PBS_Benjamin Franklin_2of3_The Age of Scientific Discovery
Transcript
00:00Major funding for Benjamin Franklin is provided by the Northwestern Mutual Foundation.
00:21The people of Northwestern Mutual are proud to have supported this remarkable series on
00:26PBS, celebrating the wisdom and ingenuity of one of America's most distinguished founding
00:32fathers.
00:34Major funding is also provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, expanding America's
00:40understanding of who we were, who we are, and who we will be.
00:46The Pew Charitable Trusts, investing in ideas, returning results.
00:52Additional funding is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for Public Understanding
00:57of Science and Technology, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Corporation for Public
01:04Broadcasting, by these funders, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
01:13I'd already shown that an electrical stroke could melt small quantities of metal, previously
01:37we had struck a pigeon dead using only electricity.
01:43The experiment today was to see whether electricity could kill an animal as large as a turkey.
01:51We knew the shock would have to be very great.
01:55Everyone in the room was excited, talking to me and to each other, and stupidly, I forgot
02:02I was holding the conductor connected to the negative pole of the battery.
02:06I'm a trifle ashamed of this blunder, a bigger charge and I might not be talking to you now.
02:23It certainly would have been the easiest of all deaths.
02:34Franklin is a wonderful example of a very powerful mind with a very powerful curiosity,
02:42immense gifts and considerable flaws in action.
02:49He presented to the world a face of folksy charm, but beneath this surface lay the fire
02:54of enormous ambition.
02:58The range of Benjamin Franklin's achievements is astonishing.
03:03The inventor who saved the world from the terrors of lightning, and the diplomat who
03:07rescued the American Revolution, is also the author of one of the most widely reprinted
03:12books since the Bible.
03:17Benjamin would relish the communication and digital revolution we're going through today.
03:23And I'm sure he would have been one of the first people in America to have created a
03:25website and then also probably created an online service so he could make money off
03:29of the website, because he loved the idea of spreading information, thoughts, discourse.
03:41He is the touchstone for every single pivotal point in early American history.
03:47His signature on the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, Constitution, is symbolic
03:55of Franklin's impact on American history.
03:59He signed the documents, but he was the documents.
04:06He basically was a down-to-earth, pragmatic person.
04:10Somebody who not always practiced what he preached, but always had the detachment and
04:16sense of irony to know his true soul.
04:21And understanding Franklin's soul is sort of understanding the soul of America.
04:39It is the inclination of old men to talk about themselves and their deeds, but just because
04:45I'm old, don't feel you owe me any respect.
04:48You can listen or not, as you please.
04:51I confess right off, because if I deny it, you won't believe me, that another reason
04:56I'm talking about myself is to gratify my own vanity.
05:00By the way, have you ever noticed when someone is making a speech which they introduce with
05:05the words, without vanity, I may say, they always say something very vain about themselves
05:12right afterwards?
05:14Some people think vanity is an evil.
05:16I don't.
05:17I think vanity is one of the great comforts of life.
05:23I've had a very happy life, so much so that I'd have no objection to living it all over
05:28again.
05:29Well, perhaps I'd correct a few errors I made the first time around.
05:35But since repetition isn't possible, the next best thing is to remember that life and to
05:42relate it to you.
05:56Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1706.
06:02Only 15 years earlier, all New England had been consumed by the Salem witch trials.
06:09This is a world where witches are real, and they are doing the work of the devil.
06:19Man has very little ability to control cosmic forces or even understand how the natural
06:27world works.
06:29If lightning did damage, it would be conceived of as an affliction, an affliction that one
06:37had earned.
06:42If the almighty God should from heaven rain down upon Boston a horrible tempest of thunderbolts,
06:48it would be no more than our unrepented sins deserve.
06:57Mankind is at the mercy of an all-powerful God.
07:04People have little control over their fate and must passively accept their lot.
07:11When lightning hits a house, causing it to catch fire, the fire brigade extinguishes
07:15the fire only in the adjoining houses, but lets that house burn to the ground.
07:21They see it as the will of God, devil's unseen forces and God's vengeance.
07:31This is the world into which Benjamin Franklin was born.
07:36My father, Josiah Franklin, married young and came with his wife to Boston in 1682 to
07:42escape religious persecution in England.
07:45Here he had four more children by his first wife, and after she died, ten more by a second
07:50wife, my mother, Abiah Folger.
07:53In all, Josiah had 17 children.
07:56I am the youngest son, born in Boston in 1706.
08:05Franklin will later make much of his rise to prominence from humble beginnings.
