Published January 17, 2024

Happy Birthday Benjamin Franklin, born on this day in Boston, Massachusetts in 1706. He is arguably the first Caucasian/European American, with respect to the millions of Indigenous people already here for thousands of years. Walter Isaacson calls him “the most approachable Founding Father.” I also love collecting his photo on green, gray, and white rectangular paper.

If you are this far, I am wondering what you remember about him. Perhaps the kite, the key, and the lightning storm. Poor Richard’s Almanack? Franklin invented or engaged in the creation or improvement of the armonica, bifocals, the Franklin Stove, the lightning rod, swim fins, and the urinary catheter. He also refined the odometer. The Franklin Stove and lightning rod could have made him wealthier, but he offered the (then) technology for the public good.

Benjamin Franklin only had two years of formal schooling three centuries ago, twice as long as Abraham Lincoln. He made up for it by reading, and like Abe, he was a self-taught autodidactic. At the age of twelve, he was apprenticed to his brother for nine years as a printer. He learned the trade; and even contributed to his brother’s newspaper under a pseudonym. At seventeen, he ran away and ended up in Philadelphia, selling his collection of books to finance the trip.

His skills as a printer opened the doors to several shops to ply his trade. A potential business opportunity sent him to London for a year and a half when he was just eighteen years old. Traveling across the Atlantic three centuries ago was a six-week journey that was not a cruise ship. That venture never bore fruit.

For two decades in the city of Brotherly Love, he was a printer, newspaperman, businessman, and an all-around Renaissance man. He was interested in everything, constantly conducting scientific studies on a variety of topics. Franklin possessed an insatiable curiosity and a need for self-improvement. A college, fire company, and library were among his projects, and he helped refine the postal system of the time.

In 1747, far exceeding life expectancy which was under the age of thirty, he retired from business as a wealthy man. He dabbled in his inventions and was increasingly active in public life. Historian H.W. Brands describes “a man constantly reinventing himself.” Franklin was as well-known as any American colonist at the time. For a man I and others consider to be the first American, he spent twenty-seven of his final forty-three years in Europe on various diplomatic missions.

From 1757-1775 he was in Great Britain, which makes it remarkable that he supported the American Revolution after becoming a fixture in British society. After he returned to America, he assisted Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence. In the fall of 1776, he was appointed as a commissioner to France, where he would stay for nine years.

There, in 1778, he was able to secure an essential military partnership with the French, after the colonial victory at the Battle of Saratoga. That alliance was instrumental in defeating the British. He also negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which made peace with Great Britain and ended the Revolutionary War. As a diplomat, he is said to have been tactful, smart, and unassuming. He crossed the Atlantic a remarkable eight times.

The Articles of Confederation was the first American constitution that was not working, an impressive group of men met in the sweltering summer of Philadelphia in 1787 to revise it. If you slept through Civics or Political Science classes, they created the amazing document we still have, which is malleable enough for the telegraph and trains, airplanes and automobiles, and cell phones and computers.

Like many great men, he had his faults. His relationship with his common-law wife Deborah Reed was complicated, exasperated by his frequent absences and failure to write often. He had a son out of wedlock, William, who became a British loyalist on the opposite side of his father. To call him a womanizer is an understatement, stories of his flirtations are legendary. Franklin was a man of contradictions who played all sides in his personal and professional life.

When Franklin died in 1790 at eighty-four, he was the oldest founding father and third longest-lived with only the second President John Adams (90) and the fourth President James Madison outliving him.

There are several ways to learn more about this fascinating man. There is a short The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Isaacson wrote a five-hundred-page biography, on my 2024 reading list. Ken Burns produced a riveting short series of the man in 2022. Enjoy and admire his monetary photo, but your further study, by whatever means, would be very worthwhile.