17 January: Benjamin Franklin

Born this date in 1706 Benjamin Franklin was one of the most well known founders of the United States of America. He signed the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States and the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. He's also known as a scientist and inventor. Here are some facts about him:

1. He only attended school for two years, because that's all his parents could afford. (Since his father had seventeen children by two wives, that's hardly surprising!) He left school at the age of ten to work for his father and later as an apprentice in his brother's print shop. He was a voracious reader, often going without food in order to buy books.
2. When his brother James started up a newspaper called the New England Courant, Benjamin wanted to write for it, but James refused. Undeterred, Benjamin submitted letters and articles under the name of Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow. His submissions covered a wide range of subjects from religion and women's rights to fashion and marriage. Mrs Dogood's writings became so popular that "Mrs Dogood" received several marriage proposals. When Ben eventually came clean and told his brother he was Mrs Dogood, James was angry and jealous.
3. Fed up with being mistreated by his brother, Ben left home and settled in Philadelphia, at the age of 17. He was virtually penniless when he arrived, but in time, set up his own print shop and wrote and published “Poor Richard’s Almanack”, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. The almanac was the source of a number of adages still often quoted today, such as "A penny saved is twopence dear", "Fish and visitors stink in three days", and "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise". He went from being penniless to being able to retire at the age of 42 and devote himself to science and public service.
4. He didn't make his fortune in time to be able to marry the woman he wanted. In his early days in Philadelphia, he lodged with the Read family and fell in love with their 15 year old daughter, Deborah. He proposed to her when he was 17 but her widowed mother, worried about Franklin's financial position and the fact he was about to travel to London at Governor Sir William Keith's request, didn't allow the marriage. While Franklin was in London, Deborah married someone else. However, the man she married turned out to be a crook who stole her dowry and fled to Barbados without her. Nowadays that would be grounds for divorce or annulment, but not back then. Deborah was stuck and not free to marry again. When Franklin returned, he moved in with Deborah. Their common law marriage produced two children, and the couple also brought up Franklin's illegitimate son, William. Deborah was afraid of the sea, and so never travelled with her husband but was known to complain about being left behind.
5. Franklin was musical, too - he played the Violin, the harp, and the Guitar and also composed music. He even invented a musical instrument, the glass armonica, designed to reproduce the sound of a wet finger rubbing the rim of a glass. It consisted of 37 Glass orbs of different sizes and pitches, which he then mounted on a spindle controlled by a foot pedal. Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss all composed music for it. Franklin wrote, “Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction.”
6. His many other inventions include bifocal lenses, the lightning rod, swimming aids, the Franklin stove, an iron fireplace that produced less smoke and used less wood, and the first volunteer fire brigade in America. He never patented his inventions, believing that they should be freely available rather than a means to make money. He wrote, "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; and this we should do freely and generously. He also invented a phonetic alphabet which ditched the redundant consonants C, J, Q, W, X and Y and added six new letters. That one didn't catch on.
7. Everyone has heard of his experiments with Kites and Lightning, but he was also the first to study and chart the Gulf Stream. At the time, he was deputy postmaster, and began looking into complaints about how long it took mail from England to reach New York, when merchant ships could do the trip much faster. Franklin's cousin, a sea captain, told him about the strong eastbound mid-ocean current which the merchant ships knew to avoid, but the mail ships sailed right into it. At first, the British sea captains ignored Franklin's advice, but when they started to listen to him they could cut their journey time by as much as two weeks.
8. Despite being a Founding Father of the USA and signing all the documents, he wasn't so keen on independence from Britain at first, since he'd lived there and held royal appointments. He campaigned for a peaceful compromise rather than revolution. When the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, he said it was an “act of violent injustice on our part” and insisted that the East India Company should be compensated for its losses. As time went on, he changed his mind and publicly announced his support for American independence - but not before he was suspected of being a British spy.
9. He is a member of both the Chess and swimming halls of fame. Swimming because he had a lifelong love of the sport. He swam in the Thames while in England and was observed to be so good that a friend offered to help him set up a swimming school. While Franklin turned that offer down he remained a proponent of swimming instruction for the rest of his life. Chess because he wrote a well-known essay, The Morals of Chess that detailed the rules of conduct for playing the game and was responsible for making chess a popular sport in America.
10. Although he owned slaves as household servants in his younger days, he became an abolitionist in his later years. His daughter's inheritance was conditional on her freeing her slaves. He also left money to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. There were strings attached, however - for its first 100 years, the money was to be placed in a trust and only used to provide loans to local tradesmen. A portion could then be spent, but the rest would remain off limits for another 100 years, at which point the cities could use it as they saw fit. By 1990 these funds were worth $4.5 million and $2 million. The money was used to help finance the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston. As for Franklin's sons, one died young, and he'd fallen out with William over American Independence. When Franklin became a supporter, William didn't - he was staunchly against the revolution and even went to prison for opposing it. After the war, he moved to England. His father never forgave him and cut him out of his will.

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