The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (38 page)

Besides, Franklin had enough money to allow him and Deborah to live quite comfortably. Wealth still failed to impress him; the purpose of money was to purchase one’s freedom to pursue that which was useful and interesting. Accordingly, he decided sometime about midsummer of 1747 to turn the operation of the shop over to Hall, and on the first of January 1748 the agreement was concluded. For eighteen years the two men would be partners, should they both live that long. Franklin would supply the capital equipment and the inventory on hand; Hall would furnish
the talent and diligence necessary to direct day-to-day operations. The two men would share expenses and profits equally. The agreement was essentially exclusive, although somewhat more on Hall’s part than Franklin’s. During the eighteen years of the contract, Hall would not engage in the printing business outside the partnership; Franklin was precluded only from practicing it in Philadelphia without Hall’s leave. (This took account of the partnerships Franklin had planted elsewhere.) Hall was allowed to continue “occasional buying and selling in the stationery and bookselling way,” which he did. At the end of the term of agreement, Hall would have the option of purchasing the equipment at its 1748 value less depreciation for wear and tear.

The partnership started splendidly and thrived with the passing years. “Mr. Hall continues well, and goes on perfectly to my satisfaction,” Franklin wrote William Strahan, Hall’s old employer, two years into the arrangement. Through the mid-1750s Franklin realized more than £650 per year, on average, from what his investment and Hall’s efforts produced. At a time when a royal governor might earn £1,000 per year, this hardly made Franklin the richest man in America—or even Philadelphia, America’s richest city. But it filled all his and Deborah’s material desires. More to the point, it bought him time to pursue those other interests that always enticed him more than the getting of money.

Franklin
celebrated retirement by moving his home from Market Street to the quieter environs of Sassafras Street (also called Race Street, according to Philadelphians’ confusing habit of naming certain streets twice). The neighborhood of the market had suited a diligent tradesman who wished, as any diligent tradesman should, to keep an eye on the business; but Franklin’s new condition as silent partner called for a modest distancing from the hurly-burly. He was entering a more contemplative existence; quiet was what he sought.

In the early autumn of the first year of his retirement, he reported his state to Cadwallader Colden. “I am settling my old accounts and hope soon to be quite a master of my own time, and no longer (as the song has it)
at every one’s call but my own.”
The future held only the pleasantest prospect. “I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give my self, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness, leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy men as are pleased to honour me with their
friendship or acquaintance, on such points as may produce something for the common benefit of mankind, uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.”

For a time
, events—both those within his control and those beyond—followed Franklin’s script. The most important of either category was the war with France and Spain, which drew to a close in 1748. If Franklin’s efforts in forming the Association had proven more critical to the security of Pennsylvania, perhaps Thomas Penn would have taken less umbrage; but as things happened, the battery below Philadelphia was barely completed, and the militia had hardly started drilling seriously, before hints of peace began wafting across the Atlantic. The hints gained substance during the summer of 1748, and in October the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle officially concluded nearly a decade of conflict.

Franklin later would say that there was never a good war or a bad peace, but in the aftermath of King George’s War he would have had an argument, certainly in New England. Most disappointing—indeed infuriating—was the British restoration of Louisbourg to France. The Americans who captured the fortress, and the much larger number that fought vicariously, could hardly be expected to appreciate that in exchange for Cape Breton Island the British regained Madras in India, lost to the French at an earlier point of this global struggle. Nor did the Americans value the subtle shifts in European power the war produced. As they saw it, they had proved their superiority at arms to British regulars, only to be played fools by the British Crown. If someone had set a spark to this mixture of British arrogance and American resentment, it would have exploded.

Franklin
was busy making sparks, but literally rather than figuratively. The return of peace, following his retirement from business, allowed him to indulge his interests, of which the most interesting—to himself and presently to others—was electricity.