08:09His father is a tradesman, a candle and soap maker.
08:13This is not a world of privilege, far from it.
08:17Josiah is a proud, devoutly religious man.
08:21He instills in his son the Puritan idea that you have no real control over your destiny.
08:27From birth, some have been chosen to go to heaven and some will burn in the eternal damnation
08:34of hell.
08:35As a matter of fact, Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven gives the essence of Calvinist
08:44Puritanism in one sentence when he kills a man who says he doesn't deserve to die
08:54and he says deserving has nothing to do with it.
09:02That's Calvinism in a nutshell.
09:07Josiah decides to send the young Franklin to school to be educated as a minister.
09:13He was raised in a religious family.
09:15His uncle gave him a gift of a multi-volume set of sermons, as he said, presuming that
09:25young Ben might set up stock as a preacher.
09:31In Boston, being educated as a minister means that he is being prepared to be a leader in
09:36society.
09:39The most powerful and influential clergyman in New England is Cotton Mather.
09:45Young Franklin is fascinated by his sermons, which take the most commonplace events of
09:50daily life and draw out their moral lessons.
09:54I was emptying the cistern of nature, making water on a wall, when a dog came up beside
10:00me and did the same thing.
10:02I thought to myself, how mean and vile is our mortal state, our natural necessities
10:09placing us on the same level as dogs?
10:13From that moment on, I resolved that every time I answered the call of nature, I would
10:20evoke some divine thought that would rise up and soar to the angels.
10:30Virtually every aspect of Puritanism was accentuated in Cotton Mather.
10:36His Puritanism was to the tenth power.
10:39Among his reminders to himself is not to enter or leave a room without doing some good in
10:46it.
10:49This for Mather is one of the central tenets of Puritanism.
10:53You glorify God by doing good for your fellow man.
10:59Franklin was early on thrilled with the possibility that he would become his generation's Cotton
11:08Mather.
11:10In his old age, Franklin will vividly remember a visit to Cotton Mather and a moral lesson
11:15learned.
11:18He was showing me out of the house and there was a very low beam near the doorway.
11:22I was still talking.
11:24Then he began shouting, stoop, stoop.
11:26I didn't understand what he meant and banged my head on the beam.
11:31You're young, he said, and have the world before you.
11:35Stoop as you go through it and you'll avoid many hard thumps.
11:40That advice has been very useful to me.
11:43I've avoided many misfortunes by not carrying my head too high in pride.
11:51Franklin from the get-go understood that he was a modest man's son, but he had powers
11:59that rich men's sons didn't have.
12:01He was smarter than they were.
12:02He was more adroit than they were.
12:04He was stronger than they were.
12:06In school, Franklin soars to the head of his class.
12:09He is promoted and immediately rises up in his next class as well.
12:13He is beginning to suffer from the Puritan sin of vanity.
12:18Benjamin's getting snide.
12:20He's getting uppity.
12:21He's getting impatient with stupid people.
12:26At ten years old, I was taken out of school to assist my father in his business, making
12:31soap and candles, cutting wicks, filling the dipping molds, attending the shop, running
12:37errands.
12:38I hated that trade and had a hankering for the sea, but my father wouldn't allow it.
12:45However, living near the water, I was much in it and about it.
12:50I taught myself to swim.
12:57It's easy to get caught up with Franklin on the hundred-dollar bill, Franklin in the Du Plessis
13:02portrait, Franklin in Peale's portraits.
13:05He is always the elder statesman.
13:08It's easy to forget that he had hair once, that he was a little kid, passionately fond
13:15of swimming.
13:18He became an excellent swimmer.
13:22He was tall and broad-shouldered and athletic-looking and active.
13:32Few people knew how to swim in the 18th century.
13:35As a youth, Franklin has to learn by reading a book by the French author Thievenot.
13:41He looked at the drawings that Thievenot had made of, I think, forty different positions
13:47in swimming, and he practiced them all, one by one by one.
13:51He mastered them, and as he adds in the autobiography, he added a few of his own.
14:02I was flying a paper kite while swimming in a pond.
14:06I found that floating on my back and holding the string, I was pulled across the pond without
14:12the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.
14:18He's in a most difficult position.
14:21He's brighter even than he knows, and his intelligence has to find an outlet that it
14:27cannot find.
14:30Although he's been denied further schooling, Benjamin is sure of one thing.
14:34He's not going to spend the rest of his life as a candle maker.
14:39He resists so strongly that Josiah finally decides to apprentice young Franklin to his
14:43older brother James, a printer.
