August 29, 2024 • 27 mins
From Walter Isaacson– the bestselling biographer behind Musk, Einstein and Steve Jobs– and journalist Evan Ratliff (Shell Games, Longform) comes a revealing look into the life of Ben Franklin, and how his genius shaped America.
In this first episode of five, we dive into the way Franklin's scientific curiosity laid the groundwork for his approach to democracy, and how his thirst for innovation not only led him to invent everything from swimming flippers to the lightning rod, but also turned him into a bona fide, worldwide celebrity—a fame he would soon wield for America's benefit.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
During the COVID crisis, and when I was hanging around
Elon Mosque, I was in an airless, windowless conference room
down in Bokachika, Texas and Star Base, and of course
nobody was wearing masks because they were all accolytes of
the mosque. But one of the things I did is
i'd sneak into the conference room sometimes and make sure
(00:34):
the vent fan was always on. I wasn't very sure
about cloth masks or anything else, but I knew if
you were with a group of people in a room,
you should make sure the windows are open, because that's
what Franklin taught us. There's a really amusing scene where
Benjamin Franklin is traveling with John Adams to meet with
(00:57):
a British emmissary to see if they can avert the revolution,
and Adams and Franklin have to share a room at
an end, and Adams has a cold, and Franklin keeps
opening the window and Adams says, no, no, shut the window.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I have a cold.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
And Franklin explains his theory of colds and airborne organisms,
and Adams, who's not a very funny fellow, writes in
his journal. Franklin droned on and on until I finally
fell asleep and the window was left open. And indeed,
Franklin doesn't catch the cold. Walter, welcome, Thank you very much, Evan.
(01:38):
Great to be with you.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, it's great to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I am very excited to talk about mister Benjamin Franklin.
Doctor Benjamin Doctorlyn, Yes Franklin. Even though it's not exactly
an Urn doctorate, he got many honorary ones and loved
the title. The proper respect should be showed, respect must
be paid. Over the past year, I had an ongoing
(02:00):
conversation with the famed biographer Walter Isaacson about writing about
research and of course, about the subjects themselves. You may
have heard the first part of our conversation in a
Musk when we talked about his experience studying the controversial
tech mogul. Some of the things we discussed, both about
innovation and about the state of our polarized politics. Maybe
(02:21):
want to reach back into the past and look at
some of Walter's historical subjects. So we turned to a
figure that Walter can't stop thinking about, Benjamin Franklin, a
man who straddled the worlds of science, media, and government
in America's turbulent founding era, to see if he could
help us make sense of today's turbulent times. Where were
(02:55):
you in your life when you decided that you were
going to pursue a biography of Franklin and what was
about him that sort of grabbed you.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I came to Benjamin Franklin having written about Henry Kissinger
and foreign policy. Kissinger was very much a raal politique realist,
and I wanted to look at the roots of that
tension between realism and idealism in American foreign policy, and
it takes you back to Benjamin Franklin. He is both
(03:25):
the ultimate realist and the ultimate idealist. So I thought, wow,
I should go back and do Benjamin Franklin. But then
the second thing that struck me is that his balance
of power, diplomacy, and the checks and balances, all the
things he did derived from his science.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
It wasn't easy for someone like Franklin, who had limited means,
to transition seamlessly from printing to science to politics, and excel.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
In all three.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
This remarkable versatility became the foundation of Franklin's and during
Influence I was especially interested to learn about Franklin the scientists.
It's the part of the my new least well, or
at least not beyond the idea that he discovered electricity.
More on that in a bit, And Isaacson tells me
it's his scientific curiosity and exploration that lays the groundwork
(04:12):
for some of his most important work as a founding father.
For Franklin, being a scientist was not a profession or
a strict field of study. It was a state of
mind driven by curiosity and a tendency towards self directed learning.
And of course there was still so much to discover.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Nowadays.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
In our generation you had people who were great humanist, great,
but they would tell, oh, I can't do physics, I
can't do man, you know, I don't do any of that.
But he or his younger friend Jefferson would have thought
you were a philistine if you did keep up with science. Well,
does reconnect it for Benjamin Franklin, somebody whose experimental nature,
(04:54):
whose search for evidence informed everything he did. So that
made me you want to write about all the facets
of Benjamin Franklin, the scientists, Benjamin Franklin, the entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin,
the business person who creates a media Empire, Benjamin Franklin,
the diplomat. All of this wove together, and I felt, nowadays, boy,
(05:17):
we really need Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So that's why I immersed myself.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
At that time, you felt we need Benjamin and all
the more so today I want.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
To go all the way back, start at the beginning,
and try to figure out how he became one of
the foremost scientists of his age.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Benjamin Franklin was the tenth son of a Puritan immigrant
to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and as a tenth son,
he was going to be his father's tithe to the Lord.
