Ben Franklin Facts

[sparkie]

I know little about Ben Franklin but heard recently that he wa a great man as well as very smart inventor.

[SpareOOM]

:p He was a cartoonist too. "Join or Die" was the name of one of his featured cartoons (I think that was the name of it).

~Spare

[sparkie]

What else did he do? Maybe the easier answer would be what did he NOT do?

[Franklin]

http://earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/firsts/cartoon/snake.html

He also founded the first public library. The one failure I can think of is his attempt to create a phonetic alphabet, removing a few letters and adding a few. Which didn't make much sense to me - why remove some and add some? Why not just use the redundant ones instead of adding new ones. The concept of a phonetic alphabet makes pragmatic, but not aesthetic sense. Usually, Franklin was concerned with both, but I suppose he leaned further to the practical side.

He was an agnostic, but declared that, if there is a God, then the best way to serve God was to serve Humanity, which he certainly did.

He founded the University of Pennsyvania and his trust fund supports the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia - a really cool science museum - to this day.

He was the first to develop a theory of unseen, airborne entities - germs -causing the common cold. When he was traveling with John Adams, they stopped at an inn on a cold night which had only one room with one bed available, so they slept in the same bed. Adams had a cold and suggested they leave the window closed so that Franklin wouldn't catch cold from the cold air. Franklin chose to leave the window open, reasoning that the little buggers with no name - germs - would have less of a chance of affecting/infecting him with the added circulation provided by the open window. Ben did not catch the cold.

Cheers, Franklin

[sparkie]

What would Ben Franklin of posted at DRAR board today? Really, I am curious.

[Franklin]

Hi Sparkie,

Well, I tried to channel ol' Ben, but he's busy writing a new Constitution for the Higher Realms, where he runs a newspaper, the post office and started the first public library. (He never stops, does he?) So I don't know what he would write. He may use his alter ego, Silence Dogood. Ms. Dogood was a character that Ben dreamed up when he was 16 years old. She was a middle-aged, rural widow who would write letters to New-England Courant, a newspaper run by Ben's older brother.

Silence was very well received and several men wrote in to offer their hand in marriage. I suspect Ben would use his humor and cunning to gently get the point across that the leadership of DRAR are acting in a manner not unlike that of a twit, a pillock or a toe-rag (some of the many British derogatory statements indicating that one is - as we Yanks would say - a jerk).

Cheers, Franklin

[sparkie]

So, did he really fly a kite?

[Franklin]

Yes, he did fly a kite in order to demonstrate that lightning was actually electricity. People did know about electricity, but the only use they were making of it at the time was as a novelty - generating static electricity at carnivals to make people's hair stand up.

The famous painting of Franklin and his son flying the kite was inaccurate in that it showed a very old man and a very young boy. In fact, Franklin was in his mid-forties, I believe, and his son was in his early twenties.

As you probably know, Franklin invented the lightning rod. The same basic design is used to this day. He rigged a bell onto the rod so he would know when it was invoked. He left a gap in the wire running from the lightning rod to the ground. When lightning struck, the spark across the gap would ring the bell. While Bem was travelling in Europe, his wife wrote to him that the bell was driving her crazy. He wrote back telling her to close the gap with a wire - but not during a lightning storm!

Cheers, Franklin

P.S. For those too young or deprived to know, the icon for this post is Mr. Peabody, the World's Smartest Dog

[Faucet]

he also came up with teh concept of the skis!

[NicoMoon]

Sheesh! It makes you wonder where we'd be without old Ben!:worthy:


What a human he was! Quite the inspiration, I'm glad we adopted him for that!

[Franklin]

Daylight Saving Time - another great idea brought to you by Ben Franklin. Is there anything he didn't think of?

[taiarain]

He was also supposedly a fan of the ladies. At least, that's what I think I remember from the Founding Fathers series.

Taia