14:47He persuaded me to sign the indentures and serve as an apprentice until I was twenty-one.
14:54I was only twelve years old at the time.
15:05He continues rebelling once he's been made a printer.
15:08He still thinks of himself as the kid who was on his way to the college.
15:15So when everyone in James Franklin's printing shop gets together for lunch, Benjamin excuses
15:21himself.
15:24And after eating a quick meal, he studies in private.
15:29In the print shop, he has access to a rich assortment of books, very different from Cotton
15:34Mather's religious tracts.
15:38When he discovered these books, he just ate them up.
15:41They're not talking about religious consciousness.
15:43They're not talking about who's saved and who's not saved.
15:46It gave him a glimpse of something other than the world he was living in.
15:53He begins a methodical program of self-education, learning everything from geometry to the art
15:59of winning arguments using the Socratic method.
16:02When he decides he's got to perfect his own writing style, he disassembles the books in
16:08front of himself, word by word, and then rewrites them.
16:12It was an extraordinary intensity of effort that just is awesome.
16:18He would make little notes on pieces of paper, the theme of a paragraph or the various points
16:24in the thing.
16:26He would put it aside for a while, come back, and then try to compose it.
16:31In a few cases, he thought he even made a slight improvement over these masters of English
16:35writing.
16:41His brother James publishes one of the first newspapers in America, the New England Current.
16:48Much of the content of this paper appears in the form of fictitious letters to the editor,
16:52adopting different personae, but actually written by James Franklin and his friends.
16:59He also begins to receive a number of papers, signed, silenced, do-good, an obvious pseudonym.
17:06The letters are written by the printer's apprentice himself, Benjamin Franklin.
17:12He had to write under another name because his elder brother James didn't want Ben getting
17:17involved in the newspaper.
17:20Young Benjamin assumes the role of a middle-aged widow with progressive ideas and strong opinions
17:25on every aspect of life.
17:28Name a vice in which women exceed men, drunkenness, swearing, and idleness.
17:34If you talk to us, you'll learn that a woman's work is never done.
17:38As for ignorance, that's completely the fault of men who prevent women from getting an education.
17:44Women are taught to read and write their names and nothing else.
17:47We have the God-given capacity for knowledge and understanding.
17:51What have we done to forfeit the privilege of being taught?
17:56Franklin got the tone of these letters, the pitch of this woman's voice, just perfect.
18:02Now here's a 16-year-old boy putting himself in the voice and the position of a middle-aged
18:09widow and pulling it off.
18:11It's absolutely remarkable.
18:12And that's what convinced me that Franklin's a genius.
18:16Silence Do Good's letters, 14 in all, appear in The Current over a period of six months.
18:22James, and indeed all of Boston, is beginning to wonder who this Silence Do Good really
18:28is.
18:30Sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin can hardly contain himself.
18:34And when he does say, these papers that you've been praising so heavily, and which are, after
18:38all, very good, these papers are mine.
18:42That doesn't help relations with the brother, the master, who's also supposed to be governing
18:48him.
18:50Benjamin was smarter than James, was better as a printer, even as an apprentice, than
18:56James was.
18:59James would beat him, as masters commonly beat their apprentices.
19:04Well, Ben didn't think this was right.
19:09In his 17th year, Benjamin Franklin breaks his apprenticeship agreement.
19:13He steals himself from his brother.
19:21Franklin is now a runaway.
19:24He has no idea what will happen next.
19:26But he is confident, intelligent, and he has a trade.
19:32His life in the next two years reads like a novel by Dickens, escapades, mishaps, embarrassments,
19:38and conquests.
19:40He travels to New York, and then to Philadelphia, where he works for several months as a printer.
19:47In Philadelphia, a wealthy man, impressed with Franklin's abilities, offers him an opportunity
19:52to go to London, and the young printer jumps at the chance.
19:58In England, he will encounter a world that will transform his life.
20:11He falls in love with London.
20:13Everybody knew everybody in Boston, the big city you lose yourself, free from any kind
20:20of parental or master control, and it's a pretty freewheeling time for him.
20:28He sowed wild oats with wild abandon.
20:32He met women of all kinds.
20:35As he said later, he was always very lucky.
20:38He didn't catch any dreadful disease.
20:43He is awake and alert, already quite knowing about the variety of human characters.
20:52He's 18 when he comes to London, and willy-nilly, in important respects, naive.
20:59But he is a quick learner.
21:04Franklin survives in London by working as a pressman and typesetter in one of the city's
21:08many print shops.
