Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia: Chapters 6–9

Ben then decided that horse-drawn carts should be used to take away the mud and dirt. This was the forerunner of sanitation departments and garbage collectors, now so familiar and important to us all.

Ben suggested that it would be better to hire regular policemen and pay them a salary than to depend on the system of elected constables. Sometimes these constables hired helpers who struck Ben as being not much better than the thieves and bandits they were supposedly trying to catch.

At his first mass meeting in Robert’s Coffee House, 1,200 persons signed up for a defense association. The association spread through the province until there were ten thousand members. They divided themselves up into companies and became a full-fledged militia.

Ben immediately became interested in the hospital, for he was interested in everything. He wrote articles in the Gazette to get subscriptions and begged for money himself. Then he took up the matter with the Assembly. Finally he got a grant and a charter.

People who had never been cared for outside their homes, except in almshouses or jails, had a place to receive good care when they became ill.

He had noticed that heated air rises and cold air rushes in to take its place. Fireplaces of that day, with small openings, and more draughts than heat, did not take advantage of this fact.

"I’ve been using this contraption in my common room and it is twice as warm as it used to be for one-quarter the wood I used to burn there.”

The pamphlet excited plenty of interest and Governor Thomas, who was then head of the Colony of Pennsylvania, offered Ben a patent which would prevent anybody else from selling it. Ben refused. He said: "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.”

It was Ben, too, who said that farmers ought to be able to take out insurance on their crops against storms, blights, and insects.

People were horrified that he should suggest such a thing. It was flying in the face of Providence! But such insurance is commonplace today.

He decided, from watching reapers in a field, that evaporating perspiration kept the body cool. He experimented with this by having a steaming punch made of hot water, honey, and vinegar, and drinking it when the thermometer stood at a hundred. This induced perspiration and it made him feel cooler.

As for moisture, I have been in the river every evening two or three hours for a fortnight together, when one would suppose that I might imbibe enough of it to take cold if humidity could give it, but no such effect ever followed.

Once when he was going to London, he noticed that one of the ships in the convoy left a smoother wake than the others.

The captain said this was because the cook emptied grease out of the scullery in the ship’s wake.

He mounted the glasses on an iron spindle, with the largest glasses at each end of the spindle and the smallest in the middle. The spindle was then placed horizontally in a case with four legs. The player, sitting before the spindle, revolved it with a pedal, such as was found on a spinning wheel in those times, and touched the edges of the moving glasses with his fingers.

There he met a Dr. Spence, who had just come from Scotland with some apparatus for making experiments.

Within a year, Franklin had made two of his most important discoveries—his conception of electricity as a single fluid, and his discovery of the positive and negative nature of currents.

Suddenly there was a crack like a pistol shot, a terrific flash of fire, and Mr. Franklin took the entire charge through his body. Fortunately, although it was enough to kill the turkey, it wasn’t enough to kill a man. Ben was knocked insensible, as if he had been struck from head to foot with one great blow.

At this moment he received the tingle of an electric shock from the key in the palm of his hand. Who can describe the emotions of a man at such a time? Ben may have felt triumph, exaltation, wonder, awe; but we have no way of knowing.

Franklin had brought fire from the heavens with a homely toy, such as you yourself may have played with, and the world cheered.

As head of the commission to make the treaty, Franklin forbade that any liquor be sold to them.

The Assembly was very pleased with the treaty and seemed to think Ben had handled the situation masterfully. This was the beginning of his career in diplomacy.

A congress of commissioners from all the colonies went to Albany to meet with the chiefs of the Six Indian Nations, and Ben was a member of the Pennsylvania delegation.

He never became personal in his political wrangles with the governor and various officials sent over from England.

“When will you be back?” she asked wistfully.

His problems were largely concerned with taxes, which the English Crown insisted on levying on the colonists, but not on the estates of their representatives.

He was getting old and he was troubled with gout, colds, and other ailments.

As the boils subsided, Franklin’s spirits rose and he was soon again in the thick of the Continental Congress’ affairs.

Ben, who was now called Dr. Franklin, with reverence and respect, was the most famous American in the world.

When two servants in livery bore his sedan chair to the door of the State House where the Continental Congress sat for meetings, people crowded around just to look at him.

Though he has conversed with most of the great people of the world, he listened intently to my silly remarks as if they were really interesting.

The very fact that Benjamin Franklin espoused the cause of the American Revolution made the world pay more attention to it.

The women wore hoop skirts so wide they had to walk sideways through a door, and fancy bonnets. At dinner parties there would often be fourteen courses; as a result a good many people developed the gout.
Franklin did not, in spite of his fame, go in for this kind of ostentation.

The Declaration of Independence was at last made satisfactory to the Congress. When it was ratified, the greatest Americans of that time stood around, grave and worried, brooding over the things that could happen as a result of this courageous plunge into the future.

Every man who stood waiting to add his name to the document must have been trembling inside. Ben Franklin must have shared this general apprehension.