First Man of the Universe

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706. He was 70 years old when he arrived in Paris in 1776; he would stay for the next nine years representing the United States of America and the cause of the American Revolution that had just begun. He was the most famous American in the world. If John Adams can be believed, Franklin might have been at that moment the most famous man in the world from anywhere.

In Adams’s words, Franklin’s “reputation was more universal than . . . Newton . . . or Voltaire.” His name was known not only to “kings . . . nobility . . . and philosophers . . .”; there was scarcely “a peasant or a citizen . . . who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind.” His fame came especially from two sources: his scientific discoveries and his statesmanship on behalf of American freedom. These accomplishments were summed up in a Latin epigram bestowed on Franklin by an admiring Frenchman: “Eripuit coele fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis,” which means: “He snatched the lightning from the heavens and the scepter from tyrants.”

Franklin’s scientific fame came with the publication in 1751 of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity, presenting to the world “the first convincing theory of electricity.” This was soon followed by the kite flying experiment that became legendary for snatching lightning from the heavens.

His political fame grew in the 20 years leading up to 1776, almost all of which he spent in England representing Pennsylvania and other colonies as they inched their way toward Revolution. He returned to America in 1775, became one of the authors and signers of the American Declaration of Independence, and was immediately sent back across the ocean — his seventh crossing — as a commissioner to France to secure critical French support for the Revolution. If he had been captured by the British on his voyage across the Atlantic to France, he would have been hanged as a traitor. In England, he was regarded as “the chief of the rebels,” just the man to snatch a scepter from tyrants.

His humble beginnings made Franklin’s great fame all the more astonishing. He was born in Boston the youngest son (and 15^th child) of a tallow-chandler who had come to New England from old England to escape religious persecution. Franklin knew from his earliest days that he would have to make his own way in the world. After a couple of years of formal education, he was obliged to educate himself, and he did this with characteristic diligence and characteristic success. When he was 12, he was apprenticed to his older brother, who was a printer in Boston. He was legally bound until he was twenty-one, but feeling himself mistreated, Franklin abandoned his apprenticeship when he was seventeen and ran away to Philadelphia with hardly a penny in his pocket.

There he set out to build a life from scratch among strangers. With virtues that he would later list and invite others to emulate — and with genius that is impossible to emulate — Franklin made himself a great success at the printing trade. In his spare time, he did things like invent stoves, improve street lamp designs, start volunteer fire brigades, and organize the first lending library in north America. Having acquired what he needed to live on, he retired at the age of 42 and spent the next 42 years of his life, from 1748 to 1790, pursuing his scientific and philosophic inquiries and doing all he could—and this was a very great deal — to benefit his city, state, country, and world.

Benjamin Franklin so benefitted those around him, near and far, in small things and in great things, that sensible people who knew him in his time were grateful to have him as a neighbor, a fellow citizen, and a collaborator, preferably a leader, in any common enterprise. He was a great man, not just for his time, but for all time. At the end of his life, contemporaries in Europe plausibly called him “the greatest statesman of the present or perhaps of any century,” a “Solon, Socrates, and Seneca” of his time, and “the first man of the universe.” At the same time, he was so charming and affable that he was liked, and often loved, by many who knew him personally, from all walks of life, in Europe and America; and when called upon to reflect on human folly, he could be as piercingly funny as Mark Twain.

In his long and extraordinary life, Franklin showed memorably that Aristotle and George Washington were right: virtue and happiness are inseparable, and never dull. When he was departing Paris in 1785 at the age of 79, the streets were lined with men and women cheering and weeping at the departure of the great Franklin, for what all knew must be the last time. But he left such a rich record of his life that in some ways we can know him even better than his contemporaries did, benefit just as much from his example and his wisdom, and still laugh with him at the human folly that seems never to be in short supply.