21:11In this publishing world, he meets the notorious Bernard Mandeville, author of Private Vice's
21:16Public Benefits.
21:19He's enchanted with Mandeville's idea that there is no moral difference between good
21:23and evil.
21:26Franklin evolves philosophies which will let him get away with anything, that God couldn't
21:31possibly object to evil, God couldn't possibly object to pleasure, because everything that
21:37comes to us comes to us from God, because God created everything.
21:41He writes a little pamphlet, which he publishes, without his name on it, in 1725.
21:46He's freed himself from one of the most serious constraints operating in the Boston of his
21:53day, and that is he defines his religion radically differently than that of his family's religion.
22:03Franklin feels at home in London's flourishing coffeehouse culture, where new and radical
22:08ideas are hotly debated.
22:11England is in the full throes of a revolution of human thought, a revolution called the
22:16Enlightenment.
22:18The Enlightenment was a new way of looking at the world that suggested that rational
22:25thought and planning could lead to change.
22:29It's a reduction of the importance of religion in life, and a much greater emphasis on the
22:36here and now, and on the improvement of people's lives.
22:45This revolution in human thought allows people to examine all aspects of existence, including
22:51the accepted belief that one's station in life is fixed and unchanging.
23:00The basic assumption of the Enlightenment is that we're not born to be what we are,
23:05which was the traditional view for centuries, for eons.
23:11And once you have that insight, which is a modern insight, you can begin to change things.
23:18Education becomes important.
23:19You can change what you were born, presumably born to be.
23:23You can become something else.
23:27These new and revolutionary ideas, Benjamin Franklin has taken it all in.
23:41Now 20, he sets sail back to Philadelphia.
23:51He will spend the long journey home working out the lessons, good and bad, learned during
23:56his stay in England.
24:01This was going to be a new chapter in Benjamin's life.
24:06He felt a certain nostalgia for London, which had pleased him so much, and perhaps a little
24:13apprehension of the future.
24:18September 23rd, 1726, two months at sea.
24:25For all we know, like Noah and his company in the ark, we may be the only surviving remnant
24:31of the human race.
24:36Philosophers write a lot of fine words on the pleasures of solitude, but man is a sociable
24:43animal, and one of the greatest punishments is to be excluded from society.
24:51He's beginning to have second thoughts about whether one can live alone, whether one can
24:58be an island sufficient unto oneself.
25:00He's been really irresponsible.
25:02He's been really having a great time in London, never put anything aside.
25:09The only reason he's able to come back is that some Philadelphia merchant is paying
25:13his way.
25:15It's beginning to dawn on him that this isn't quite the way to live.
25:21Franklin becomes fiercely determined to change the direction of his life.
25:28Those who teach the art of writing tell us that we must always begin with a plan, an
25:32outline of the whole piece, otherwise the essay will turn out incoherent.
25:38I've never had a regular design in my life, so up to now it's been a confused variety
25:44of different scenes.
25:46I must make resolutions, some plan of action.
25:54From this moment on, I intend to live my life as a rational creature.
26:02He had a great need to put his life in order at that moment.
26:09One could almost say he wanted to become a good boy, a good, serious, steady boy.
26:19One, I will be extremely frugal until I have paid all my debts.
26:28As systematically as he has cultivated his mind as a teenager, he now wants to cultivate
26:35his emotions.
26:38Two, I will apply myself industriously to business.
26:44I will not divert my mind with any foolish schemes of growing suddenly rich.
26:51Industry and patience are the surest means to plenty.
27:02Franklin arrives in Philadelphia in 1726.
27:07After the great metropolis of London, this town of 4,000 with dirt streets and wooden
27:12houses seems like a tiny country village.
27:16It is here he will start his life over again.
27:21His story is, of course, spectacular.
27:23The youngest son of the youngest son for five generations back, as he says, in a world where
27:29primogeniture and patriarchy were valued.
27:33He sees himself as at the lowest rung of the ladder, and he's intent on moving up.
27:42Benjamin Franklin was in a very difficult position if he thought he was going to rise
27:46as a tradesman within the patriarchal structures that existed.
27:54In this world of family connections and patronage, Franklin is an outsider.
28:00He realizes that he can never succeed on his own.
28:05When he comes back to Philadelphia, he really launches on a new resolve, which is this new
28:11morality that is going to overthrow the sense of unbridled self-interest, and which is going
28:18to suggest instead that people will do better working together, living together.
28:25He recruits blacksmiths, shoemakers, shopkeepers, ambitious tradesmen like himself, and forms
28:32a club which he calls the Junto.