His father was going to send him to Harvard to
study to be a minister, and Franklin wasn't exactly cut
for the cloth.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
At some point, they were.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Assaulting the provisions for the winter, and he said to
his father, why don't we just say grace over him
right now? We get it done for the entire the
next few months. And so his father realized, well, that
would be a waste of money to send him to
become a minister. He was always a spunky lad, and
he loved to think of himself as a leader among
(06:13):
the boys. He was the one who led the other
kids to stealing rocks so they could build a dam
in the Boston Harbor where they could swim, and he
invented ways to do swimming, including paddles and flippers.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Franklin becomes an autodidact, less by choice than by the
fact that his dad decides that this particular son is
probably not worth the investment of a Harvard education.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
He becomes a person always curious. He read about everything
from history to science. He watches how whirlwinds form. He
eventually discovers how storms move up the coast because he's
interested in a kneeclipse that is happening. So it's that
insatiable curiosity I think was almost created when he was
(07:03):
denied the right to go to college. So he gets
his hunger for teaching himself and.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
This sort of ability to see the world in a
way that you feel you can figure it out if
you see something around you. In Benjamin Franklin, it prompted
an idea that he could solve it, that he could
understand something that maybe hadn't been understood.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
This was the gift of the scientific revolution that had
occurred just before Franklin's time, which is the universe wasn't
just a total mystery. There were things you could figure
out about it. How storms moved, how eclipses happened. Now
that seems pretty obvious, but you have to remember before
the Enlightenment, we thought wisdom was received as opposed to
(07:45):
let's figure out nature. And so Franklin becomes the pioneer
of the Enlightenment in America. Unlike Newton Galileo, he doesn't
have a lot of math. He doesn't do the theories.
But as he says, as a practical person, you don't
need to know the theory of gravity to know that
(08:07):
if you let go of a piece of crockery, it'll
fall to the floor and break. Among the things Franklin
studied as an experimentalist and a tinker is just simple phenomenon,
the lightning rod being the most famous. But then how
does dark cloth absorb heat better than light cloth? And
(08:30):
he did experiments where he put black pieces of cloth
on snow and then lighter pieces of cloth and measured
which would melt the snow underneath faster.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
It almost sounds like something you would do in the
eighth grade or even elementary school science project. And the
idea that at the time he could conceive these experiments
and just do them on his own. He could just
execute them and make a discovery.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, we had great theorists right before from Fanklin who
understood the nature of light and heat. But then you
have Franklin doing experiments we all did. It's like, okay,
a light piece of cloth and a dark one, what's
going to get warmer? But what Franklin does is he
always looked for practical ways to use that your clothes
(09:18):
in summer should be light and in winter should be dark.
He also tinkered and created a wood burning stove we
now call the Franklin stove, and it was about the
simple thing of how do you get more heat into
the room with less smoke. And these type of things
may seem mundane compared to Newton figuring out a theory
(09:43):
of gravity, but in our daily lives having clean burning stoves,
bifocal glasses, understanding the heat absorption of cloth, a urinary
Catherine when his brother was having a urinary tract disease,
Franklin is able to make it flexible, easy to insert.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
And this is just his way of using both.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Science and ingenuity to create new technology, which is what
we try to do in our modern age.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
When we come back.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Franklin's scientific discoveries make him an international celebrity, and we'll
even dig into that rumor about Franklin wanting to bump
the bald Eagle and make the humble Turkey America's official bird.
(10:42):
There's this story of Benjamin Franklin and his ingenuity that
every school kid knows. It involves a man in long socks,
a kite, a key, and a lightning storm. But it
isn't just his discovery of electricity and conductivity that makes
this moment special. As with all franklin scientific explorations, it
led to something practical, an invention that saved countless lives.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I asked Walter about that.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
I did not realize how famous he became just from
the lightning rod, particularly in France, and it's sort of
foreshadowing for later what he's able to do diplomatically for
the New America. A lot of it is derived from
this fame that he's accrued because he invented the lightning rod.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
It's kind of odd, but up until then people believed
they were bolts from heaven and an expression of God's will,
and they would consecrate the bells of churches to water
off the lightning, but even the most religiously faithful were
likely to have noticed that it was not very effective.
Lightning kept hitting church peoples. In Germany. During one period
(11:52):
thirty five years, three hundred and eighty six churches were struck,
and in venice like three thousand people were killed when
tons of gun powder had been stored in the church
and it was hit. Franklin later wrote to John Winthrop,
who was a Harvard professor, and he wrote, the lightning
seems to strike steeples of choice just as the bells
are ringing. One would think we might now try some
(12:14):
other trick to ward it off.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Benjamin Franklin again.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
His electricity experiments when a showman came down from Boston
who was doing static electricity, you know, rubbing a glass
with cloth and then making little sparks. What Franklin does
is he mixes this sort of fun you have with
a parl trick using static electricity with theories from reading
the other great scientists of the time. In the journal
(12:40):
that Franklin kept for his experiments, he noted in seventeen
forty nine that there were some similarities between electrical sparks
and lightning, and being the type of bookkeeper he was,
he listed twelve of them. They both give light, they
have the same color, the crooked direction of swift motion,
the sulfur of smell. Very Franklin like. He puts his
(13:02):
rallying cry at the bottom of the notebook page, let
the experiment be made. You know, great theorists like Newton
had noticed the apparent connection between lightning and electricity, but
nobody had written, let the experiment be made.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
So Franklin lays out a methodical test for figuring out
exactly what lightning is, and it's a rather complicated thing.
