REVOLUTIONS have always forged intellectual firebrands. Look at the first three American presidents, each of whom was a distinguished revolutionary and a citizen scientist. George Washington joined the American Philosophical Society and experimented with crops on his plantation; John Adams founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and Thomas Jefferson’s scientific achievements, in particular in agriculture and palaeontology, are the stuff of legend. As children of the Enlightenment, they believed that humanity could build a better world through science and political reform.
Benjamin Franklin was different. He was not a child of the Enlightenment; he was its father.
When Francis Bacon first codified the scientific method in 1620, he declared that “knowledge is power” – if humanity could decipher how nature worked we could make things better. Some 130 years later, that prophecy remained glaringly unfulfilled. Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica may have contained the universe, but there was nothing in it for the common citizen. Many saw London’s Royal Society as little more than a self-congratulatory social club for aristocrats to laud their superiority over commoners; philosopher aristocrats like Isaac Newton were as often ridiculed as revered.
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“He was not a child of the Enlightenment; he was its father”
That all changed with Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod in 1752. Through a brilliant series of experiments, this middle-class tradesman from Philadelphia made it possible for anyone to control an awesome natural force and protect their buildings from lightning strikes. This swept away any doubts about the power of science and inspired thousands to join in the grand enterprise. The achievement almost transformed Franklin into a force of nature himself: by the time he arrived in Paris 24 years later as commissioner for the US and to petition for French aid in America’s quest for independence, he was an international superstar, the greatest scientist of his time.
This is the crucial point about Franklin’s life: he would never have become a great statesman had he not first become a great scientist. This is little acknowledged today, I suspect because historians prefer statecraft to science. The First Scientific American, Joyce Chaplin’s wonderfully fresh look at this truly remarkable man, should change that forever.
Chaplin’s book is exhaustively researched and superbly narrated. Her vivid descriptions of the intricacies of life as a colonial tradesman in the 1750s paint a world that the reader can almost step into. More importantly, Chaplin tells better than anyone how Franklin used his status as a great scientist to raise himself in the world of colonial politics.
Sadly, however, the book reveals little about Franklin’s scientific mind. It would have been an even better biography if Chaplin had explained his scientific methods and thinking as brilliantly as she laid out his personal and political intrigues. For example, she fails to address Franklin’s influence on the Enlightenment; his adaptation of the Leyden jar, which experimenters used to store electrical energy and measure the charge it held; or the details of his single-fluid theory of electricity. None of these are properly explained, so the reader is never made aware of the immensity of Franklin’s contribution to science, or why London’s snooty Royal Society bestowed on this rustic colonial tradesman the Copley Medal, its equivalent of the Nobel prize.
The book contains many small errors that suggest Chaplin is not a science person herself, and herein lies the fundamental problem with trying to capture the whole of Benjamin Franklin: it’s hard to get inside another person’s mind unless you share their passions. That is why historians cannot fully grasp the scientist in Franklin, and scientists cannot fully grasp the statesman. There is one more great biography to be written about this extraordinary man, but it may take a Franklin to write it.
