Franklin Born: America's Renaissance Man

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, the fifteenth of seventeen children in a family of candle and soap makers. He had two years of formal education, attended the Boston Latin School briefly and then a private academy, and was pulled out at ten to work in his father's shop. Everything else he learned himself. He was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer, at twelve, and ran away to Philadelphia at seventeen with virtually nothing. By his mid-twenties, he was publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard's Almanack, whose aphorisms about thrift, industry, and common sense became foundational to the American self-image. The almanac made him wealthy enough to retire from printing at forty-two and devote the rest of his life to science, diplomacy, and civic projects. The kite-and-key experiment in 1752 was not a theatrical stunt but a controlled scientific test that proved lightning was electrical, leading directly to his invention of the lightning rod. He also invented bifocals, the flexible urinary catheter, the glass harmonica, and swim fins. He founded the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, and the first public lending library and first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia. He was the only Founding Father to sign all four of the nation's founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution. He served as ambassador to France in his seventies, where Parisian society treated him as a celebrity, and returned home to serve as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention at eighty-one. He died on April 17, 1790, at eighty-four.