He describes how you would make an electrical stand that's
grounded but has an iron rod that's connected to the earth,
and how many feet And he also discovered that pointed
(13:41):
pieces of metal attract sparks better than rounded pieces. So
he does all of these very specific descriptions of how
to do the experiment, and it's done actually in France
first before he has a chance to erect all the
apparatus in Philadelphia.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
But even though he wasn't there to do the experiment,
he becomes famous for having designed the experiment.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Absolutely the King of France has read about Franklin's proposed experiments,
and the King asks people in France to try to
carry them out, and these are known as Franklin's experiments.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
And then what happens when he finally arrives in France.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
When he arrives in France, he is known as the
great scientist who tamed lightning, and so he's enormously famous.
Crowds turn out in Brittany when he lands. They carry
him to the steps of the academy when he gets
to Paris so that he can hug Voltaire. He also
(14:44):
is a good public relations guy. And so Franklin, who
had hardly ever been to the backwoods and lives in Philadelphia,
Boston and London his whole life. Where's a fur cap
he had gotten during one trip to Canada and pretends
to be the back wood sage and scientists, and they
were veeram and the women start wearing their hair and
(15:07):
what was called the coiffor la la Franklin, which is
their hair done up as if it's a fur cap
on their heads.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
It's wild to think of them as such a celebrity.
And then you realize at this point his popularity is
just from the lightning rod, even though he also invented
or goes on to invent so many other things. But
my question is, why didn't you patent the lightning rod?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I mean, it.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Feels obvious for a man like Franklin, a successful business owner,
if he'd just taken a percentage on every rod, his
descendants could still live off that.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, he talks about how much it could have made
had he patented the lightning rod idea or patent in
the stove. But he always felt that it was part
of your civic duty to be inventive, and that we
gained so much from previous inventions that we should be
happy to put things back in the river of history.
(16:03):
So his experiments that come to the conclusion of the
single fluid theory of electricity, the invention of batteries in
which you can store electricity, the invention of lightning rods
so you can draw electricity from the clouds, those are
the most important experimental discoveries of his era. But he
(16:23):
just wants to say, what use is it. At one point,
after a season of electricity experiments, he said, we discovered
all sorts of things, but we hadn't figured out what
the use of it would be and so they draw
a lot of electricity stored in batteries and then use
the shocks to kill turkeys. And he said they were
(16:44):
uncommonly tender, And so we Southerners like to think he's
the inventor of the first fried turkey.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Hold on, speaking of turkeys. What to quickly address this
rumor that you hear periodically around Thanksgiving that Ben Franklin
wanted the turkey as America's national birdd instead of the
bald eagle.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
I think he thought the bald eagle was too proud,
And it was in one of his writings where he
didn't want there to be an aristocracy called the Cincinnatis Club,
people who had started with Washington were supposed to be part.
He said, no, no, we're not trying to do that. And
he then does this little divergence where he doesn't want
(17:22):
the eagle to be the symbol of un I say,
it's should be the turkey, because the turkey reminds us,
you know, we're a little bit silly. We shouldn't take
ourselves too seriously, and he does this pay on to
the turkey. I'm much more practical, and I don't know
He just thought we shouldn't get too grand, we should
poke fun at our pretensions.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
We're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we'll look at how Franklin's scientific inquiry bled
into all parts of his life, including how he managed
to keep a cool head while helping found it in nation.
(18:13):
One of the things about Ben Franklin is that being
a scientist it is foundational. It shapes him as a
person and spills into all his different interests, but he's
always kind of doing it on the side. When does
it really become a focus for him?
Speaker 1 (18:27):
By age forty two, he had probably become the most
successful self made person in the colonies. He had not
only created print shops, but he enfranchised them up and
down the coast. He had helped create a colonial postal
system to tie these print shops together. He created Poor Richard,
and he created newspapers, and so this makes him very successful.
(18:51):
But at that point he wants to change his life
a bit, and so he retires, partly so that he
become more of a civic citizen, even more than he
had been before, but also somebody who was interested in
everything from the sparks of electricity and lightning to diplomacy.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
What do you think it was about his outlook on
life that caused him to have this almost like sense
of fun and scientific adventure about exploring all of these
different areas.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
There are very few people in history who really have
a hunger to learn everything possible about everything that you
could know. I mean, that's certainly true of Leonardo da Vinci.
It was everything from a musician to a mathematician, to
an artist to an engineer. It was true of maybe Aristotle. Well,
it's definitely true of Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
And he must have had an innate ability to not
be concerned about being wrong or being called a dabbler.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
I think that if somebody called him a dabbler an amateur,
he would take it as a compliment. He really loved
being ingenious and trying to be interested in everything, and
I think he thought if he were blinder and too focused,
he wouldn't be able to be as creative or as imaginative.
