Made In America - Bill Bryson [34]
Fortunately, those who attended included some of the most steady, reflective and brilliant intellects any young nation has ever produced: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Roger Sherman, Gouverneur Morris, John Dickinson, Edmund Randolph, and of course the regal, rocklike George Washington whose benign presence as president of the convention lent the proceedings an authority and respectability they could not otherwise have expected. Of the leading political figures of the day only Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both abroad on state business, were not there.
In many ways the most interesting of the delegates was Benjamin Franklin. Aged eighty-one, he was coming to the end of his long life – and in the view of many of his fellow delegates had long since passed the useful part of it. But what a life it had been. One of seventeen children of a Boston soap and candle maker, he had left home as a boy after receiving barely two years of schooling, and established himself as a printer in Philadelphia. By dint of hard work and steady application he had made himself into one of the most respected thinkers and wealthiest businessmen in the colonies. His experiments with electricity, unfairly diminished in the popular mind to inventing the lightning rod and nearly killing himself by foolishly flying a kite in a thunderstorm, were among the most exciting scientific achievements of the eighteenth century and made him one of the celebrated scientists of the day (though he was never called a scientist in his lifetime, the word not being coined until 1840; in the 1700s scientists were natural philosophers). The terms he created in the course of his experiments – battery, armature, positive, negative and condenser, among others5 – show that he was a good deal more than a mildly quizzical fellow who just wanted to see what would happen if he nudged a kite into some storm clouds. Franklin’s life was one of relentless industry. He invented countless useful objects (which we shall discuss in a later chapter), helped to found America’s first volunteer fire department, its first fire insurance company (the Hand-in-Hand), one of Philadelphia’s first libraries, and the respected if somewhat overnamed American Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge to be Held at Philadelphia.6 He created an eternal literary character, the Richard of Poor Richard’s Almanack, filled the world with maxims and bons mots, corresponded endlessly with the leading minds of Europe and America, wrote essays on everything from how to select a mistress (take an older woman) to how to avoid flatulence (drink perfume), and in 1737 drew up the first list of American slang terms for drunkenness. (He came up with 228.) He represented America overseas with intelligence and skill and, of course, was one of the shapers of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He dabbled in property speculation and ran a printing business with holdings as far afield as Jamaica and Antigua. He became the largest dealer in paper in the colonies and made Poor Richard’s Almanack such an indispensable part of almost every American household that it was for twenty-five years the country’s second best-selling publication (the Bible was first). Such was his commercial acumen that he was able to retire from active business in 1748 aged just forty-two and devote himself to gentlemanly pursuits like politics,