28:38Franklin's formation of the Junto is the mother of all self-help associations.
28:44These are young men on the make.
28:46They need connections.
28:51Today we would call it networking.
28:55Part secret society, part discussion group, part rotary club, the Junto meets in a tavern
29:01every Friday night.
29:03Standing questions for the Junto.
29:06Do you know any rich people?
29:08Do you know how they got rich?
29:11Has anyone's business failed?
29:13Do you know why?
29:16Do you know of any fellow citizen who's done some worthy action deserving our praise?
29:22Someone who's committed an error for us to avoid?
29:26Do you have any projects the Junto can help you with?
29:31They have debates.
29:33They have speaking exercises where they critique each other, not just for the ideas, but for
29:39the presentation, for the delivery, so that they're learning a certain polish.
29:43They're learning to talk like sophisticated businessmen.
29:51Franklin is now able to borrow money, and two years after his return to Philadelphia,
29:55he opens up a print shop.
29:59Now an independent businessman, he soon realizes that it will take more than hard work to get
30:04ahead in the world.
30:07Franklin discovers that the very modern idea of image is crucial to his success.
30:13In order to build my credit and character as a tradesman, I take care not only in reality
30:19to be industrious and frugal, but to appear so in public.
30:24When I buy paper, I make sure to be seen pushing it through the streets in a wheelbarrow.
30:30I'm soon considered an industrious and thriving young man, and merchants who import books
30:37or stationery choose me to sell them in my shop.
30:41Everything goes swimmingly.
30:45The tennis player, Andre Agassi, said image is everything.
30:50Franklin is always in control of how he looks to other people.
30:55It would have been characteristic of Franklin at the time to make sure he hadn't oiled that
31:00wheelbarrow's wheel, so that he squeaked through the streets and attracted attention.
31:06My thoughts now turn to marriage.
31:10A single man is like half a scissors, an incomplete human being.
31:22Of course, it was a great day for Ben Franklin, probably a great day for Philadelphia, because
31:27that's the day that he saw the woman that he would one day take to wife, Deborah Reed.
31:31The story has become part of the Franklin myth.
31:34In 1723, when he first ran away from Boston to Philadelphia at the age of 17, Franklin
31:40was a young man fresh off the boat, walking down Market Street with two loaves of bread
31:45stuffed under his arms and one being stuffed into his mouth.
31:49He actually sees a woman standing on a stoop, and she very much remembers seeing him, because
31:54she thought it was very funny.
31:57Now seven years later, he and Deborah agree to get married.
32:02Franklin has good reason to want to settle down.
32:05He has been having affairs with what he calls low women, and now finds himself the father
32:09of a baby boy.
32:12Deborah becomes mother to his son, William, and together they will have two children,
32:17a son who dies young, and a daughter, Sally.
32:21Deborah proves to be an excellent helpmate.
32:24She runs the shop and is a shrewd businesswoman.
32:29Franklin's success in Philadelphia is due in part to his practical selection of a very
32:33practical wife.
32:36Of their Chloe's and Phyllis's poets may prate, I sing of my plain country Joan.
32:44Some faults have we all, and so has my Joan, but then they're exceedingly small.
32:51And now I'm grown used to them, so like my own, I scarcely can see them at all.
33:01Franklin now takes over a failing newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.
33:06He becomes not only its printer, but its publisher, editor, and chief writer.
33:12From the first issue, Franklin transforms the Gazette, livening it up with local news
33:17and a touch of sensationalism.
33:20He puts his stories in the voices of fictitious reporters.
33:24A butcher had a dream that he was killing a calf.
33:27When he woke up, he discovered to his horror that he was actually slicing his child in
33:32two.
33:33And he would often make up stories.
33:36He would relate gossip.
33:37He would sometimes relate as true gossip things that he had simply made up.
33:42In Bucks County, we hear that a flash of lightning came so near a lad as to melt the pewter buttons
33:47off his britches.
33:49Lad considers himself lucky that nothing else in that sight was made of pewter.
33:55He recognized in a way that Rupert Murdoch today might appreciate that selling news was
34:01also selling entertainment.
34:04The Pennsylvania Gazette also prints serious articles on a variety of subjects.
34:08Franklin, who had grown up in the oppressive uniformity of Boston, passionately believes
34:13that a free press will encourage ordinary people to begin thinking for themselves.
34:19And certainly the Pennsylvania Gazette is a profitable paper because it exposes all
34:23sides to an issue.
