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ON BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Episode 1: Ingenuity

Published Aug 29, 2024, 9:01 AM

From Walter Isaacson– the bestselling biographer behind Musk, Einstein and Steve Jobs– and journalist Evan Ratliff (Shell Games, Longform) comes a revealing look into the life of Ben Franklin, and how his genius shaped America. 

In this first episode of five, we dive into the way Franklin's scientific curiosity laid the groundwork for his approach to democracy, and how his thirst for innovation not only led him to invent everything from swimming flippers to the lightning rod, but also turned him into a bona fide, worldwide celebrity—a fame he would soon wield for America's benefit.   

During the COVID crisis, and when I was hanging around Elon Mosque, I was in an airless, windowless conference room down in Bokachika, Texas and Star Base, and of course nobody was wearing masks because they were all accolytes of the mosque. But one of the things I did is i'd sneak into the conference room sometimes and make sure the vent fan was always on. I wasn't very sure about cloth masks or anything else, but I knew if you were with a group of people in a room, you should make sure the windows are open, because that's what Franklin taught us. There's a really amusing scene where Benjamin Franklin is traveling with John Adams to meet with a British emmissary to see if they can avert the revolution, and Adams and Franklin have to share a room at an end, and Adams has a cold, and Franklin keeps opening the window and Adams says, no, no, shut the window.

I have a cold.

And Franklin explains his theory of colds and airborne organisms, and Adams, who's not a very funny fellow, writes in his journal. Franklin droned on and on until I finally fell asleep and the window was left open. And indeed, Franklin doesn't catch the cold. Walter, welcome, Thank you very much, Evan. Great to be with you.

Yeah, it's great to talk to you.

I am very excited to talk about mister Benjamin Franklin. Doctor Benjamin Doctorlyn, Yes Franklin. Even though it's not exactly an Urn doctorate, he got many honorary ones and loved the title. The proper respect should be showed, respect must be paid. Over the past year, I had an ongoing conversation with the famed biographer Walter Isaacson about writing about research and of course, about the subjects themselves. You may have heard the first part of our conversation in a Musk when we talked about his experience studying the controversial tech mogul. Some of the things we discussed, both about innovation and about the state of our polarized politics. Maybe want to reach back into the past and look at some of Walter's historical subjects. So we turned to a figure that Walter can't stop thinking about, Benjamin Franklin, a man who straddled the worlds of science, media, and government in America's turbulent founding era, to see if he could help us make sense of today's turbulent times. Where were you in your life when you decided that you were going to pursue a biography of Franklin and what was about him that sort of grabbed you.

I came to Benjamin Franklin having written about Henry Kissinger and foreign policy. Kissinger was very much a raal politique realist, and I wanted to look at the roots of that tension between realism and idealism in American foreign policy, and it takes you back to Benjamin Franklin. He is both the ultimate realist and the ultimate idealist. So I thought, wow, I should go back and do Benjamin Franklin. But then the second thing that struck me is that his balance of power, diplomacy, and the checks and balances, all the things he did derived from his science.

It wasn't easy for someone like Franklin, who had limited means, to transition seamlessly from printing to science to politics, and excel.

In all three.

This remarkable versatility became the foundation of Franklin's and during Influence I was especially interested to learn about Franklin the scientists. It's the part of the my new least well, or at least not beyond the idea that he discovered electricity. More on that in a bit, And Isaacson tells me it's his scientific curiosity and exploration that lays the groundwork for some of his most important work as a founding father. For Franklin, being a scientist was not a profession or a strict field of study. It was a state of mind driven by curiosity and a tendency towards self directed learning. And of course there was still so much to discover.

Nowadays.

In our generation you had people who were great humanist, great, but they would tell, oh, I can't do physics, I can't do man, you know, I don't do any of that. But he or his younger friend Jefferson would have thought you were a philistine if you did keep up with science. Well, does reconnect it for Benjamin Franklin, somebody whose experimental nature, whose search for evidence informed everything he did. So that made me you want to write about all the facets of Benjamin Franklin, the scientists, Benjamin Franklin, the entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin, the business person who creates a media Empire, Benjamin Franklin, the diplomat. All of this wove together, and I felt, nowadays, boy, we really need Benjamin Franklin.

So that's why I immersed myself.

At that time, you felt we need Benjamin and all the more so today I want.

To go all the way back, start at the beginning, and try to figure out how he became one of the foremost scientists of his age.

Benjamin Franklin was the tenth son of a Puritan immigrant to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and as a tenth son, he was going to be his father's tithe to the Lord. His father was going to send him to Harvard to study to be a minister, and Franklin wasn't exactly cut for the cloth.

At some point, they were.

