Stories of Invention, Told by Inventors and their Friends Part 7

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

"We call the Americans a nation of inventors," said Fergus. "How long has this been true?"

"That is a very curious question," said Uncle Fritz. "You remember we were talking of it before. When I go back to think of the hundred and fifty years before Bunker Hill, I think there must have been a great many inglorious Miltons hidden away in the New England towns. Really, the arts advanced very little between 1630 and 1775. Flint-locks had come in, instead of match-locks. But, actually, the men at Bunker Hill rested over the rail-fence old muskets which had been used in Queen Anne's time; and to this day a 'Queen's arm' is a provincial phrase, in New England, for one of these old weapons, not yet forgotten. That inability to improve its own condition comes to a people which lets another nation do its manufacturing for it. You see much the same thing in Turkey and French Canada. Just as soon as they were thrown on their own resources here, they began to invent."

"But," said Fergus, "there was certainly one great American inventor before that time."

"You mean Franklin,--the greatest American yet, I suppose, if you mean to measure greatness by intellectual power and intellectual achievement.

Yes; Franklin's great discovery, and the inventions which followed on it, were made twenty-five years and more before Bunker Hill."

"What is the a.s.sociation between Franklin and Robinson Crusoe?" asked Alice. "I never read of one but I think of the other."

Uncle Fritz's whole face beamed with approbation.

"You have started me upon one of my hobbies," said he; "but I must not ride it too far. Franklin says himself that De Foe's 'Essay on Projects'

and Cotton Mather's 'Essay to do Good' were two books which perhaps gave him a turn of thinking which had an influence on some of the events in his after life. And you may notice how an 'Essay on Projects' might start his pa.s.sion for having things done better than in the ways he saw.

The books that he was brought up on and with were books of De Foe's own time,--none of them more popular among reading people of Boston than De Foe's own books, for De Foe was a great light among their friends in England.

"If Robinson Crusoe, on his second voyage, which was in the year 1718, had run into Boston for supplies, as he thought of doing; and if old Judge Sewall had asked him to dinner,--as he would have been likely to do, for Robinson was a G.o.dly old gentleman then, of intelligence and fortune,--if there had been by accident a vacant place at the table at the last moment, Judge Sewall might have sent round to Franklin's father to ask him to come in. For the elder Franklin, though only a tallow-chandler,--and only Goodman Franklin, not _Mr._ Franklin,--was a member of the church, well esteemed. He led the singing at the Old South after Judge Sewall's voice broke down.

"Nay, when one remembers how much Sewall had to do with printing, one might imagine that the boy Ben Franklin should wait at the door with a proof-sheet, and even take off his boy's hat as Robinson Crusoe came in."

Here Bedford Long put in a remark:--

"There are things in Robinson Crusoe's accounts of his experiments in making his pipkins, which ought to bring him into any book of American inventors."

"I never thought before," said Fergus, "that De Foe's experiences in making tiles and tobacco-pipes and drain-pipes fitted him for all that learned discussion of glazing, when Robinson Crusoe makes his pots and pans."

"Good!" said Uncle Fritz; "that must be so.--Well, as you say, Alice, there are whole sentences in that narrative which you could suppose Franklin wrote, and in his works whole sentences which would fit in closely with De Foe's writing. The style of the younger man very closely resembles that of the older."

"And Franklin would have been very much pleased to hear you say so."

"He was forever inventing," said Uncle Fritz. "As I said, he was worried unless things could be better done. If he was in a storm, he wanted to still the waves. If the chimney smoked, he wanted to make a better fireplace. If he heard a girl play the musical-gla.s.ses, he must have and make a better set."

"And if the house was struck by lightning, he went out and put up a lightning-rod."

"He had a little book by which people should make themselves better; for he rightly considered that unless a man could do this, he could make no other improvement of much account."

And when Uncle Fritz had said this, he found the pa.s.sage, which he bade John read to them.

FRANKLIN'S METHOD OF GROWING BETTER.

"I made a little book in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. [He had cla.s.sified the virtues and made a list of thirteen, which will be named below.] I ruled each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line and in its proper column I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day. The thirteen virtues were: 1. TEMPERANCE; 2. SILENCE; 3. ORDER; 4. RESOLUTION; 5. FRUGALITY; 6. INDUSTRY; 7. SINCERITY; 8. JUSTICE; 9. MODERATION; 10. CLEANLINESS; 11. TRANQUILLITY; 12. CHASt.i.tY; 13. HUMILITY. Each of these appears, by its full name or its initial, on every page of the book. But the full name of one only appears on each page.