(20:16):
He also just loved science for its own sake, the
fascination of experiments, and that included when he's in France
after the Revolution, he's helping fund the first flights of
hot air balloons, just because he's totally fascinated. When a
spectator asked, what is the use of these new balloons?
(20:38):
What are they good for? Franklin said, what is the
use of a newborn baby. Franklin realized that curiosity for
its own sake, we may not know what it will
grow into, but we should always expect that things will
grow and they'll become useful.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
But he didn't lose the rest of his life on it. Experiments.
He just did experiments while he was doing everything else.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Even when he's in England trying to negotiate for the
colonies and prevent the revolution, he's still pursuing scientific inquiries.
It's his hobby. So he helped put the lightning rods on
Saint Paul's cathedral. That's where he does his theories of
the common cold. That's where he does theories of exercise,
where he sees how much heat you're generating when you
(21:27):
do different types of exercises, and sort of comes up
with this notion of what we now called calories. He
looked into lead poisoning why the oceans were salty. He
actually got.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
That one wrong.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
But even inventing things like musical instruments.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
You mentioned in being wrong. That's another aspect of it
is it's not just about making discoveries and proving things,
but it's about this sort of iteration and revision and
evolution where you might get it wrong, but then you've
still moved scientific knowledge forward.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
He liked testing things out and being open to evidence.
The basic scientific method which Franklin embraced, which is to
have a theory, figure out a way you can test it,
then revise your theory based on the evidence you get.
That scientific method sounds so simple to us, it's so obvious.
(22:18):
He got a theory, test it, and by the way,
if the evidence comes back, figure out a new theory.
And that notion helps him understand how science intersects with
public policy. One of the things we don't do very
well is let people change their minds. We always say, well,
you flip flopped, or you change your mind. Well, Franklin
(22:38):
often evolved. He evolved on slavery, he evolved on immigration.
And having that open mind in which you're willing to
accept new evidence and revise your opinions. That's the essence
of the scientific method. But it's also the essence of democracy.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And for someone who is so detail orient to. He
seemed to push the notion of imperfection, that imperfection needed
to be allowed in the Constitution. It's sort of funny
to think about today when there's so much reverence for
the founding fathers. So they've written the perfect documents, and
those documents need to be respected letter by letter and
word by word. But he seemed to have a notion
(23:18):
of we're not going to achieve perfection.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
His closing speech in the Constitutional Convention is really a
document that everybody should read. He was the oldest person
by far at the Convention, twice as old as the
average member, and he says, I confess that I do
not entirely approve this Constitution at present. But he said,
the older I get, the more I realize that I'm
(23:42):
wrong at times, and which seems like an imperfection to me. Well,
maybe it's the right way to do it. And so
he says, I endorse this Constitution with all of its
perhaps flaws, because I'm not sure now that they are flaws,
or that we could get something more perfect came out
of human hands.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
And of course there were cases where he was right,
and one of them is the Gulf Stream. Can you
walk us through how you figure that out.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Even as he's traveling across the ocean coming back to
Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five, for instance, there he is
standing on the deck of the boat with his grandson
Temple and hearing that it takes longer to get back
to America than it does to get to Europe. And
he's going, why is that? Why is that? And so
he measures, with his grandson helping him, the temperature of
(24:32):
the water. And he's devised a barrel that has a
flap to it that he can open so he can
take the temperature at different depths to see how deep
the Gulf stream is.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
And something that is now confirmed by satellites that match
up to a picture that he created just by lowering
barrels into the water.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
It's extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
If you see the chart he makes, it's remarkably similar
to the one that's now on the NASA web site.
In fact, the NASA website reprints a picture of Benjamin
Franklin's chart. Franklin was a great believer in the future.
In his will, he set up to trust funds for
(25:14):
aspiring entrepreneurs like himself, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia.