Assaulting the provisions for the winter, and he said to his father, why don't we just say grace over him right now? We get it done for the entire the next few months. And so his father realized, well, that would be a waste of money to send him to become a minister. He was always a spunky lad, and he loved to think of himself as a leader among the boys. He was the one who led the other kids to stealing rocks so they could build a dam in the Boston Harbor where they could swim, and he invented ways to do swimming, including paddles and flippers.

Franklin becomes an autodidact, less by choice than by the fact that his dad decides that this particular son is probably not worth the investment of a Harvard education.

He becomes a person always curious. He read about everything from history to science. He watches how whirlwinds form. He eventually discovers how storms move up the coast because he's interested in a kneeclipse that is happening. So it's that insatiable curiosity I think was almost created when he was denied the right to go to college. So he gets his hunger for teaching himself and.

This sort of ability to see the world in a way that you feel you can figure it out if you see something around you. In Benjamin Franklin, it prompted an idea that he could solve it, that he could understand something that maybe hadn't been understood.

This was the gift of the scientific revolution that had occurred just before Franklin's time, which is the universe wasn't just a total mystery. There were things you could figure out about it. How storms moved, how eclipses happened. Now that seems pretty obvious, but you have to remember before the Enlightenment, we thought wisdom was received as opposed to let's figure out nature. And so Franklin becomes the pioneer of the Enlightenment in America. Unlike Newton Galileo, he doesn't have a lot of math. He doesn't do the theories. But as he says, as a practical person, you don't need to know the theory of gravity to know that if you let go of a piece of crockery, it'll fall to the floor and break. Among the things Franklin studied as an experimentalist and a tinker is just simple phenomenon, the lightning rod being the most famous. But then how does dark cloth absorb heat better than light cloth? And he did experiments where he put black pieces of cloth on snow and then lighter pieces of cloth and measured which would melt the snow underneath faster.

It almost sounds like something you would do in the eighth grade or even elementary school science project. And the idea that at the time he could conceive these experiments and just do them on his own. He could just execute them and make a discovery.

Yeah, we had great theorists right before from Fanklin who understood the nature of light and heat. But then you have Franklin doing experiments we all did. It's like, okay, a light piece of cloth and a dark one, what's going to get warmer? But what Franklin does is he always looked for practical ways to use that your clothes in summer should be light and in winter should be dark. He also tinkered and created a wood burning stove we now call the Franklin stove, and it was about the simple thing of how do you get more heat into the room with less smoke. And these type of things may seem mundane compared to Newton figuring out a theory of gravity, but in our daily lives having clean burning stoves, bifocal glasses, understanding the heat absorption of cloth, a urinary Catherine when his brother was having a urinary tract disease, Franklin is able to make it flexible, easy to insert.

And this is just his way of using both.

Science and ingenuity to create new technology, which is what we try to do in our modern age.

When we come back.

Franklin's scientific discoveries make him an international celebrity, and we'll even dig into that rumor about Franklin wanting to bump the bald Eagle and make the humble Turkey America's official bird. There's this story of Benjamin Franklin and his ingenuity that every school kid knows. It involves a man in long socks, a kite, a key, and a lightning storm. But it isn't just his discovery of electricity and conductivity that makes this moment special. As with all franklin scientific explorations, it led to something practical, an invention that saved countless lives.

I asked Walter about that.

I did not realize how famous he became just from the lightning rod, particularly in France, and it's sort of foreshadowing for later what he's able to do diplomatically for the New America. A lot of it is derived from this fame that he's accrued because he invented the lightning rod.

It's kind of odd, but up until then people believed they were bolts from heaven and an expression of God's will, and they would consecrate the bells of churches to water off the lightning, but even the most religiously faithful were likely to have noticed that it was not very effective. Lightning kept hitting church peoples. In Germany. During one period thirty five years, three hundred and eighty six churches were struck, and in venice like three thousand people were killed when tons of gun powder had been stored in the church and it was hit. Franklin later wrote to John Winthrop, who was a Harvard professor, and he wrote, the lightning seems to strike steeples of choice just as the bells are ringing. One would think we might now try some other trick to ward it off.

Benjamin Franklin again.

His electricity experiments when a showman came down from Boston who was doing static electricity, you know, rubbing a glass with cloth and then making little sparks. What Franklin does is he mixes this sort of fun you have with a parl trick using static electricity with theories from reading the other great scientists of the time. In the journal that Franklin kept for his experiments, he noted in seventeen forty nine that there were some similarities between electrical sparks and lightning, and being the type of bookkeeper he was, he listed twelve of them. They both give light, they have the same color, the crooked direction of swift motion, the sulfur of smell. Very Franklin like. He puts his rallying cry at the bottom of the notebook page, let the experiment be made. You know, great theorists like Newton had noticed the apparent connection between lightning and electricity, but nobody had written, let the experiment be made.

