The Enlightenment by Anthony Kenny

Author:Anthony Kenny
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2017-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

11

Transatlantic enlightenment

Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) was the youngest son of a Boston tallow-chandler who was the father of 17 children. In his engaging Autobiography he tells us that he had only two years’ schooling before being apprenticed as a printer, at the age of 12, to his elder brother James. In his teens he succeeded James as editor of a newspaper, the New England Courant, which enjoyed a reputation for sedition. Before long he departed for Philadelphia, where he was befriended by the governor of Pennsylvania, who offered to set him up on his own as a printer.

In 1724 Franklin went to England and spent 18 months learning the latest printing techniques and technology. Back in Philadelphia he rapidly became the city’s most successful printer. He set up the city’s first police force and first fire-insurance company, and founded its first ­hospital. He promoted street cleaning and lighting, himself perfecting a new type of ventilated lantern. Having established America’s first circulating library, he went on to be one of the founders of the American Philosophical Society on the model of the English Royal Society. Finally, he set up an academy, which is today the University of Pennsylvania.

Alongside these civic endeavours, Franklin continued his own lifelong education. He taught himself French, Latin, Italian and Spanish. By 1725 he had worked out his own religious position. He disowned the doctrines of grace and predestination and ceased to believe in immortality. He adopted a form of deism similar to that of Voltaire, though he admitted that ‘this doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful’ (A 59).

Throughout his life, Franklin had much more interest in science than in religion. Already as a child he had invented paddles and flippers to increase his speed of swimming. The 1740s were the period of his greatest scientific endeavour. He discovered the Gulf Stream and conducted studies of the effects of oil on water. He designed new types of stove, invented the damper and attempted to devise a perfect smokeless chimney. But it was in the study of electri­city that he made his most lasting contribution to science. He began with experiments on static electricity collected through glass gadgets. Many of the most commonplace words used today in the discussion of electricity – positive, negative, neutral, battery, condenser, conductor – were coined by Franklin in these years. He discovered the fundamental law of the conservation of electric charge, and carried out the experiments that led to the invention of the lightning conductor. His results, published in a pamphlet in 1751 and swiftly translated into French, German and Italian, gave him a European reputation.

Franklin crossed the Atlantic eight times and spent long periods first in London and then in Paris. In 1759 he paid a visit to Scotland, where he met David Hume and Adam Smith and entertained them with his irreverent literary hoaxes. A member of the Pennsylvania Assembly since 1751, he visited England as its agent in a dispute with the descendants of William Penn over their proprietorial rights in Pennsylvania.

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