34:24And sometimes it would be Franklin himself writing a letter under one pen name on one
34:28side of the issue and then the next week writing another letter under another pen name on another
34:33side of the issue.
34:34And it was good for business, but I think it was also, Franklin thought, good for getting
34:38the truth out.
34:41Franklin also begins printing a yearly almanac, the 18th century equivalent of a date book.
34:50In the day columns for which there are no entries, he squeezes in little aphorisms.
34:55Soon people from all walks of life are repeating them.
34:58He who lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.
35:04Some are funny, some serious, all memorable.
35:08The greatest monarch on the proudest throne is still obliged to sit on his own arse.
35:15The way to be safe is never to feel secure.
35:22Once again he's encouraging people to examine the world around them.
35:26Franklin is delivering something that's related to the sermon.
35:32Franklin is always, almost always, trying to inculcate a lesson that will lead to improvement.
35:38How many observe Christ's birthday?
35:40How few his teachings?
35:42It's much easier to keep the holidays than the commandments.
35:47He loves to tweak.
35:49He loves to insinuate.
35:51He loves to grab you and surprise you.
35:55Fish and house guests stink after three days.
36:00Love your neighbor, but don't pull down your hedge.
36:06Poor Richard is the ordinary man's philosopher, how to get along in the everyday world.
36:12He is the spokesman for sense that is genuinely common.
36:16Creditors have better memories than debtors.
36:21Franklin later collects poor Richard's aphorisms on money and frugality and puts them in a
36:26book which he calls The Way to Wealth.
36:29Translated into many languages during his lifetime, the book has never been out of print.
36:35If you want to know the value of money, go try and borrow some.
36:40Franklin uses the profits from his successful publishing ventures to acquire real estate
36:45and set up partnerships with print shops all through the colonies.
36:50By the time he's 35, this once penniless printer's apprentice has become one of the wealthiest
36:56men in Philadelphia.
36:58God helps them who help themselves.
37:03Everyone associates Franklin with getting rich.
37:07But for Franklin, getting rich is an end in itself.
37:11Nothing could be further from the truth.
37:13To be really successful in a Franklinian sense, if you read what he writes very carefully,
37:18is not to be wealthy and to be conspicuously wealthy, to live in a big house, to eat off
37:25good china, to wear fancy clothes, that the sign of success was in your capacity to give
37:33back to the community, and that it was in serving that one achieved felicity.
37:44Where did the sense of obligation come from?
37:47I think there may well be Protestant and maybe even Puritan origins here.
37:54Remembering the lessons of his youth, Franklin now turns his considerable energy to doing
37:58good, to improving life in Philadelphia.
38:02The country town of 4,000 has become a city, overflowing with 20,000 inhabitants.
38:09There are animals everywhere.
38:11Housewives turn their hogs out in the street to feed on garbage.
38:15Backyard outhouses overflow when it rains.
38:19The smell and the flies are terrible.
38:24As Philadelphia continues to grow, so do its problems.
38:29I propose for the city I love an effective way of cleaning its streets.
38:35Some may think that this is a matter of small importance, that it is not worth considering
38:40the dust blown into the eyes of a single person in a single shop on a windy morning.
38:47But in a populous city, this happens all the time.
38:52Human happiness comes not from infrequent pieces of good fortune, but from these small
38:58improvements to daily life.
39:03He's got, at some level, ideas that he's convinced are better than anybody else's, and he wants
39:10to see those ideas implemented.
39:12The trick is how to do that when you're not king, and you're not an earl, and you're not
39:16a duke, but you are a common citizen in the colony.
39:23Lincoln and Ajunto use their collective power to solve common problems.
39:28They form a volunteer fire department and convince tradesmen to pool their resources,
39:33setting up the library company, the first lending library in America.
39:38Not the rugged individual, but a group of people sensing a social need can band together,
39:46not depending on the government, but taking the situation in hand and exerting whatever
39:51ingenuity and whatever strength they have to achieve what they think needs to be done.
39:58And I think Franklin did that on a scale that nobody in the world had ever dreamed before.
40:05The genius is social.
40:08And the Voluntary Association is Franklin's invention, and it's what builds America.
40:16Working through these associations, he helps establish the Pennsylvania Hospital.
40:22He founds a college, which is to become the University of Pennsylvania.
40:27He proposes America's first organization to exchange scientific knowledge, the American
40:31Philosophical Society.
40:36The Voluntary Associations also devote their energies to down-to-earth projects, like paving
40:42and lighting the streets of Philadelphia.
40:45He wanted to make life here and now more comfortable for ordinary human beings, and that is new
40:53in the world.