"My intention being to acquire the habitude of these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time, and when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another,--and so on, till I should have gone through the thirteen; and as the previous acquisition might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head which is so necessary where constant vigilance has to be kept up, and a guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations."[6] And so he goes on to show how Temperance would prepare for Silence, Silence for Order, Order for Resolution, and thus to the end.

Here is the first page of the book, with the marks for the first six of the virtues.

+--------------------------------+ | TEMPERANCE. | +--------------------------------+ | EAT NOT TO DULNESS. | | | | DRINK NOT TO ELEVATION. | +----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | | S.| M.| T.| W.|Th.| F.| S.| | T. | | | | | | | | | S. | * | * | | * | | * | | | O. | * | * | * | | * | * | * | | R. | | | * | | | * | | | F. | | * | | | * | | | | I. | | | * | | | | | | S. | | | | | | | | | J. | | | | | | | | | M. | | | | | | | | | C. | | | | | | | | | T. | | | | | | | | | C. | | | | | | | | | H. | | | | | | | | +----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

"I determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the virtues successively. Thus, in the first week my great guard was to avoid every the least offence against _Temperance_, leaving the other virtues to their ordinary chance, only marking every evening the faults of the day. Thus, if in the first week I could keep my first line, marked T, clear of spots, I supposed the habit of that virtue so much strengthened, and its opposite weakened, that I might venture extending my attention to include the next, and for the following week keep both lines clear of spots. Proceeding thus to the last, I could go through a course complete in thirteen weeks, and four courses in a year. And like him who having a garden to weed does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time, and, having accomplished the first, proceeds to the second, so I should have, I hoped, the encouraging pleasure of seeing on my pages the progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines of their spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean book, after a thirteen weeks' daily examination."

Uncle Fritz said that this plan of Franklin's had been quite a favorite plan of different people at the end of the last century. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and Mr. Day, and a good many of the other reformers in England, and many in France, really thought that if people only knew what was right they would all begin and do it. They had to learn, by their own experience or somebody's, that the difficulty was generally deeper down.

There was a man, named Droz, who published a little book called "The Art of being Happy," with tables on which every night you were to mark yourself, as a school-mistress marks scholars at school, 10 for truth, 3 for temper, 5 for industry, 9 for frugality, and so on.[7]

"But in the long run," said Uncle Fritz, "there may be too much self-examination. If you really look up and not down, and look forward and not back, and loyally lend a hand, why, you can afford to look out and not in, in general."

Fergus brought the talk back to the lightning-rod, and asked where was the earliest hint of it.

The history seems to be this. In the year 1747 a gentleman named Collinson sent to Franklin, from England or Scotland, one of the gla.s.s tubes with which people were then trying electrical experiments.

Franklin was very much interested. He went on repeating the experiments which had been made in England and on the Continent of Europe. With his general love of society in such things, he had other gla.s.s tubes made, and gave them to his friends.

He had one immense advantage over the wise men of England and France, in the superior dryness of our air, which greatly favors such experiments.

Almost any one of the young Americans who will read this book has tried the experiment of exciting electricity by shuffling across a Brussels carpet on a dry floor, and then lighting the gas from a gas-jet by the spark. But when you tell an Englishman in London that you have done this, he thinks at first that you are making fun of him. For it is very seldom that the air and the carpet and the floor are all dry enough for the experiment to succeed in England. This difference of climate accounts for the difficulty which the philosophers in England sometimes found in repeating Dr. Franklin's experiments.

When it came to lightning and experiments about that, he had another very great advantage; for we have many more thunder-storms than they have. In the year 1752, when Mr. Watson was very eager to try the lightning experiments in England, he seems to have had, in all the summer, but two storms of thunder and lightning.

Franklin made his apparatus on a scale which now seems almost gigantic.

The "conductor" of an electrical machine such as you will generally see in a college laboratory is seldom more than two feet long. Franklin's conductor, which was hung by silk from the top of his room, was a cylinder ten feet long and one foot in diameter, covered with gilt paper. In his "Leyden battery" he used five gla.s.s jars, as big as large water-pails,--they held nine gallons each. One night he had arranged to kill a turkey by a shock from two of these. He received the shock himself, by accident, and it almost killed him. He had a theory that if turkeys were killed by electricity, the meat would perhaps be more tender.

