Benjamin Franklin Trivia
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49 free Benjamin Franklin trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free Benjamin Franklin trivia questions with answers. Forty-four questions on Benjamin Franklin, the Boston candlemaker's son who ran away to Philadelphia at 17 and became a printer, scientist, inventor, postmaster, diplomat and Founding Father. The set covers his early pen names and Poor Richard's Almanack, the civic institutions he started, from a subscription library to a fire company, his electrical experiments and the famous kite, and inventions like the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove and the glass armonica. It also follows him into politics: the Join, or Die cartoon, the Albany Plan, his humiliation before the Privy Council, the years in France, the treaties he signed and his late turn to abolition. Some questions bust popular myths, such as whether he really wanted the turkey as national bird or invented daylight saving time. Easier questions suit a classroom or family quiz; the later ones on his son William, his 13 virtues and his flatulence essay will stretch history buffs. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and shows the sentence that proves it under the explanation.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Benjamin Franklin made his name in Philadelphia, but in which city was he born?
Boston
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.
Q 02What trade did Franklin's father Josiah practise?
Candle and soap maker
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.
Q 03The teenage Franklin gave up eating what, and spent the money left over on books?
Meat
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.
Q 04Under what pen name did the teenage Franklin get letters published in his brother's newspaper?
Silence Dogood
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.
Q 05Franklin ran away at 17 and first looked for work in which city before reaching Philadelphia?
New York
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.
Q 06Which Philadelphia newspaper did Franklin take over and publish from 1729, at age 23?
The Pennsylvania Gazette
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.
Q 07Under what pseudonym did Franklin write his famous almanack from 1732?
Richard Saunders
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.
Q 08Franklin's almanack says early rising makes a man healthy, wealthy and what?
Wise
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.
Q 09What was the Junto, which Franklin formed in Philadelphia in 1727 at age 21?
A mutual-improvement club
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.
Q 10Which institution, founded in 1731, did Franklin call his first public project?
Library Company of Philadelphia
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.
Q 11In 1736 Franklin organised his Philadelphia neighbours, each bringing his own equipment, into which kind of volunteer company?
Fire 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.
Q 12Which institution grew out of the Academy and College of Philadelphia that Franklin founded?
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania: where the other colonial colleges trained ministers, Franklin's academy set out to prepare young men for business and public service.
Q 13Which learned body did Franklin found in 1743 for sharing scientific discoveries?
Q 21Franklin once tried to kill a turkey with electricity and got what result?
He shocked himself instead
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.
Q 22Which Atlantic current did Franklin chart with his cousin, a Nantucket sea captain?
Gulf Stream
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.
Q 23Franklin's 1754 'Join, or Die' cartoon shows which animal cut into pieces?
A snake
American Philosophical Society
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.
Q 14Which musical instrument, played by touching spinning bowls, did Franklin invent in 1761?
Glass armonica
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.
Q 15The Franklin stove of the 1740s was designed as a more efficient version of what?
Open fireplace
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.
Q 16Which invention credited to Franklin did he find particularly useful at dinner in France?
Bifocal spectacles
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.
Q 17Which word did Franklin first apply to an electrical device, a set of charged glass plates wired together?
Battery
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.
Q 18In the kite experiment, what did Franklin tie to the kite string to draw sparks from a storm cloud?
A key
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.
Q 19Which pair of terms for electrical charge did Franklin introduce, replacing 'vitreous' and 'resinous'?
Positive and negative
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.
Q 20Franklin's 1753 Copley Medal for electrical work was the top honour of which scientific body?
Royal Society
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.
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.
Q 24Franklin's rejected 1754 plan for a unified colonial government is named after which town?
Albany
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.
Q 25To which office did the Second Continental Congress appoint Franklin on 26 July 1775, the first to hold it?
United States Postmaster General
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.
Q 26In 1774 Franklin was publicly abused before the Privy Council for leaking the letters of which colony's governor?
Massachusetts
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.
Q 27Franklin sat on which body, appointed in June 1776, that drafted the Declaration of Independence?
Committee of Five
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.
Q 28Which headgear did Franklin wear in Paris in place of a wig?
Fur cap
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.
Q 29Franklin served on a 1784 French royal commission that discredited which fashionable healing craze?
Mesmerism
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.
Q 30Franklin alone signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and which other founding document?
The Constitution
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.