The revolving loan fund in Philadelphia was particularly interesting because
it accrued just as the way he said it did,
and two centuries after his death, the fund had reached
more than two million dollars, and at one point it
(25:36):
was used by kids in inner city Philadelphia to make
electric go kart type things to race in one of
these solar races. So I love the idea of the
person who help us harness electricity also having a loan
fund of people doing it in the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
And was there a tiny bit of ego in it
too that his name was sort of carry along with
those he couldn't have known maybe how big his name
would continue to be anyway.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Oh, I think he knew.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Franklin was someone who cared deeply about the legacy he
would leave not only as a scientist and a civic leader,
but also as a man with some pretty big regrets
of a.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
More personal nature.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Next time on on Benjamin Franklin, we dive into Franklin's
early life. He was a printer, a businessman, and a rebel.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Franklin has a very complicated family life, and throughout his
life he had kept this ledger of errors. He had
made and how he had regnified and mistake number one
in his ledger book was running Away from his brother.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
This show is based on the writing and research of
Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed
and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our
consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs, Who's our editor. Social media by
Dara Potts.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
This show was.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Engineered at CDMU Studios from iHeart Podcasts. The executive producers
are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was
executive produced by Mangeshetigador, with an assist from Oz Walishan
Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman,
conel Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan Otuski
(27:20):
and Ali Gavin And If you like podcasts about inventions
what they mean for humanity, check out my other show
shell Game, about how it created an AI clone and
set it loose on the world. It's at shell Game
dot co. And for more shows from Kaleletoscope, be sure
to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Thanks so much for listening
During the COVID crisis, and when I was hanging around
Elon Mosque, I was in an airless, windowless conference room
down in Bokachika, Texas and Star Base, and of course
nobody was wearing masks because they were all accolytes of
the mosque. But one of the things I did is
i'd sneak into the conference room sometimes and make sure
(00:34):
the vent fan was always on. I wasn't very sure
about cloth masks or anything else, but I knew if
you were with a group of people in a room,
you should make sure the windows are open, because that's
what Franklin taught us. There's a really amusing scene where
Benjamin Franklin is traveling with John Adams to meet with
(00:57):
a British emmissary to see if they can avert the revolution,
and Adams and Franklin have to share a room at
an end, and Adams has a cold, and Franklin keeps
opening the window and Adams says, no, no, shut the window.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I have a cold.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
And Franklin explains his theory of colds and airborne organisms,
and Adams, who's not a very funny fellow, writes in
his journal. Franklin droned on and on until I finally
fell asleep and the window was left open. And indeed,
Franklin doesn't catch the cold. Walter, welcome, Thank you very much, Evan.
(01:38):
Great to be with you.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, it's great to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I am very excited to talk about mister Benjamin Franklin.
Doctor Benjamin Doctorlyn, Yes Franklin. Even though it's not exactly
an Urn doctorate, he got many honorary ones and loved
the title. The proper respect should be showed, respect must
be paid. Over the past year, I had an ongoing
(02:00):
conversation with the famed biographer Walter Isaacson about writing about
research and of course, about the subjects themselves. You may
have heard the first part of our conversation in a
Musk when we talked about his experience studying the controversial
tech mogul. Some of the things we discussed, both about
innovation and about the state of our polarized politics. Maybe
(02:21):
want to reach back into the past and look at
some of Walter's historical subjects. So we turned to a
figure that Walter can't stop thinking about, Benjamin Franklin, a
man who straddled the worlds of science, media, and government
in America's turbulent founding era, to see if he could
help us make sense of today's turbulent times. Where were
(02:55):
you in your life when you decided that you were
going to pursue a biography of Franklin and what was
about him that sort of grabbed you.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I came to Benjamin Franklin having written about Henry Kissinger
and foreign policy. Kissinger was very much a raal politique realist,
and I wanted to look at the roots of that
tension between realism and idealism in American foreign policy, and
it takes you back to Benjamin Franklin. He is both
(03:25):
the ultimate realist and the ultimate idealist. So I thought, wow,
I should go back and do Benjamin Franklin. But then
the second thing that struck me is that his balance
of power, diplomacy, and the checks and balances, all the
things he did derived from his science.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
It wasn't easy for someone like Franklin, who had limited means,
to transition seamlessly from printing to science to politics, and excel.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
In all three.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
This remarkable versatility became the foundation of Franklin's and during
Influence I was especially interested to learn about Franklin the scientists.
It's the part of the my new least well, or
at least not beyond the idea that he discovered electricity.
More on that in a bit, And Isaacson tells me
it's his scientific curiosity and exploration that lays the groundwork
(04:12):
for some of his most important work as a founding father.
For Franklin, being a scientist was not a profession or
a strict field of study. It was a state of
mind driven by curiosity and a tendency towards self directed learning.
And of course there was still so much to discover.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Nowadays.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
In our generation you had people who were great humanist, great,
but they would tell, oh, I can't do physics, I
can't do man, you know, I don't do any of that.
But he or his younger friend Jefferson would have thought
you were a philistine if you did keep up with science. Well,
does reconnect it for Benjamin Franklin, somebody whose experimental nature,
(04:54):
whose search for evidence informed everything he did. So that
made me you want to write about all the facets
of Benjamin Franklin, the scientists, Benjamin Franklin, the entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin,
the business person who creates a media Empire, Benjamin Franklin,
the diplomat. All of this wove together, and I felt, nowadays, boy,
(05:17):
we really need Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So that's why I immersed myself.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
At that time, you felt we need Benjamin and all
the more so today I want.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
To go all the way back, start at the beginning,
and try to figure out how he became one of
the foremost scientists of his age.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Benjamin Franklin was the tenth son of a Puritan immigrant
to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and as a tenth son,
he was going to be his father's tithe to the Lord.
