The Society for Useful Knowledge (16 page)

But if nature's laws were one and the same, on earth as in the heavens, then surely any findings from Franklin's Philadelphia experiments, albeit carried out in colonial obscurity, were equally valid, and thus to be equally valued in London, Paris, Leipzig, or St. Petersburg. In this way, Newton's claim on the universal application of natural philosophy essentially freed Franklin and his fellow Philadelphians to challenge the imperial economy of knowledge and to stake their own claims on scientific inquiry.
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And, in fact, Franklin's experimental protocols—both the famous electric kite and an earlier version using a soldier's sentry box to attract lightning and
capture some of its power—were soon performed to great acclaim across the scientific world, from England, France, and the Netherlands to Russia and as far away as Japan. His collected writings on the subject, drawn primarily from his letters to Collinson between 1747 and 1750, were published in London under the title,
Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America
. Subsequent editions appeared in French, German, and Italian.
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Given Franklin's lifelong antipathy for classical learning, it is fitting that a planned volume in Latin was never completed.

Among the public at large, the dissemination of Franklin's curious observations and specifically his proposal for the use of lightning rods was, well, nothing short of electric. He was widely hailed as both a genius and the true philosopher of nature, and his accomplishments were celebrated in verse and commemorated by university professors, government ministers, and the press. His collaborator Kinnersley predicted that as a result of the lightning rod Franklin's name would go down in history alongside that of the incomparable Isaac Newton: “May this method of security from the destructive violence of one of the most awful powers of nature … extend to the last posterity of mankind, and make the Name of FRANKLIN like that of NEWTON, immortal.”
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The French economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who served as finance minister when Franklin was representing the rebellious American colonies in Paris, wrote a Latin epigram that captured something of the popular sentiment toward the electrician-turned-politician: “He snatched the lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.” Franklin's image as a simple colonial sage—which he did nothing to discourage and in fact everything to advance—resonated with the French public in particular. A French translation of sayings from his
Poor Richard's
almanacs became a bestseller under the title,
The Way to Wealth
, while his homespun clothing provided the alluring air of the frontiersman amid the over-the-top finery and foppery of the Paris salons and the royal court.

Soon, his likeness accompanied by Turgot's inspirational motto was being reproduced on silk, porcelain, and other fine materials across France. Understandably, King Louis XVI was nonplussed by the sudden ubiquity of this potent symbol of democratic rebellion, even if Franklin and the Americans did represent useful allies against the hated British. In a fit of petulance, the king had a porcelain chamber pot fashioned for his mistress with Franklin's portrait prominently painted on the inside.
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Popular enthusiasm for the lightning rod tended to overshadow the advances in basic science achieved by the Philadelphia circle. The virtuosi, too, elevated the new Franklinist principles of electricity to almost unassailable heights and effectively blocked out opposing views. Several important elements united the public and the natural philosophers in their adulation. First, Franklin's work grew directly from the contemporary fad in Europe and the colonies for electrical phenomena. As a result, the man in the street, not just the specialist, was well aware of the theoretical problems and practical issues involved.

Second, Franklin's findings provided a seemingly straightforward example of the ways scientific knowledge could arm man with power over the forces of nature, as reflected in Turgot's epigram. Third, they comported with contemporary sensibilities regarding common sense and bodily experience as vital complements to rational investigation. Perhaps most important of all, the development of the lightning rod appeared to validate the widely held faith, traceable back at least to Francis Bacon more than 130 years earlier, that the work of the natural philosophers would ultimately lead to practical applications.
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The two colonial cities that shaped Franklin's outlook, the Boston of his early years and the Philadelphia of his commercial and political successes, proved particularly hospitable to the exploration into “the Nature of Things.” By the time of Franklin's birth, the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had long since carved out space for reason and argumentation, in contrast to what they saw as the unthinking, implicit faith of their sectarian rivals.

They also saw the utility of knowledge as part and parcel of God's providence. To be sure, the divine plan was contained fully within the Puritan creed, but this did not absolve man from responsibility to carry out his own investigations into the world of nature.
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John Norton, a leading figure among the New England Puritans, made this link between faith and knowledge explicit: “The end of the Gospel is to be known, the duty and disposition of the Believer, is to know.”
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Besides, noted his fellow cleric John Cotton, “Zeal is but a wildfire without knowledge.”
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The Puritans also nurtured something of an intellectual tradition within their clergy, reflected in the founding of the early New England universities, Harvard and Yale. The Puritan cleric Increase Mather, who read deep religious portent into the appearance of a pair of spectacular comets in 1680 and 1682,
took up astronomy and formed a small circle of his own, the Philosophical Society of Agreeable Gentlemen.

This modest enterprise, which apparently never had more than a handful of active members, faded within several years amid the press of religious and political controversies surrounding the Puritan community. Yet, Increase and his son Cotton Mather contributed regular reports of New World phenomena to the virtuosi in London, and Cotton was elected to membership in the Royal Society after the publication of a long series of his scientific letters, collated as the
Curiosa Americana
.

In time, the other main religious groups in colonial America followed the example of the New England Puritans and established their own educational institutions: the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and the informal “log colleges” among the Presbyterians; Queen's College (Rutgers) for the Dutch Reformed; King's College (Columbia) and the College of William and Mary for the Anglicans. While the central thrust was devoted to education of the faithful and the grooming of the clergy, other subjects gradually began to make inroads into the traditional curriculum.