Uh huh.

So Franklin lays out a methodical test for figuring out exactly what lightning is, and it's a rather complicated thing. He describes how you would make an electrical stand that's grounded but has an iron rod that's connected to the earth, and how many feet And he also discovered that pointed pieces of metal attract sparks better than rounded pieces. So he does all of these very specific descriptions of how to do the experiment, and it's done actually in France first before he has a chance to erect all the apparatus in Philadelphia.

But even though he wasn't there to do the experiment, he becomes famous for having designed the experiment.

Absolutely the King of France has read about Franklin's proposed experiments, and the King asks people in France to try to carry them out, and these are known as Franklin's experiments.

And then what happens when he finally arrives in France.

When he arrives in France, he is known as the great scientist who tamed lightning, and so he's enormously famous. Crowds turn out in Brittany when he lands. They carry him to the steps of the academy when he gets to Paris so that he can hug Voltaire. He also is a good public relations guy. And so Franklin, who had hardly ever been to the backwoods and lives in Philadelphia, Boston and London his whole life. Where's a fur cap he had gotten during one trip to Canada and pretends to be the back wood sage and scientists, and they were veeram and the women start wearing their hair and what was called the coiffor la la Franklin, which is their hair done up as if it's a fur cap on their heads.

It's wild to think of them as such a celebrity. And then you realize at this point his popularity is just from the lightning rod, even though he also invented or goes on to invent so many other things. But my question is, why didn't you patent the lightning rod?

I mean, it.

Feels obvious for a man like Franklin, a successful business owner, if he'd just taken a percentage on every rod, his descendants could still live off that.

Yeah, he talks about how much it could have made had he patented the lightning rod idea or patent in the stove. But he always felt that it was part of your civic duty to be inventive, and that we gained so much from previous inventions that we should be happy to put things back in the river of history. So his experiments that come to the conclusion of the single fluid theory of electricity, the invention of batteries in which you can store electricity, the invention of lightning rods so you can draw electricity from the clouds, those are the most important experimental discoveries of his era. But he just wants to say, what use is it. At one point, after a season of electricity experiments, he said, we discovered all sorts of things, but we hadn't figured out what the use of it would be and so they draw a lot of electricity stored in batteries and then use the shocks to kill turkeys. And he said they were uncommonly tender, And so we Southerners like to think he's the inventor of the first fried turkey.

Hold on, speaking of turkeys. What to quickly address this rumor that you hear periodically around Thanksgiving that Ben Franklin wanted the turkey as America's national birdd instead of the bald eagle.

I think he thought the bald eagle was too proud, And it was in one of his writings where he didn't want there to be an aristocracy called the Cincinnatis Club, people who had started with Washington were supposed to be part. He said, no, no, we're not trying to do that. And he then does this little divergence where he doesn't want the eagle to be the symbol of un I say, it's should be the turkey, because the turkey reminds us, you know, we're a little bit silly. We shouldn't take ourselves too seriously, and he does this pay on to the turkey. I'm much more practical, and I don't know He just thought we shouldn't get too grand, we should poke fun at our pretensions.

We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll look at how Franklin's scientific inquiry bled into all parts of his life, including how he managed to keep a cool head while helping found it in nation. One of the things about Ben Franklin is that being a scientist it is foundational. It shapes him as a person and spills into all his different interests, but he's always kind of doing it on the side. When does it really become a focus for him?

By age forty two, he had probably become the most successful self made person in the colonies. He had not only created print shops, but he enfranchised them up and down the coast. He had helped create a colonial postal system to tie these print shops together. He created Poor Richard, and he created newspapers, and so this makes him very successful. But at that point he wants to change his life a bit, and so he retires, partly so that he become more of a civic citizen, even more than he had been before, but also somebody who was interested in everything from the sparks of electricity and lightning to diplomacy.

What do you think it was about his outlook on life that caused him to have this almost like sense of fun and scientific adventure about exploring all of these different areas.

There are very few people in history who really have a hunger to learn everything possible about everything that you could know. I mean, that's certainly true of Leonardo da Vinci. It was everything from a musician to a mathematician, to an artist to an engineer. It was true of maybe Aristotle. Well, it's definitely true of Benjamin Franklin.

And he must have had an innate ability to not be concerned about being wrong or being called a dabbler.

Yeah.

I think that if somebody called him a dabbler an amateur, he would take it as a compliment. He really loved being ingenious and trying to be interested in everything, and I think he thought if he were blinder and too focused, he wouldn't be able to be as creative or as imaginative. He also just loved science for its own sake, the fascination of experiments, and that included when he's in France after the Revolution, he's helping fund the first flights of hot air balloons, just because he's totally fascinated. When a spectator asked, what is the use of these new balloons? What are they good for? Franklin said, what is the use of a newborn baby. Franklin realized that curiosity for its own sake, we may not know what it will grow into, but we should always expect that things will grow and they'll become useful.

