Franklin and the American Enlightenment

Benjamin Franklin, a Boston-born printer who settled in Philadelphia, embodied the Enlightenment ideal of useful knowledge. He published Poor Richard's Almanack from 1732, spreading practical advice and wit, and helped found the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), the American Philosophical Society (1743) and an academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. His experiments with electricity, including the proposal that lightning is electrical, made him famous in Europe; the Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal in 1753.

He invented the lightning rod and bifocals and declined to patent his inventions, believing knowledge should benefit the public. As a diplomat in France from 1776 to 1785, he became a celebrity of the salons and helped secure the French alliance during the American Revolution. Franklin also enslaved people for much of his life; in later years he changed his views and became president of the Pennsylvania abolition society. His life illustrates the American Enlightenment's practicality and its contradictions.