Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was a printer, scientist, inventor and diplomat, and the only person to sign all four founding documents of the United States. Born in Boston in 1706, the fifteenth of seventeen children of a candlemaker, he had two years of schooling, was apprenticed to his brother's printing shop at twelve, and ran away to Philadelphia at seventeen. He built a printing business and made a fortune from the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard's Almanack, and retired from trade at forty-two to spend his time on public projects and science. He founded a subscription library, a fire company, an insurance company, a hospital and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and reorganised the colonial postal service. His electrical work made him internationally famous. He proposed that electricity is a single fluid, coined the terms positive and negative, battery and conductor, and in 1752 flew a kite in a thunderstorm to demonstrate that lightning is electrical, from which he developed the lightning rod. He also invented bifocals and an efficient stove, and charted the Gulf Stream, and patented none of it. He spent most of 1757 to 1775 in London representing colonial interests and arguing for reconciliation, and was publicly humiliated before the Privy Council in 1774. His decisive service was in France from 1776, where he cultivated a persona of frontier simplicity in a fur cap and secured the alliance and the loans without which the war would have been lost. He negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1783. He enslaved people early in life and became president of an abolition society. He died in 1790.
- Lived: 1706 CE – 1790 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: diplomat, scientist, founding_father
