal, some eighty-two days in all, was finally over.

Franklin, then age nineteen, had arrived in the British imperial capital on Christmas Eve, 1724, aboard the aptly named
London Hope
only to find that he had been betrayed by his putative patron, Pennsylvania governor William Keith. Taken with the young man's obvious talent and bursting ambition—and in need of a sympathetic printer and publicist to help revive his own fading political fortunes—Keith had offered to provide financial backing and letters of introduction to associates in London so that Franklin could refine his professional skills, procure a new press and sets of type, and then return to Philadelphia and go into business for himself.

Keith's offer proved disingenuous. There were no letters of credit, nor any of the other promised correspondence, in the official mailbags on board the
London Hope
, and Franklin now found himself in a strange town with few contacts and even fewer financial resources. On the advice of the fatherly Denham, whom he
had first met on this same outbound voyage, Franklin secured work with the city's printers in order to support himself and—or so the plan went—to earn passage back to Philadelphia.

Franklin was already well versed in the printing trade, thanks to his older brother James, in whose workshop he had served a brief and troubled apprenticeship back in their native Boston. His legal assignment to James, formalized in 1718, was the culmination of a painstaking effort by the boys' father, Josiah Franklin, to make sure his sons each had a marketable trade to serve the burgeoning community of Boston. Here, Benjamin had proven a particular challenge, even to a man as resourceful as Josiah Franklin—immigrant tradesman, religious nonconformist, and the father of a prodigious number of children on both sides of the Atlantic.

Josiah was an astute observer of human nature, a clever, curious, and inventive man often sought out by neighbors and even his social betters for advice and counsel.
⁸
And he was eager to cultivate the best in his many offspring. “At his Table he liked to have as often as he could, some sensible Friend or Neighbor, to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful Topic for Discourse, which might tend to improve the Minds of his Children,” Franklin later recalled.
⁹

Josiah's own decision to leave Oxfordshire behind and emigrate to New England in 1683 had been more a matter of rational economic calculation than a direct response to religious persecution against his fellow Puritans, set in motion by the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1650. There was simply not enough work in England, he reasoned, to support the extended Franklin clan, which sprang from a line of dyers, blacksmiths, and farmers.
¹⁰
Once in the colonies, Josiah coolly assessed the local market and jettisoned his own specialty as a dyer of silk and other fine cloth and adopted the less-esteemed but more profitable trade of making candles and soap from rendered animal fats, at the “sign of the blue ball” on Milk Street.

Observing that his youngest son was miserable working in the family soap-making business, Josiah began to shop around for an occupation that might catch the boy's fancy. At first, Josiah settled on a clerical career, and he dipped into the family's meager resources to provide the schooling necessary to prepare Benjamin for theological training at Harvard College. “My early Readiness in learning to read … and the Opinion of all his Friends that I should make a good Scholar, encouraged him in this Purpose of his,” Franklin wrote years later, adding that he could not recall a time when he could not read.
¹¹

His uncle and namesake Benjamin Franklin, writing from England, celebrated the boy's bright future in sweeping, florid tones: “If the Buds are so precious what may we expect when the fruit is ripe?” Ezra Stiles, a biblical scholar and president of Yale, later recorded Franklin family lore that held that Benjamin was already reading the Bible by age five. He was, marveled Stiles, “addicted to all kinds of reading.”
¹²

Josiah's plan quickly began to unravel. He had never fully freed himself of nagging doubts about the heavy expense required for a clerical education, as well as the uncertain professional prospects that lay ahead for the boy. The educated man, Josiah reckoned, was often left with little more than “a mean Living” and would have done better to pursue a solid trade instead.
¹³
He soon pulled Benjamin from Boston Grammar School, despite the boy's sterling promise and rapid rise through the grades, and sent him to private lessons in basic writing and arithmetic. After a total of two years of schooling—the only formal education Franklin would ever receive—father and son were back where they had begun: young Benjamin still needed a suitable trade.

Haunting the father, no doubt, was the memory of one of his older boys, also named Josiah, who had run away to sea. A list of family birthdays compiled by Benjamin as an adult bore only the starkest notation beside the name of his long-lost brother: “Went to sea, never heard of.”
¹⁴
Benjamin, too, had yearned for shipboard adventure, if nothing else to escape the drudgery of the candle-and-soap trade. His mother, Abiah Folger, was from a whaling family in nearby Nantucket, perhaps fueling the boy's romantic notions of a life at sea.

Already, Benjamin was an accomplished swimmer, a serious student of navigation, and a competent boatman, all of which greatly troubled Josiah, who was determined to find his precocious son a safer profession. “He therefore took me to walk with him, and see Joiners, Bricklayers, Turners, Braziers, &c. at their Work, that he might observe my Inclination, and endeavor to fix it on some Trade or other on Land. It has ever since been a Pleasure to me to see good Workmen handle their Tools.”
¹⁵

Josiah briefly attached Benjamin to a relative, a maker of knives and other utensils, before finally apprenticing his youngest son to James, just returned from England with a printing press of his own. After the trial and error of the previous months, it must have been a welcome move, although Benjamin, now age twelve, understandably harbored some reservations about being legally bound to a brother nine years his senior. In addition, he faced the standard
restrictions on any apprentice of his day: “Taverns, inns, or alehouses he shall not haunt. At cards, dice, tables or any other unlawful game he shall not play. Matrimony he shall not contract.”
¹⁶
In return, the master craftsman typically agreed to teach his apprentice the secrets of the trade and to provide “Meat, Drink, Apparel, washing & Lodging, and … a complete new suit of Clothes.” He was also to instruct his charge in reading and writing.
¹⁷