His father was going to send him to Harvard to
study to be a minister, and Franklin wasn't exactly cut
for the cloth.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
At some point, they were.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Assaulting the provisions for the winter, and he said to
his father, why don't we just say grace over him
right now? We get it done for the entire the
next few months. And so his father realized, well, that
would be a waste of money to send him to
become a minister. He was always a spunky lad, and
he loved to think of himself as a leader among
(06:13):
the boys. He was the one who led the other
kids to stealing rocks so they could build a dam
in the Boston Harbor where they could swim, and he
invented ways to do swimming, including paddles and flippers.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Franklin becomes an autodidact, less by choice than by the
fact that his dad decides that this particular son is
probably not worth the investment of a Harvard education.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
He becomes a person always curious. He read about everything
from history to science. He watches how whirlwinds form. He
eventually discovers how storms move up the coast because he's
interested in a kneeclipse that is happening. So it's that
insatiable curiosity I think was almost created when he was
(07:03):
denied the right to go to college. So he gets
his hunger for teaching himself and.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
This sort of ability to see the world in a
way that you feel you can figure it out if
you see something around you. In Benjamin Franklin, it prompted
an idea that he could solve it, that he could
understand something that maybe hadn't been understood.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
This was the gift of the scientific revolution that had
occurred just before Franklin's time, which is the universe wasn't
just a total mystery. There were things you could figure
out about it. How storms moved, how eclipses happened. Now
that seems pretty obvious, but you have to remember before
the Enlightenment, we thought wisdom was received as opposed to
(07:45):
let's figure out nature. And so Franklin becomes the pioneer
of the Enlightenment in America. Unlike Newton Galileo, he doesn't
have a lot of math. He doesn't do the theories.
But as he says, as a practical person, you don't
need to know the theory of gravity to know that
(08:07):
if you let go of a piece of crockery, it'll
fall to the floor and break. Among the things Franklin
studied as an experimentalist and a tinker is just simple phenomenon,
the lightning rod being the most famous. But then how
does dark cloth absorb heat better than light cloth? And
(08:30):
he did experiments where he put black pieces of cloth
on snow and then lighter pieces of cloth and measured
which would melt the snow underneath faster.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
It almost sounds like something you would do in the
eighth grade or even elementary school science project. And the
idea that at the time he could conceive these experiments
and just do them on his own. He could just
execute them and make a discovery.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, we had great theorists right before from Fanklin who
understood the nature of light and heat. But then you
have Franklin doing experiments we all did. It's like, okay,
a light piece of cloth and a dark one, what's
going to get warmer? But what Franklin does is he
always looked for practical ways to use that your clothes
(09:18):
in summer should be light and in winter should be dark.
He also tinkered and created a wood burning stove we
now call the Franklin stove, and it was about the
simple thing of how do you get more heat into
the room with less smoke. And these type of things
may seem mundane compared to Newton figuring out a theory
(09:43):
of gravity, but in our daily lives having clean burning stoves,
bifocal glasses, understanding the heat absorption of cloth, a urinary
Catherine when his brother was having a urinary tract disease,
Franklin is able to make it flexible, easy to insert.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
And this is just his way of using both.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Science and ingenuity to create new technology, which is what
we try to do in our modern age.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
When we come back.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Franklin's scientific discoveries make him an international celebrity, and we'll
even dig into that rumor about Franklin wanting to bump
the bald Eagle and make the humble Turkey America's official bird.
(10:42):
There's this story of Benjamin Franklin and his ingenuity that
every school kid knows. It involves a man in long socks,
a kite, a key, and a lightning storm. But it
isn't just his discovery of electricity and conductivity that makes
this moment special. As with all franklin scientific explorations, it
led to something practical, an invention that saved countless lives.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I asked Walter about that.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
I did not realize how famous he became just from
the lightning rod, particularly in France, and it's sort of
foreshadowing for later what he's able to do diplomatically for
the New America. A lot of it is derived from
this fame that he's accrued because he invented the lightning rod.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
It's kind of odd, but up until then people believed
they were bolts from heaven and an expression of God's will,
and they would consecrate the bells of churches to water
off the lightning, but even the most religiously faithful were
likely to have noticed that it was not very effective.
Lightning kept hitting church peoples. In Germany. During one period
(11:52):
thirty five years, three hundred and eighty six churches were struck,
and in venice like three thousand people were killed when
tons of gun powder had been stored in the church
and it was hit. Franklin later wrote to John Winthrop,
who was a Harvard professor, and he wrote, the lightning
seems to strike steeples of choice just as the bells
are ringing. One would think we might now try some
(12:14):
other trick to ward it off.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Benjamin Franklin again.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
His electricity experiments when a showman came down from Boston
who was doing static electricity, you know, rubbing a glass
with cloth and then making little sparks. What Franklin does
is he mixes this sort of fun you have with
a parl trick using static electricity with theories from reading
the other great scientists of the time. In the journal
(12:40):
that Franklin kept for his experiments, he noted in seventeen
forty nine that there were some similarities between electrical sparks
and lightning, and being the type of bookkeeper he was,
he listed twelve of them. They both give light, they
have the same color, the crooked direction of swift motion,
the sulfur of smell. Very Franklin like. He puts his
(13:02):
rallying cry at the bottom of the notebook page, let
the experiment be made. You know, great theorists like Newton
had noticed the apparent connection between lightning and electricity, but
nobody had written, let the experiment be made.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
So Franklin lays out a methodical test for figuring out
exactly what lightning is, and it's a rather complicated thing.
