Benjamin Franklin

Josiah Franklin boiled tallow into candles and soap on Milk Street in Boston and had 17 children. The fifteenth, and the youngest son, was taken out of school at ten to cut wicks and fill molds, and indentured at 12 to his brother James, a printer. At 16 he began sliding essays under the shop door signed Silence Dogood. James printed 14 of them without knowing who wrote them and was furious when he found out. When Benjamin broke the indenture and left, he counted it decades later as one of the first errata of his life. A Pennsylvania governor's promise of backing sent him to London at 18 and proved worthless. He set type in a deconsecrated church there and came home in 1726 to keep another man's books.

He gave English the words positive and negative for electrical charge, sold about 10,000 almanacs a year under a borrowed name, and organized Philadelphia the way other men organize a shelf: a club of tradesmen in 1727, a fire company in 1736, a hospital charter in 1751, an academy that became a university, a learned society that still meets. He took over the colonial post office in 1753 and had it turning its first profit by 1761. The diplomacy and the Constitution belong to BriefHistory. What follows is the household he ran all of it from.

In 1771, at 65, staying on an English bishop's estate, he began the story of his own life as a letter. It opens: Dear Son. The son was William, born out of wedlock in 1730 to a woman never identified, raised in Franklin's house, and by then the royal governor of New Jersey. Five years later they were on opposite sides of a war. William was arrested, held eight months in solitary confinement at Litchfield, and sailed for England when the British left New York. In the 1782 peace talks his father insisted that loyalists who had borne arms be excluded from any general pardon. They never lived on the same continent again, and the memoir addressed to William breaks off at 1758, unfinished.

Some 20,000 people came to the funeral, and the revolutionary assembly in France went into three days of mourning. At 22 he had written himself a printer's epitaph about appearing again in a new and more perfect edition. The stone he actually specified reads only Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. The stranger bequest was the money: 1,000 pounds each to Boston and Philadelphia, lent out to young tradesmen and left to compound for two centuries. By 1990 the Philadelphia fund had passed two million dollars and went to scholarships for local high school students. The Boston fund reached nearly five million and built a trade school. His face has been on the hundred-dollar bill since 1914.

Benjamin Franklin's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Junto company
  A club of aspiring tradesmen who met to read, argue and improve the town 1727
• Poor Richard's Almanack book
  Issued yearly as Richard Saunders, about 10,000 copies a year 1732
• Union Fire Company company
  Philadelphia's first organized volunteer fire brigade 1736
• Academy and College of Philadelphia company
  He was its first president. It is now the University of Pennsylvania 1749
• Experiments and Observations on Electricity book
  The collected letters that gave the field the terms positive and negative charge 1751
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin book
  Begun as a letter to his son, abandoned at the year 1758, published first in French in 1791 1771

• 1718 aged ~12 Indentured at 12 to his brother James, a Boston printer He had already been pulled out of school at ten to work in his father's candle shop.
• 1722 aged ~16 Publishes 14 Silence Dogood letters in his brother's newspaper at 16 James printed every one of them without knowing the author was in his own shop.
• 1727 aged ~21 Forms the Junto at 21
• September 1, 1730 aged 24 Enters a common-law marriage with Deborah Read The same year he publicly acknowledged William, his son by a woman never identified.
• 1736 aged ~30 His son Francis dies of smallpox at four
• August 10, 1753 aged 47 Appointed deputy postmaster general for the British colonies He rewrote the accounts and the routes. The service showed its first profit in 1761.
• 1771 aged ~65 Begins his memoir as a letter addressed to his son William William was 41 and the royal governor of New Jersey.
• December 14, 1774 aged 68 Deborah dies in Philadelphia while he is in London He had spent most of the preceding decade abroad.
• April 17, 1790 aged 84 Dies of a pleuritic attack in Philadelphia About 20,000 people attended the funeral. France went into three days of mourning.

• Thomas Paine 1737–1809
  Pamphleteer whose Common Sense and Crisis essays mobilized American public opinion for independence. mentor to
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. drafted the Declaration with
• John Adams 1735–1826
  Second President and key Founding Father who helped secure independence and shaped early American diplomacy. negotiated in France alongside
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. influenced
• Thomas Edison 1847–1931
  Inventor and scientist whose research laboratory model and electrical innovations transformed modern life. influenced