49 Fun Facts About Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin made his name in Philadelphia, but in which city was he born?

Boston: he was born on Milk Street and baptised the same day at the Old South Church, in a town he would leave for good as a teenage runaway.

What trade did Franklin's father Josiah practise?

Candle and soap maker: at ten, Ben was put to work cutting wicks and filling moulds in the shop, hated it, and longed to go to sea.

The teenage Franklin gave up eating what, and spent the money left over on books?

Meat: a book praising a vegetable diet won him over at 16, but he gave in on a sea voyage when the crew fried fresh cod, deciding that since fish eat one another he could eat them.

Under what pen name did the teenage Franklin get letters published in his brother's newspaper?

Silence Dogood: at 16 he posed as a middle-aged widow and slid the letters under the shop door at night, and James published fourteen before learning who she was.

Franklin ran away at 17 and first looked for work in which city before reaching Philadelphia?

New York: the one man he hoped would hire him, William Bradford, had no work but said his son in Philadelphia had just lost his chief assistant, so the runaway travelled on.

Which Philadelphia newspaper did Franklin take over and publish from 1729, at age 23?

The Pennsylvania Gazette: a rival, Samuel Keimer, had rushed it out to beat Franklin's own plan for a newspaper, then sold it to him for a trifle within a year.

Under what pseudonym did Franklin write his famous almanack from 1732?

Richard Saunders: everyone knew who 'Poor Richard' really was, but the character went on denying it year after year, and the almanack sold close to ten thousand copies a year.

Franklin's almanack says early rising makes a man healthy, wealthy and what?

Wise: the line runs 'Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise', and his last almanack strung such sayings into one speech, later sold as The Way to Wealth.

What was the Junto, which Franklin formed in Philadelphia in 1727 at age 21?

A mutual-improvement club: its young tradesmen met on Friday evenings to debate questions of morals, politics and science, and were nicknamed the Leather Apron Club.

Which institution, founded in 1731, did Franklin call his first public project?

Library Company of Philadelphia: fifty subscribers each put in forty shillings to buy books none could afford alone, and America's first successful lending library is still open.

In 1736 Franklin organised his Philadelphia neighbours, each bringing his own equipment, into which kind of volunteer company?

Fire company: each member of his Union Fire Company kept leather buckets and strong bags ready, the buckets for water and the bags for carrying a neighbour's goods out of the flames.

Which institution grew out of the Academy and College of Philadelphia that Franklin founded?

University of Pennsylvania: where the other colonial colleges trained ministers, Franklin's academy set out to prepare young men for business and public service.

Which learned body did Franklin found in 1743 for sharing scientific discoveries?

American Philosophical Society: 'philosophical' meant natural philosophy, the science of its day, and Franklin argued that the colonies were at last settled enough to have leisure for it.

Which musical instrument, played by touching spinning bowls, did Franklin invent in 1761?

Glass armonica: he mounted tuned glass bowls on a spindle turned by a foot treadle and played their rims with wet fingers, and Mozart and Beethoven both wrote music for it.

The Franklin stove of the 1740s was designed as a more efficient version of what?

Open fireplace: his iron 'Pennsylvania fireplace' sat in the hearth and gave more heat from less wood, and when the governor offered him a patent on it he turned it down.

Which invention credited to Franklin did he find particularly useful at dinner in France?

Bifocal spectacles: one part of each lens showed him his food and the other the faces across the table, and watching people's features as they spoke helped him follow their French.

Which word did Franklin first apply to an electrical device, a set of charged glass plates wired together?

Battery: his was a stack of glass panes between lead plates that stored a charge, not a chemical cell, which only arrived with Volta's pile half a century later.

In the kite experiment, what did Franklin tie to the kite string to draw sparks from a storm cloud?

A key: lightning never struck the kite, which would probably have killed him. The wet string picked up charge from the storm, and a spark jumped from the key to his knuckle.

Which pair of terms for electrical charge did Franklin introduce, replacing 'vitreous' and 'resinous'?

Positive and negative: he argued that electricity is a single fluid, so a charged body simply has too much or too little of it, and the gains and losses always balance.

Franklin's 1753 Copley Medal for electrical work was the top honour of which scientific body?

Royal Society: a colonial tradesman with two years of schooling had won Britain's highest scientific prize, and three years later the Society elected him a Fellow.

Franklin once tried to kill a turkey with electricity and got what result?

He shocked himself instead: two large Leyden jars discharged through his own arms and body, leaving them numb for hours, and he called it an experiment he never wished to repeat.

Which Atlantic current did Franklin chart with his cousin, a Nantucket sea captain?

Gulf Stream: asked why packet ships from England took weeks longer than merchantmen, Timothy Folger explained that whalers knew to keep out of the current, and the cousins mapped it.

Franklin's 1754 'Join, or Die' cartoon shows which animal cut into pieces?

A snake: it has eight pieces rather than one for every colony, because New England is one segment and Georgia and Delaware do not appear.

Franklin's rejected 1754 plan for a unified colonial government is named after which town?

Albany: the congress there approved his plan, but the colonial assemblies thought it gave the Crown too much power and the Crown's ministers thought it too democratic, so both turned it down.

To which office did the Second Continental Congress appoint Franklin on 26 July 1775, the first to hold it?

