Articles, broadcasts highlight physicist and US founding father Benjamin Franklin
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8005
“Electricity became the exemplar of physical science during the eighteenth century,” wrote historian of science John L. Heilbron in Elements of Early Modern Physics (University of California Press, 1982). Concerning the 18th-century physical scientist Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson declared in 1782 that “no one of the present age has made more important discoveries, nor has enriched philosophy with more, or more ingenious, solutions of the phenomena of nature.” Recent coverage in a few major media outlets has focused on the statesman Franklin as a physicist who successfully promoted practical science-mindedness in civic life.
What occasions the focus is a new book, The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), by Jonathan Lyons. The Wall Street Journal‘s review opened with an anecdote and an overview:
Benjamin Franklin once led a party of merry picnickers who, with electrified gilt goblets, toasted the international community of scientists studying electricity. The group then slaughtered a turkey with an electrical charge and roasted it with electrical fire. Franklin observed: “Birds killed in this Manner eat uncommonly tender.” Franklin was one of the foremost “electricians” of his day, winning the prestigious Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London for his theoretical and practical accomplishments in the field. Connections between Franklin’s scientific work and his role in early American politics have been explored in a number of biographies and scholarly studies. In “The Society for Useful Knowledge,” Jonathan Lyons takes a provocative turn: He claims that Franklin’s notion of “useful knowledge"—gleaned from the charter of the Royal Society—spread throughout the colonies and “made possible the Revolution and . . . America’s characteristic political and economic systems.”
Franklin founded one society for useful knowledge, the American Philosophical Society, that came to be presided over by Jefferson while he served concurrently as US vice president and then president. Concerning such societies, the Weekly Standard‘s reviewer of Lyons’s book wrote the following:
The idea of these societies came from England. As a teenager on his first visit to London, Franklin had frequented the coffeehouses, many of which doubled as political or entrepreneurial discussion clubs. The era’s leading useful knowledge group was the Royal Society, founded in 1660. Its guiding principles were those of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who had sought to turn intellectual life away from the authority of the ancients—from theology and metaphysics—and toward a new unity of theory and practice. Among the Royal Society’s early luminaries were John Locke and William Penn; but its single brightest star was Sir Isaac Newton: physicist, mathematician, and hardworking head of the Royal Mint.
At first it seemed unlikely that the threadbare colonials could rival so lofty an organization as the Royal Society, but Franklin’s electrical experiments—one of which demonstrated that lightning is, in fact, electrical—and his invention of workable lightning conductors made a huge impression on the Royal Society. The group honored Franklin by making him the first American recipient of its annual Copley Medal, in 1753, and then gave him membership in the society itself, as did its French counterpart, the Académie des Sciences. For the rest of his life, Franklin was a scientific celebrity throughout Europe.
At the Boston Globe, a reviewer addressed how Franklin translated his overseas experience for application in America:
In the new America, as Franklin and his cohort saw it, “experimental science and experiential knowledge” were the order of the day. In place of European metaphysical philosophy and classical education in Greek and Latin came a thirst for the practical application of science and for a practical education in reading and writing English. It was philosophy grounded in the artisanal crafts of printing and smithing, and of architecture and husbandry. Franklin’s experiments with electricity were a public sensation in part because it was a literal shock you could feel in your own body. Thus the various organizations of “leather apron” artisans and “useful knowledge” societies spread throughout the colonies. (One of their descendants lives on in Cambridge’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences, cofounded in 1780 by John Adams.) Among Franklin’s circle we meet the astronomer David Rittenhouse, botanist John Bartram, and the Founding Father, physician, and educator Benjamin Rush. All play their role in Lyons’s story.
The coverage has also included a 69-minute C-SPAN book talk by Lyons, a 25-minute segment on NPR’s Science Friday, and NPR’s online excerpt from the book.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.