40:54I mean, people have lived for thousands of years without really worrying about ordinary
40:59people.
41:02That's the enlightenment for Franklin, I think.
41:06The scriptures assure me that on the last day we shall not be examined on what we believed,
41:13but on what we did.
41:15Our entrance to heaven will not be because we kneeled and said, Lord, Lord, but because
41:21we did some good for our fellow creatures.
41:28Franklin was a unique person.
41:31He was too smart in too many areas.
41:35He was modern in a world that wasn't yet totally modern, so that he really was set apart from
41:42other people.
41:44I think it would be interesting to look at Franklin's character as a study in how a man
41:53finds himself, in essence, solitary, alone, different from other people, and finds ways
42:02to establish connections with them.
42:05They're not intimate connections.
42:07They're organizational connections.
42:09They're political connections.
42:11They're sort of a hail-fellow, well-met connections.
42:14He certainly never found an intellectual soulmate among the men that he knew, and he settles
42:22for the kinds of relationships that he can find.
42:28All through his life, Franklin never saw a problem that he didn't try to solve.
42:34Frustrated by inefficient fireplaces, he tinkers with a stove that gives off more heat using
42:39less fuel.
42:43He takes over the inefficient colonial postal system and speeds up the delivery of letters.
42:49And for the first time in its history, the post office makes a profit.
42:54He looks into the problem of defense on the frontiers and suggests a radical plan for
42:58an intercolonial union, illustrated by this cartoon.
43:04He tries to perfect dripless candles and invents a simplified clock that needs only
43:08three wheels.
43:11He wonders about the movement of storms and the social behavior of ants.
43:17A lot of people who think carefully about one aspect of life or another, or one public
43:22service or another, devote serious attention to those problems or that particular chore,
43:33and then relax for a while and recharge their batteries.
43:37Franklin apparently didn't need to do that.
43:40He'd go from one public problem to a mathematical problem.
43:45Franklin's rest, for instance, if he were waiting outside the door to be admitted to
43:49an assembly room, would be to do a very complicated mathematical problem, or to think about an
43:56invention, how to perfect a man-made object.
44:01Franklin didn't really rest, in the conventional sense, between chores.
44:06His mind was simply too active.
44:11At the age of 42, Franklin decides to make a radical change in his life.
44:16He will retire from the day-to-day operations of the print shop.
44:22To celebrate this event, the artist Robert Feeke paints this elegant full-length portrait.
44:30Benjamin Franklin Printer has transformed himself into Benjamin Franklin, Gentleman
44:35of Leisure.
44:37He will now have time to pursue the true passion of his life, science.
44:44Science in the 18th century, natural philosophy as they called it, was made up of a number
44:51of amateurs, enlightened, distinguished, and extremely curious amateurs who had to make
44:59their own tools for the experiments.
45:03And Franklin was absolutely at ease in that world.
45:07That was the world in which he could thrive.
45:12Franklin's curious mind now becomes intrigued by one of the great scientific mysteries of
45:16the 18th century, the phenomenon of electricity.
45:24Never in my life has anything so totally engrossed me.
45:28While I was making experiments and then repeating them for my friends and acquaintances who
45:33come in crowds to see them, I don't have a moment for anything else.
45:40In Franklin's day, electricity was much more of a puzzle than gravity had been a century
45:45earlier in Newton's time.
45:47Everybody was familiar with things falling and all, but electricity was just a matter
45:52of rubbing something and getting some sparks.
45:56Where did this come from?
45:57Very mysterious.
46:00For Franklin, the pursuit of electricity started as a game.
46:04There was an itinerant Englishman who went from town to town showing gadgets that produced
46:11scintillas and sparks and could do things.
46:23In one popular demonstration, a group of people hold hands and then receive a collective shock
46:28from an electrostatic generator.
46:31This game is performed by people around the world.
46:38With the kind of mind and the curiosity he had, Franklin wanted to go beyond the amusement.
46:46The great thing about every one of these parlor tricks and simple phenomena of attraction,
46:55repulsion was, why?
46:59Before Franklin, no one had any clue.
47:03Franklin puzzles over electricity for almost ten years.
47:07Why is a stream of water attracted to a charged glass rod?
47:12Can you kill an animal with an electric shock?
47:16At the time, everyone assumed that electricity was some mysterious force created by rubbing
47:21two different substances together.
47:25Through experimentation, Franklin proves that, in fact, the friction does not create electricity.
47:30It simply moves a charge from one body to another.
47:35When these charged bodies are brought close together, the result is a spark.