He acknowledges Mr. Collinson's present of the gla.s.s tube as early as March 28, 1747. On the 11th of July he writes to Collinson that they ("we") had discovered the power of points to withdraw electricity silently and continuously. On this discovery the lightning-rod is based.

He describes this quality, first observed by Mr. Hopkinson, in the following letter:--

"The first is the wonderful effect of pointed bodies, both in _drawing off_ and _throwing off_ the electrical fire.

"For example, place an iron shot, of three or four inches diameter, on the mouth of a clean, dry gla.s.s bottle. By a fine silken thread from the ceiling, right over the mouth of the bottle, suspend a small cork ball about the bigness of a marble; the thread of such a length, as that the cork ball may rest against the side of the shot. Electrify the shot, and the ball will be repelled to the distance of four or five inches, more or less, according to the quant.i.ty of electricity. When in this state, if you present to the shot the point of a long, slender, sharp bodkin, at six or eight inches distance, the repellency is instantly destroyed, and the cork flies to the shot. A blunt body must be brought within an inch and draw a spark, to produce the same effect. To prove that the electrical fire is _drawn off_ by the point, if you take the blade of the bodkin out of the wooden handle, and fix it in a stick of sealing-wax, and then present it at the distance aforesaid, or if you bring it very near, no such effect follows; but sliding one finger along the wax till you touch the blade, the ball flies to the shot immediately. If you present the point in the dark, you will see, sometimes at a foot distance and more, a light gather upon it, like that of a firefly or glow-worm; the less sharp the point, the nearer you must bring it to observe the light; and at whatever distance you see the light, you may draw off the electrical fire, and destroy the repellency.

If a cork ball so suspended be repelled by the tube, and a point be presented quick to it, though at a considerable distance, it is surprising to see how suddenly it flies back to the tube. Points of wood will do near as well as those of iron, provided the wood is not dry; for perfectly dry wood will no more conduct electricity than sealing-wax.

"To show that points will _throw off_ as well as _draw off_ the electrical fire, lay a long, sharp needle upon the shot, and you cannot electrize the shot so as to make it repel the cork ball. Or fix a needle to the end of a suspended gun-barrel or iron rod, so as to point beyond it like a little bayonet; and while it remains there, the gun-barrel or rod cannot, by applying the tube to the other end, be electrized so as to give a spark, the fire continually running out silently at the point.

In the dark you may see it make the same appearance as it does in the case before mentioned."

The next summer, that of 1748, the experiments went so far, that in a letter of Franklin's to Collinson he proposed the electrical dinner-party, which was such a delight to Harry and Lucy:--

"Chagrined a little that we have been hitherto able to produce nothing in this way of use to mankind, and the hot weather coming on when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, it is proposed to put an end to them for this season, somewhat humorously, in a party of pleasure on the banks of the _Skuylkill_. Spirits, at the same time, are to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river, without any other conductor than the water; an experiment which we some time since performed, to the amazement of many. A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the _electrical shock_, and roasted by the _electrical jack_, before a fire kindled by the _electrified bottle_; when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France, and Germany are to be drank in _electrified b.u.mpers_, under the discharge of guns from the _electrical battery_."

It was in a letter to Collinson of the next year, 1749,--as I suppose, though it is not dated,--that the project of the lightning-rod first appears. It is too long to copy. The paragraphs most important in this view are the following:--

"42. An electrical spark, drawn from an irregular body at some distance, is scarcely ever straight, but shows crooked and waving in the air. So do the flashes of lightning, the clouds being very irregular bodies.

"43. As electrified clouds pa.s.s over a country, high hills and high trees, lofty towers, spires, masts of ships, chimneys, &c., as so many prominences and points, draw the electrical fire, and the whole cloud discharges there.

"44. Dangerous, therefore, is it to take shelter under a tree during a thunder-gust. It has been fatal to many, both men and beasts.

"45. It is safer to be in the open field for another reason. When the clothes are wet, if a flash in its way to the ground should strike your head, it may run in the water over the surface of your body; whereas, if your clothes were dry, it would go through the body, because the blood and other humors, containing so much water, are more ready conductors.