He describes how you would make an electrical stand that's
grounded but has an iron rod that's connected to the earth,
and how many feet And he also discovered that pointed
(13:41):
pieces of metal attract sparks better than rounded pieces. So
he does all of these very specific descriptions of how
to do the experiment, and it's done actually in France
first before he has a chance to erect all the
apparatus in Philadelphia.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
But even though he wasn't there to do the experiment,
he becomes famous for having designed the experiment.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Absolutely the King of France has read about Franklin's proposed experiments,
and the King asks people in France to try to
carry them out, and these are known as Franklin's experiments.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
And then what happens when he finally arrives in France.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
When he arrives in France, he is known as the
great scientist who tamed lightning, and so he's enormously famous.
Crowds turn out in Brittany when he lands. They carry
him to the steps of the academy when he gets
to Paris so that he can hug Voltaire. He also
(14:44):
is a good public relations guy. And so Franklin, who
had hardly ever been to the backwoods and lives in Philadelphia,
Boston and London his whole life. Where's a fur cap
he had gotten during one trip to Canada and pretends
to be the back wood sage and scientists, and they
were veeram and the women start wearing their hair and
(15:07):
what was called the coiffor la la Franklin, which is
their hair done up as if it's a fur cap
on their heads.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
It's wild to think of them as such a celebrity.
And then you realize at this point his popularity is
just from the lightning rod, even though he also invented
or goes on to invent so many other things. But
my question is, why didn't you patent the lightning rod?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I mean, it.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Feels obvious for a man like Franklin, a successful business owner,
if he'd just taken a percentage on every rod, his
descendants could still live off that.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, he talks about how much it could have made
had he patented the lightning rod idea or patent in
the stove. But he always felt that it was part
of your civic duty to be inventive, and that we
gained so much from previous inventions that we should be
happy to put things back in the river of history.
(16:03):
So his experiments that come to the conclusion of the
single fluid theory of electricity, the invention of batteries in
which you can store electricity, the invention of lightning rods
so you can draw electricity from the clouds, those are
the most important experimental discoveries of his era. But he
(16:23):
just wants to say, what use is it. At one point,
after a season of electricity experiments, he said, we discovered
all sorts of things, but we hadn't figured out what
the use of it would be and so they draw
a lot of electricity stored in batteries and then use
the shocks to kill turkeys. And he said they were
(16:44):
uncommonly tender, And so we Southerners like to think he's
the inventor of the first fried turkey.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Hold on, speaking of turkeys. What to quickly address this
rumor that you hear periodically around Thanksgiving that Ben Franklin
wanted the turkey as America's national birdd instead of the
bald eagle.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
I think he thought the bald eagle was too proud,
And it was in one of his writings where he
didn't want there to be an aristocracy called the Cincinnatis Club,
people who had started with Washington were supposed to be part.
He said, no, no, we're not trying to do that. And
he then does this little divergence where he doesn't want
(17:22):
the eagle to be the symbol of un I say,
it's should be the turkey, because the turkey reminds us,
you know, we're a little bit silly. We shouldn't take
ourselves too seriously, and he does this pay on to
the turkey. I'm much more practical, and I don't know
He just thought we shouldn't get too grand, we should
poke fun at our pretensions.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
We're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we'll look at how Franklin's scientific inquiry bled
into all parts of his life, including how he managed
to keep a cool head while helping found it in nation.
(18:13):
One of the things about Ben Franklin is that being
a scientist it is foundational. It shapes him as a
person and spills into all his different interests, but he's
always kind of doing it on the side. When does
it really become a focus for him?
Speaker 1 (18:27):
By age forty two, he had probably become the most
successful self made person in the colonies. He had not
only created print shops, but he enfranchised them up and
down the coast. He had helped create a colonial postal
system to tie these print shops together. He created Poor Richard,
and he created newspapers, and so this makes him very successful.
(18:51):
But at that point he wants to change his life
a bit, and so he retires, partly so that he
become more of a civic citizen, even more than he
had been before, but also somebody who was interested in
everything from the sparks of electricity and lightning to diplomacy.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
What do you think it was about his outlook on
life that caused him to have this almost like sense
of fun and scientific adventure about exploring all of these
different areas.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
There are very few people in history who really have
a hunger to learn everything possible about everything that you
could know. I mean, that's certainly true of Leonardo da Vinci.
It was everything from a musician to a mathematician, to
an artist to an engineer. It was true of maybe Aristotle. Well,
it's definitely true of Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
And he must have had an innate ability to not
be concerned about being wrong or being called a dabbler.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
I think that if somebody called him a dabbler an amateur,
he would take it as a compliment. He really loved
being ingenious and trying to be interested in everything, and
I think he thought if he were blinder and too focused,
he wouldn't be able to be as creative or as imaginative.
(20:16):
He also just loved science for its own sake, the
fascination of experiments, and that included when he's in France
after the Revolution, he's helping fund the first flights of
hot air balloons, just because he's totally fascinated. When a
spectator asked, what is the use of these new balloons?