47:42Electricity flowing through the air.
47:46This theory was based on the concept of an electric fluid, like an electric current,
47:53and that this could exist in bodies in a surplus or a deficiency.
47:59He called one state plus, or positive, and the other minus, or negative.
48:05Before Franklin, people had no idea what electricity was or how it worked.
48:11After Franklin's fundamental insight, the phenomenon of electricity could be understood
48:16and harnessed as a force to change the world.
48:21The way Franklin pursued science is totally modern, but we have to understand in his day
48:28it was the exception.
48:34He would always emphasize that it was exploration.
48:40Nature had things out there waiting for you to find them out.
48:49You know that what you will understand tomorrow is greater than today, and you know that because
48:56the truth waits patiently for you.
49:11Both give off light of the same color and have a crooked direction.
49:16Lightning and this discharge both give off a noise, like a crack, and both are conducted
49:22by metals.
49:24The electricity generated in the laboratory is attracted to a pointed metal rod.
49:30Since they are similar in every other way, will lightning, too, be attracted to an iron
49:36rod?
49:40Let the experiment be made.
49:43In the previous century, Newton drew a connection between the motion of the moon and a falling
49:49apple.
49:51In his century, a century later, Franklin drew the connection between sparks in his
49:57laboratory and lightning bolts in the sky.
50:03Franklin hits on a method to prove experimentally that lightning and the sparks in his laboratory
50:08are exactly the same.
50:10They only differ in scale.
50:14The events of this fateful day are described by his close friend and fellow scientist,
50:18Joseph Priestley.
50:23Secretly because he was afraid of being made fun of, and with only his son as a witness,
50:28he raised a kite into an oncoming storm.
50:32Fixed upon it, there was a pointed wire which was to draw the lightning from the clouds.
50:39They were in the storm for a considerable amount of time with nothing happening.
50:43Then, just as he was about to give up, he put his knuckle to the key and felt a definite
50:51electric spark.
50:53Can you imagine his excitement?
50:57The exquisite pleasure of that moment.
51:02He transferred the charge from the key to the electric jars.
51:05The jars could then be used to perform the same electrical experiments as if they had
51:11been charged by rubbing a glass in the laboratory.
51:15The sameness of the electrical matter with that of lightning had been proven.
51:27Knowing this about electricity, Franklin asks himself one more question.
51:32How can this knowledge serve humanity?
51:38It has pleased God in his goodness to mankind to finally show them a way of protecting their
51:44buildings from the mischief of thunder and lightning.
51:48Take a small iron rod with one end buried three feet under.
51:52In his almanac of 1753, Franklin reveals the details of his invention.
51:58A rod of iron placed on the roof of a building can safely discharge a bolt of lightning down
52:03a wire connected into the ground.
52:07If he doesn't patent the lightning rod, it will be his gift to the world.
52:13The ordinary lightning rod, the Franklin rod, is still the basis of the lightning protection
52:22code in every single country in the world.
52:26It's still today the best way to protect an ordinary house or a structure from lightning
52:31damage.
52:34Knowing the ogre of lightning, this frightening thing, this had a huge impact on the public
52:43imagination.
52:45There was an episode, for example, of two ships side by side.
52:48One had a lightning rod and one didn't.
52:52Both struck by lightning, one destroyed completely.
52:55The one with the lightning rod, perfectly fine.
53:00First, the clergy felt that he was usurping a prerogative of the almighty.
53:09Franklin said, well, we do not hesitate to protect ourselves from the hail of heaven
53:16with roofs and shields, so we should be entitled to do the same with lightning.
53:24In an age of reason, his proof that the lightning discharge is an ordinary natural phenomenon
53:37and not a manifestation of the powers of darkness or the force of an angry god was seen as a
53:45tremendous blow for reason against superstition.
53:53In 1753, Franklin is awarded the Copley Medal, the 18th century equivalent of the Nobel Prize
54:00for science.
54:03This once runaway printer's apprentice is now the most famous American in the world.
54:10Benjamin Franklin is 47 years old.
54:13By 18th century standards, an old man.
54:17His contributions to science were remarkable, but if he could look into his future, he would
54:22be astounded.
54:24In truth, his life's work has just begun.
54:32Learning is valuable, but on the day of judgment, we'll not be asked whether we have learned
54:38languages or philosophy or even the proper name of every star.
54:46The sun and moon will have vanished.
54:48The constellations themselves will have disappeared along with all of nature.
54:54But our deeds, our good and bad works, shall remain forever, recorded in the archives of
55:04eternity.