But he didn't lose the rest of his life on it. Experiments. He just did experiments while he was doing everything else.

Even when he's in England trying to negotiate for the colonies and prevent the revolution, he's still pursuing scientific inquiries. It's his hobby. So he helped put the lightning rods on Saint Paul's cathedral. That's where he does his theories of the common cold. That's where he does theories of exercise, where he sees how much heat you're generating when you do different types of exercises, and sort of comes up with this notion of what we now called calories. He looked into lead poisoning why the oceans were salty. He actually got.

That one wrong.

But even inventing things like musical instruments.

You mentioned in being wrong. That's another aspect of it is it's not just about making discoveries and proving things, but it's about this sort of iteration and revision and evolution where you might get it wrong, but then you've still moved scientific knowledge forward.

He liked testing things out and being open to evidence. The basic scientific method which Franklin embraced, which is to have a theory, figure out a way you can test it, then revise your theory based on the evidence you get. That scientific method sounds so simple to us, it's so obvious. He got a theory, test it, and by the way, if the evidence comes back, figure out a new theory. And that notion helps him understand how science intersects with public policy. One of the things we don't do very well is let people change their minds. We always say, well, you flip flopped, or you change your mind. Well, Franklin often evolved. He evolved on slavery, he evolved on immigration. And having that open mind in which you're willing to accept new evidence and revise your opinions. That's the essence of the scientific method. But it's also the essence of democracy.

And for someone who is so detail orient to. He seemed to push the notion of imperfection, that imperfection needed to be allowed in the Constitution. It's sort of funny to think about today when there's so much reverence for the founding fathers. So they've written the perfect documents, and those documents need to be respected letter by letter and word by word. But he seemed to have a notion of we're not going to achieve perfection.

His closing speech in the Constitutional Convention is really a document that everybody should read. He was the oldest person by far at the Convention, twice as old as the average member, and he says, I confess that I do not entirely approve this Constitution at present. But he said, the older I get, the more I realize that I'm wrong at times, and which seems like an imperfection to me. Well, maybe it's the right way to do it. And so he says, I endorse this Constitution with all of its perhaps flaws, because I'm not sure now that they are flaws, or that we could get something more perfect came out of human hands.

And of course there were cases where he was right, and one of them is the Gulf Stream. Can you walk us through how you figure that out.

Even as he's traveling across the ocean coming back to Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five, for instance, there he is standing on the deck of the boat with his grandson Temple and hearing that it takes longer to get back to America than it does to get to Europe. And he's going, why is that? Why is that? And so he measures, with his grandson helping him, the temperature of the water. And he's devised a barrel that has a flap to it that he can open so he can take the temperature at different depths to see how deep the Gulf stream is.

And something that is now confirmed by satellites that match up to a picture that he created just by lowering barrels into the water.

It's extraordinary.

If you see the chart he makes, it's remarkably similar to the one that's now on the NASA web site. In fact, the NASA website reprints a picture of Benjamin Franklin's chart. Franklin was a great believer in the future. In his will, he set up to trust funds for aspiring entrepreneurs like himself, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia. The revolving loan fund in Philadelphia was particularly interesting because it accrued just as the way he said it did, and two centuries after his death, the fund had reached more than two million dollars, and at one point it was used by kids in inner city Philadelphia to make electric go kart type things to race in one of these solar races. So I love the idea of the person who help us harness electricity also having a loan fund of people doing it in the twenty first century.

And was there a tiny bit of ego in it too that his name was sort of carry along with those he couldn't have known maybe how big his name would continue to be anyway.

Oh, I think he knew.

Franklin was someone who cared deeply about the legacy he would leave not only as a scientist and a civic leader, but also as a man with some pretty big regrets of a.

More personal nature.

Next time on on Benjamin Franklin, we dive into Franklin's early life. He was a printer, a businessman, and a rebel.

Franklin has a very complicated family life, and throughout his life he had kept this ledger of errors. He had made and how he had regnified and mistake number one in his ledger book was running Away from his brother.

This show is based on the writing and research of Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs, Who's our editor. Social media by Dara Potts.

This show was.

Engineered at CDMU Studios from iHeart Podcasts. The executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by Mangeshetigador, with an assist from Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman, conel Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan Otuski and Ali Gavin And If you like podcasts about inventions what they mean for humanity, check out my other show shell Game, about how it created an AI clone and set it loose on the world. It's at shell Game dot co. And for more shows from Kaleletoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.

Thanks so much for listening

ON Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson

He didn’t have a role in Hamilton, but America wouldn’t be the same without him!  From Walter Isaac 
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