It was a stroke of either luck or genius that Franklin latched on to electricity when he did. Arguing for luck was his chance encounter with the subject; for genius, that he quickly appreciated that here was a field where an amateur from the provinces could do work rivaling the bestequipped
institutions of Europe. At the mid-mark of the eighteenth century, the science of electricity was in its infancy; indeed, “science” was scarcely the name. Electrical phenomena were still encountered as often in the parlor and on stage as in the laboratory. Traveling “electricians” amazed audiences with demonstrations of this mysterious force. A standard trick involved suspending a boy from the ceiling with numerous silken cords, rubbing his feet with a glass tube, and drawing “electric fire”—that is, sparks—from his face and hands. The court electrician to Louis XV, the Abbé Nollet, once delighted an audience by arranging an electrical discharge through 180 soldiers of the guard who jerked to attention with an alacrity and a simultaneity unachievable by the most demanding drill sergeant. The French king, perhaps indulging an anticlericalism he could not own in public, laughed even louder when Nollet talked seven hundred monks into joining hands along short lengths of iron wire; Nollet connected the clerics to a condenser, which sent them leaping toward their Maker with a shriek.

But no one knew what accounted for such effects, and even the factual basis on which a theory of electricity might be erected was confused and contradictory. The field cried out for an investigator with the time and curiosity to pursue assorted leads down dead ends and live, with the manual dexterity and financial resources to fabricate or purchase necessary apparatus, with the personal connections to keep abreast of others’ work, and with the literary facility to disseminate his own results in a timely and persuasive manner.

When Franklin encountered his first electrical demonstration, he had no idea he fit the job description as well as anyone alive. By his own recollection, in 1746 in Boston he met a “Dr. Spence,” who put on an electric show Franklin found fascinating, if somewhat bumbling. In fact this Spence was probably Archibald Spencer, a native of Scotland who was between jobs as a male midwife and an Anglican clergyman, and the year was 1743. During the next few years Franklin queried Peter Collinson, the Library Company’s agent in London and a man with wide scientific interests and acquaintances, regarding this intriguing subject. Collinson obliged by sending over a glass tube of the sort the electricians employed to create their effects, along with assorted remarks on the current state of the electrical art. “I eagerly seized the opportunity of repeating what I had seen at Boston,” Franklin recalled, “and by much practice acquired great readiness in performing those also which we had an account of from England, adding a number of new ones.”

Soon electricity became his passion. “I was never before engaged in
any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done,” he told Collinson in March 1747. “For what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have, during some months past, had little leisure for any thing else.” It was just at this time that Franklin began negotiating with David Hall about taking over operation of the printing business; if a single influence can be said to have persuaded Franklin to doff his printer’s apron, it was his desire to don the cloak of the electrician.

From this point forward, Franklin reported regularly to Collinson on the progress of experiments conducted by himself and his friends. In one of his first letters he supplied a novel terminology that became standard in analyzing electrical phenomena. Describing a particular apparatus, consisting of bodies labeled
A
and B, he wrote: “We say
B
(and other bodies alike circumstanced) are electrised
positively; A negatively.
Or rather
B
is electrised
plus
and
A minus.”
He also recounted certain improvements in apparatus, for example the substitution of lead granules for water inside the glass vials used to generate electricity (“We find granulated lead better to fill the vial with than water, being easily warmed, and keeping the vial warm and dry in damp air”). He described an electric spider: a mannequin of cork and linen made to jump realistically when charged—“appearing perfectly alive to persons unacquainted.” At a time when other electricians spoke of two different kinds of electricity—vitreous and resinous—Franklin unified the field by positing a single sort and explaining the opposite properties in terms of a surfeit or a deficit (that is, positive condition or negative) of this single electricity, with uncharged objects being in balance.

In his early enthusiasm Franklin occasionally conjectured more than he could prove. After additional experimentation caused him to question one of the assertions of his letters, he wrote Collinson expressing his new reservations. “I have observed a phenomenon or two that I cannot at present account for on the principles laid down in those letters, and am therefore become a little diffident of my hypothesis, and ashamed that I have expressed myself in so positive a manner.” He proceeded to muse on the scientific enterprise. “In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy! If there is no other use discovered of electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may
help to make a vain man humble.”
He went on to request that Collinson not show his letters to others, or if he must, that he conceal the author’s name.

Collinson had no intention of keeping Franklin’s results confidential. Although a natural historian of some note—he debunked the common notion that swallows hibernated in the mud of streambeds—he in fact served science better as a communicator of other people’s findings. He corresponded fruitfully with John Bartram, Franklin’s botanist friend, and it was Collinson who brought Franklin to the attention of Britain’s electrical experts. In April 1748 he wrote Franklin, regarding his earlier letters, “I have imparted them to the Royal Society, to whom they are very acceptable.”