| Bio |

Who they were

Benjamin Franklin was born on 6 January 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts^[4], the son of Josiah Franklin, a tallow chandler who made candles and soap for a living^[1]. At twelve, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer, to learn the trade^[1]. The print shop put him in daily contact with books and the physical craft of setting type, both of which shaped the rest of his life. He later migrated from Boston to Philadelphia^[5], the city that became the base for his career as a printer.

In Philadelphia, Franklin built a career as a printer, eventually taking over the Pennsylvania Gazette and making it his own after 1729^{[6, p. 225]}. He also founded the Junto, a discussion club of tradesmen and thinkers that met on Friday evenings to debate ideas and improve themselves and their city^{[7, p. 202]}. Success as a printer gave him the independence to pursue science, and by the early 1750s he was known on both sides of the Atlantic for his experiments with electricity, including his famous kite experiment^{[2, p. 1]}. Public office followed: the colonial postal service made him Deputy Postmaster General, putting him in charge of mail across the American colonies^[8].

Franklin's defining role came in the American Revolution. He signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776^{[6, p. 225]}, then crossed the Atlantic as America's representative in Paris, working as Minister Plenipotentiary to win France's support for the fight against Britain^[9]. In 1778, France agreed to a formal Treaty of Alliance with the fledgling United States, in large part through Franklin's diplomacy^{[10, p. 139]}. He later helped negotiate the peace that ended the war. By tradition, Franklin is remembered as the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, and the peace treaty that followed it^{[11, p. 89]}.

Franklin's public career continued almost to the end of his life: in 1787, in his eighties, he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia^{[12, p. 9]}. He died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790^[13]. His funeral drew a large procession through the city, led by the clergy of Philadelphia^{[14, p. 5]}, a public send-off that reflected how central he had become to American public life.

Franklin's influence outlasted his lifetime in both practical and symbolic ways. The civic institutions he helped build in Philadelphia, starting with the Junto's library project, became models copied elsewhere in the colonies^{[7, p. 202]}. His diplomatic work in France helped secure the outside support the Revolution needed to succeed, cementing his reputation as one of the new nation's most effective negotiators^{[15, p. 417]}. Later generations came to treat him as a model of the self-made American: a tradesman's son who became a scientist, publisher, and statesman without ever holding the presidency itself.

One human-scale irony sits at the center of Franklin's story: his son William, whom he had helped get appointed royal governor of New Jersey^[16], stayed loyal to the British Crown throughout the Revolution, putting father and son on opposite sides of the war Franklin had helped bring about^{[17, p. 106]}.

| Legacy & Reputation |

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