Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was a famous printer, author, inventor, scientist, public servant and diplomat. He was commonly called “the first civilized American.” Franklin was born on the seventeenth day of January in 1706, on Milk Street in Boston Mass., he was his parents fifteenth child. Benjamin obviously respected his father, who probably taught him to read, so early that he could not remember learning it. While he was a young boy, A private teacher, George Brownell took Benjamin on. “Under him I acquired fair Writhing pretty soon, but I fail’d in the Arithmetic & made no Progress in it.” (Franklin’s Memoirs, ed. by Max Farrand, p. 20, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1949.) At 10-years-old he was taken home to assist his father in his business. Benjamin did not like what his father did though, so him and his father took a walk one day around Boston, observing the craftsmen at work and looking for a congenial trade. One of his cousins was a cutler, and that occupation was seriously considered. Franklin’s fondness for books, he decided to sign indentures with his elder brother James, who in 1717 had returned to Boston from London with a printing press. At the age of seventeen, Benjamin had a trade, h
Franklin was 79 when he made his last journey home. He had a stone in his bladder, which made carriage travel an agony. In Philadelphia he was elected to the executive council of the state and a few days later chosen president, serving three years. He had to stay in bed for the whole last year of his life, taking opium for pain. He was 84 years old when he died. Philadelphia gave him the most impressive funeral the city had ever seen. In 1740, Franklin invented the Pennsylvania fireplace, better known as the Franklin stove, a new kind of heating unit. He wrote a pamphlet about this stove in 1744, for his friend, Robert Grace, who was manufacturing it, but refused to take out a patent because “as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours” (Farrand, p. 794). Franklin ‘s study of electricity has two aspects. First, his “one fluid” theory or hypothesis accounted for more of the observable phenomena than did any previous hypothesis. Second, his suggestion that buildings might be protected from lightning by erecting pointed iron rods seemed both practical and highly dramatic. In 1753, he received the Copley medal from the Royal society and honorary M.A. degrees from Harvard and Yale. William and Mary gave him an M.A. degree in 1756, Edinburgh an LL.D. in 1759 and Oxford the degree of doctor of
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Approximate Word count = 951
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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