Among the Philadelphia Quakers, who had no place for a trained priesthood, or any other formal religious authority for that matter, education naturally flowed toward recognizable secular subjects that could improve society and produce better citizens.
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Such attitudes often clashed with the social ambitions of the city's leading families, who demanded the social prestige that a classical education would confer upon their sons. The ensuing struggle long plagued another of Franklin's favorite civic projects—the creation of a proper college befitting the largest and richest city in the colonies—and eventually forced him to withdraw from any meaningful role in an institution that later became the University of Pennsylvania.

International acclaim for Franklin camouflaged the deeper significance of the arrival of colonial science, just as it compensated for any regret he may have felt over the early setbacks suffered by the American Philosophical Society. Besides, Franklin still had the felicitous company of his friends and collaborators in the Junto, as well as those from the larger Library Company, to discuss the latest ideas, try out new experiments, and pursue useful civic improvements.

However, the immediate prospects for other scientifically inclined Americans were somewhat less promising. Cadwallader Colden, one of Franklin's early
partners in the proposed philosophical society, confessed in a letter to Collinson that their transatlantic correspondence was his only true source of intellectual stimulation. “I take you to be one of my own taste, and I have often wished to communicate some thoughts in natural philosophy, which have remained many years with me undigested, for we scarcely have a man in this country that takes any pleasure in such kind of speculations.”
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Farther south, in Charleston, the young Scottish doctor Alexander Garden likewise bemoaned his own isolation, despite the heavy concentration of fellow physicians drawn to South Carolina by the high incidence of illness induced by the hot, steamy climate. Garden had emigrated in 1752, and he, too, sought to make his fortune from the miseries of the region's rampant disease: yellow fever, malaria, dengue fever, and diphtheria were all common afflictions. Carolina, recounted one eighteenth-century European visitor, was “in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital.”
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Still, it was almost impossible for Charleston's several dozen physicians—some formally trained in Europe, others simply quacks out for a quick buck—all to earn a living. Patients rarely paid on time, if at all, and more and more doctors kept arriving to try their luck. An attempt by the town's practitioners to band together in a “Faculty of Physic” and demand regular payment for services rendered only provoked disdain among the local populace, a number of whom took to the pages of the
South Carolina Gazette
to ridicule the entire profession. Some pilloried the physicians in verse, capturing the general public animus for American medicine.
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Garden, who sniped reflexively at his friend John Bartram's lack of learning after the latter began to supply the British crown with plant specimens, was appalled by the low level of scientific knowledge among his new Carolina colleagues, particularly in matters of medicinal herbs and other aspects of botany. Nor were the rest of the city's inhabitants much better.

“In Charleston we are a set of the busiest, most bustling, hurrying animals imaginable, and yet we really do not do much, but we must appear to be doing,” he complained to one of his regular European correspondents. The local “gentlemen planters” were the worst of all, their entire existence taken up simply with “eating, drinking, lolling, smoking, and sleeping.”
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South Carolina was “a horrid place,” the ill-tempered Garden added in a separate letter, “where there is not a living soul who knows the least iota of Natural History.”
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To ease their shared predicament, men like Bartram, Colden, and Garden devoted enormous energy to cultivating contacts among the European scientists, often through amateur intermediaries such as Collinson and later through Franklin as well, and then to carrying on a regular correspondence over the course of many years. At times, their entreaties make painful reading as the Americans seek to curry favor among the Europeans by underscoring their own lowly status in the intellectual pecking order. “May you, Sir, who are the favored priest of Nature, and already deeply initiated into her mysteries, go on to inform yourself more and more, to examine and discover everything that is possible, and to instruct us in your invaluable writings,” wrote Garden in his tireless campaign to win over Linnaeus.
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The Swedish naturalist eventually responded with a number of letters of his own, and he gladly accepted Garden's help in collecting specimens, for which he later credited his colonial correspondent in his masterwork, the
Systema Naturae
. But Linnaeus had to be pressed by a mutual friend to reward the American's many years of contributions to the field of botany before agreeing to assign the name
gardenia
to a genus of tropical flowering shrubs.

Maintaining such a correspondence was not a simple endeavor in the eighteenth century. The slow pace of the transatlantic mail packets and other vessels, and the very real chance that important items would miscarry or fail to arrive altogether, required a great deal of organization, effort, and planning. Correspondence frequently crossed, confounding sender and recipient alike, or was lost to the fortunes of war, accidents at sea, or plunder by privateers. The time-consuming production of multiple copies of particularly important correspondence was routine, as was the keeping of special letter books, or ledgers, to record both incoming and outgoing mail, organized by date, subject, or perhaps recipient. On top of that, the naturalists had to arrange with friendly sea captains to ensure that their precious cargoes of plants, animal bones, fossils, or other specimens safely reached their destination.

Garden agonized throughout his lifetime over fears that he had failed to keep up his side in this exchange of letters, notes, and observations, often begging his correspondents' indulgence toward his obvious shortcomings. By contrast, the organized, efficient, and single-minded Franklin, who recognized at once the power inherent to directing the flows of information and ideas, effortlessly took to the art of the scientific letter and kept at it faithfully until his death.

Despite these handicaps, the Americans slowly managed to work their way into the fabric of European scientific discussions. Such communication was the stuff of eighteenth-century science, and these advances represented a vital step for the colonials, all the more so as there were virtually no prospects the Americans would ever meet their distant interlocutors.
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Equally as important, the style of learned correspondence adopted from the European model, with its distinct protocol, mores, and ideals, helped integrate North America into the worldwide scientific project and introduced a system that was soon applied with equal success among the slowly swelling ranks of the colonial virtuosi.