Benjamin Franklin

American · 1706 to 1790

Born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts Bay, Benjamin Franklin was the fifteenth of seventeen children fathered by Josiah Franklin, a soap and candle maker. He had two years of formal schooling. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer, and read everything he could borrow; smuggling essays into his brother's newspaper under the name Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow whose opinions he invented at sixteen. He ran away to Philadelphia at seventeen, arriving with three puffy rolls and almost no money, and built a printing business that made him a wealthy man. Poor Richard's Almanack, which he published yearly from 1732 to 1758 under the name Richard Saunders, sold roughly ten thousand copies a year and seeded the language with proverbs. He retired from printing at forty-two to pursue science, drawing electricity from a thunderstorm with a kite in 1752 and inventing the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, and bifocal spectacles, none of which he patented. He helped draft and signed the Declaration of Independence, secured the French alliance as minister in Paris, and signed the Constitution, the only person to sign all four founding documents of the new republic. He began The Autobiography in 1771 and left it unfinished, its narrative breaking off well before the Revolution; it was first published after his death and became one of the most widely read memoirs ever written. He owned slaves for much of his life and late in it became president of an abolition society. He died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four, and some twenty thousand people attended his funeral.