United States Postmaster General: the British had sacked him as their deputy postmaster for the colonies only eighteen months earlier, for siding with the American cause.

In 1774 Franklin was publicly abused before the Privy Council for leaking the letters of which colony's governor?

Massachusetts: Franklin stood silent while Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn mocked him before a hooting, laughing audience, and two days later he was stripped of his royal office.

Franklin sat on which body, appointed in June 1776, that drafted the Declaration of Independence?

Committee of Five: Jefferson wrote the draft and sent it to Franklin, who made a few small changes, and at 70 he went on to be the oldest man to sign.

Which headgear did Franklin wear in Paris in place of a wig?

Fur cap: the French took it for the mark of a frontier philosopher, and while he lived at Passy, just outside Paris, his face spread to medallions, snuffboxes and rings.

Franklin served on a 1784 French royal commission that discredited which fashionable healing craze?

Mesmerism: the commission, which also included the chemist Lavoisier, reported that Franz Mesmer could not back up his claims for 'animal magnetism', and the craze went into decline.

Franklin alone signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and which other founding document?

The Constitution: add the 1778 alliance with France, which he negotiated himself, and Franklin is the only person to have signed all four documents that created the United States.

Which future Chief Justice negotiated and signed the 1783 Treaty of Paris alongside Franklin and John Adams?

John Jay: the three made peace with Britain without waiting for France, against their orders from Congress, and it fell to Franklin to smooth things over with the French court.

Franklin's son William, who broke with him over the Revolution, had held which office?

Royal Governor of New Jersey: he stayed loyal to the Crown, was deposed in 1776 and held prisoner for two years, and in 1782 left for England, never to return.

Which woman became Franklin's common-law wife in 1730 after her first husband vanished?

Deborah Read: her runaway husband was neither divorced nor proved dead, so a church wedding risked a charge of bigamy, and the couple simply set up house together.

How many virtues did Franklin list in his plan for moral self-improvement?

13: he gave a week to each in turn, from Temperance to Humility, marking every lapse with a black spot in a little book, and was surprised how full of faults he turned out to be.

Which cause did Franklin take up late in life, becoming president of Pennsylvania's society for it?

Abolition of slavery: a former slave owner whose newspaper had run slave-sale notices, he made a petition to Congress to end slavery his last public act, weeks before he died.

Visitors to Franklin's grave in Philadelphia traditionally toss which objects onto the stone?

Pennies: the coins salute the 'penny saved' proverb tied to his name, and since 1858 an opening in the cemetery wall has let passers-by throw them from the street.

Franklin's portrait has appeared on which US banknote since 1914?

$100 bill: it is the highest denomination now issued, and Franklin and Alexander Hamilton are the only two faces on today's notes who were never president.

The myth that Franklin wanted the turkey as America's national bird comes from a 1784 letter to whom?

His daughter Sarah: he was mocking the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati, whose eagle he said looked more like a turkey, 'a much more respectable bird', not proposing a national symbol.

Franklin's mock letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels proposed research into improving the smell of what?

Flatulence: he wrote it as a joke at the expense of learned academies, never sent it to Brussels, and instead passed the 'little jocular paper' to friends in England.

In 1999 Franklin entered a hall of fame for which game, on whose morals he wrote a famous essay?

Chess: he even used it to learn Italian, agreeing with a fellow student that the winner of each game could set the loser a piece of grammar to learn by heart.

Which Philadelphia institution did Franklin help Dr Thomas Bond to found in 1751?

Pennsylvania Hospital: the idea was Bond's, and Franklin unlocked public money by having the Assembly promise £2,000 only once citizens had raised the same sum themselves.

Which grandson accompanied Franklin to France as his 16-year-old secretary?

William Temple Franklin: he was the son of Franklin's Loyalist son William, and served his grandfather in Paris while his own father was being held prisoner by the patriots.

Which evangelical preacher did Franklin admire and publish for profit, without sharing his theology?

George Whitefield: Franklin went to one sermon resolved to give nothing to the preacher's orphanage appeal and, by his own account, ended by emptying his pockets, gold and all, into the dish.

Why did Franklin never patent any of his inventions?

He felt ideas should be shared freely: he turned down a patent on his stove, and by his own account an English ironmonger then patented a copy and made a small fortune from it.

Josiah Franklin, father of seventeen, first meant Benjamin, his tenth son, for which career?

The ministry: Josiah meant his tenth son as a tithe to the church and sent him to grammar school at eight, but with so many children he could not afford to keep him there.

Franklin's Philadelphia home is long gone, so in which city does the only house he lived in still stand?

London: 36 Craven Street, his lodgings for most of 1757 to 1775, is now a museum, and restorers in 1998 found human bones under it, left by an anatomy school once run in the house.

What did Franklin famously carry in the hollow joint of his cane to 'calm the waters'?

Oil: after seeing a ship's wake flatten where cooks had tipped greasy water, he poured a teaspoonful on a pond at Clapham Common and watched it calm about half an acre.

Franklin's will left £1,000 to each of two cities, to be lent out at interest for how long?

200 years: the money was to be lent at 5% to young married tradesmen for a century, then lent out again for another, and he reckoned each £1,000 would end above £4 million.

In 1734 Franklin became Pennsylvania grand master of which fraternity and published its first book in America?

Freemasons: decades later in Paris, he escorted the elderly Voltaire into a lodge to be initiated.