(20:38):
What are they good for? Franklin said, what is the
use of a newborn baby. Franklin realized that curiosity for
its own sake, we may not know what it will
grow into, but we should always expect that things will
grow and they'll become useful.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
But he didn't lose the rest of his life on it. Experiments.
He just did experiments while he was doing everything else.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Even when he's in England trying to negotiate for the
colonies and prevent the revolution, he's still pursuing scientific inquiries.
It's his hobby. So he helped put the lightning rods on
Saint Paul's cathedral. That's where he does his theories of
the common cold. That's where he does theories of exercise,
where he sees how much heat you're generating when you
(21:27):
do different types of exercises, and sort of comes up
with this notion of what we now called calories. He
looked into lead poisoning why the oceans were salty. He
actually got.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
That one wrong.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
But even inventing things like musical instruments.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
You mentioned in being wrong. That's another aspect of it
is it's not just about making discoveries and proving things,
but it's about this sort of iteration and revision and
evolution where you might get it wrong, but then you've
still moved scientific knowledge forward.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
He liked testing things out and being open to evidence.
The basic scientific method which Franklin embraced, which is to
have a theory, figure out a way you can test it,
then revise your theory based on the evidence you get.
That scientific method sounds so simple to us, it's so obvious.
(22:18):
He got a theory, test it, and by the way,
if the evidence comes back, figure out a new theory.
And that notion helps him understand how science intersects with
public policy. One of the things we don't do very
well is let people change their minds. We always say, well,
you flip flopped, or you change your mind. Well, Franklin
(22:38):
often evolved. He evolved on slavery, he evolved on immigration.
And having that open mind in which you're willing to
accept new evidence and revise your opinions. That's the essence
of the scientific method. But it's also the essence of democracy.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And for someone who is so detail orient to. He
seemed to push the notion of imperfection, that imperfection needed
to be allowed in the Constitution. It's sort of funny
to think about today when there's so much reverence for
the founding fathers. So they've written the perfect documents, and
those documents need to be respected letter by letter and
word by word. But he seemed to have a notion
(23:18):
of we're not going to achieve perfection.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
His closing speech in the Constitutional Convention is really a
document that everybody should read. He was the oldest person
by far at the Convention, twice as old as the
average member, and he says, I confess that I do
not entirely approve this Constitution at present. But he said,
the older I get, the more I realize that I'm
(23:42):
wrong at times, and which seems like an imperfection to me. Well,
maybe it's the right way to do it. And so
he says, I endorse this Constitution with all of its
perhaps flaws, because I'm not sure now that they are flaws,
or that we could get something more perfect came out
of human hands.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
And of course there were cases where he was right,
and one of them is the Gulf Stream. Can you
walk us through how you figure that out.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Even as he's traveling across the ocean coming back to
Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five, for instance, there he is
standing on the deck of the boat with his grandson
Temple and hearing that it takes longer to get back
to America than it does to get to Europe. And
he's going, why is that? Why is that? And so
he measures, with his grandson helping him, the temperature of
(24:32):
the water. And he's devised a barrel that has a
flap to it that he can open so he can
take the temperature at different depths to see how deep
the Gulf stream is.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
And something that is now confirmed by satellites that match
up to a picture that he created just by lowering
barrels into the water.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
It's extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
If you see the chart he makes, it's remarkably similar
to the one that's now on the NASA web site.
In fact, the NASA website reprints a picture of Benjamin
Franklin's chart. Franklin was a great believer in the future.
In his will, he set up to trust funds for
(25:14):
aspiring entrepreneurs like himself, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia.
The revolving loan fund in Philadelphia was particularly interesting because
it accrued just as the way he said it did,
and two centuries after his death, the fund had reached
more than two million dollars, and at one point it
(25:36):
was used by kids in inner city Philadelphia to make
electric go kart type things to race in one of
these solar races. So I love the idea of the
person who help us harness electricity also having a loan
fund of people doing it in the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
And was there a tiny bit of ego in it
too that his name was sort of carry along with
those he couldn't have known maybe how big his name
would continue to be anyway.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Oh, I think he knew.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Franklin was someone who cared deeply about the legacy he
would leave not only as a scientist and a civic leader,
but also as a man with some pretty big regrets
of a.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
More personal nature.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Next time on on Benjamin Franklin, we dive into Franklin's
early life. He was a printer, a businessman, and a rebel.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Franklin has a very complicated family life, and throughout his
life he had kept this ledger of errors. He had
made and how he had regnified and mistake number one
in his ledger book was running Away from his brother.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
This show is based on the writing and research of
Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed
and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our
consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs, Who's our editor. Social media by
Dara Potts.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
This show was.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Engineered at CDMU Studios from iHeart Podcasts. The executive producers
are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was
executive produced by Mangeshetigador, with an assist from Oz Walishan
Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman,
conel Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan Otuski
(27:20):
and Ali Gavin And If you like podcasts about inventions
what they mean for humanity, check out my other show
shell Game, about how it created an AI clone and
set it loose on the world. It's at shell Game
dot co. And for more shows from Kaleletoscope, be sure
to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Thanks so much for listening
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