[Sailor Steve]

I stepped away from the naval books for a bit, and read a great biography of the man who invented America-Benjamin Franklin, by Walter Isaacson.

Everybody has heard of Franklin and the kite, but what I didn't know was that after he retired from printing (at age 42), he purchased several Leyden Jars and hooked them together in a box, experimented with dumping the water out to see it the charge was actually held in the water or in the glass (it was the glass) and finally published his findings with the Royal Society, for which they gave him a gold medal. He apologized for coining his own terms, and asked them to feel free to change whatever they wanted. The terms he used are still with us today: Positive, Negative, Plus and Minus Charge, Conductor and Electrical Storage Battery.

Later he was the first scientist to actually experiment with the idea that lightning might be electricity, and designed and built the first lighting rod. When he visited Britain later he was honored as an equal and counted among his friends the great chemist Joseph Priestley, philosophers Edmund Burke and David Hume, and the legendary economist Adam Smith. Franklin's papers don't mention it, but according the the papers collected by Smith's daughter Smith actually asked Franklin's opinion on some early chapters of The Wealth Of Nations.

When the American Revolution was starting in 1775 Ben Franklin was still in Britain, trying desparately to get both sides to come to an agreement. He returned to America in time to sign the Declaration Of Independence, and it was after John Hancock said "Now we must all hang together" that Franklin made his famous rejoinder: "Yes, we must all hang together, or most certainly we shall all hang separately!"

Franklin spent the rest of the war in Paris, and in 1783 was the primary negotiator for the peace treaty betwean Britain and the newly-independent America. In 1787 he was one of the prime movers behind the new Constitution, and he was the one who cut through all the infighting and arguing and managed to get the states to finally compromise. He has been called the First American, and one writer pointed out that of all the Founding Fathers, he alone would be at home in an office park or a shopping mall. That same writer called him "Our Founding Yuppie"; and he really did personify the upwardly mobile shop-keeper of the 1700s.

Benjamin Franklin, by Walter Isaacson. The best I've read in a long time. Highly informative, very readable, lots of fun.