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At the outbreak of the Revolution, no American name was better known than Benjamin Franklin's. The remarkable thing is that, three hundred years after Franklin's birth, this is still very close to being true. Although George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have, since 1776, nudged Franklin to the side of America's 18th-century pedestal, they have not pushed him off. Not by any means. Washington is still respected, but respected only in the studied way one acknowledges the noblest of the noble Romans; Jefferson is still the wizard of revolutionary words, but his gangly nerdiness and gigantic moral lapses have also reduced our affection for him to politeness. Franklin, however, is loved in the bubbly and uninhibited manner one loves a rascally and doting favorite uncle. In my own city of Philadelphia, Franklin easily eclipses the city's earnest and pious founder, William Penn (to the point where the statue of Penn atop City Hall is frequently mis-identified as Franklin), even though Franklin was born in Boston, had precious little in the way of piety, and actually spent most of his life after 1764 in London and Paris rather than Philadelphia.
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Not that this is undeserved. Franklin arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 as a penniless printer's apprentice—or, more accurately, as a fugitive from an apprenticeship agreement with his older brother—and rose to an unprecedented level of wealth and celebrity when rising beyond one's class was still considered an abnormality in nature. He established what became the best-read newspaper in British North America (the Pennsylvania Gazette), dominated the almanac market (which was no small market in an overwhelmingly agricultural society) with his hilariously irreverent Poor Richard's Almanac, and by 1748 was able to retire from active management of his printing business and turn his attention to the two subjects which most interested him: establishing his social credentials as an English gentleman, and gaining a foothold in the world of Enlightenment science through an ingenious series of experiments with electricity. He could afford it, too. In the 1750s, Franklin's annual income from the print-shop partnership, rental properties, patronage appointments and sales brokering (including the sale of slaves) amounted to nearly $2,000 a year, when George Washington's per annum income from Mt. Vernon was only $300 and the governor of Pennsylvania had to go cap-in-hand to the provincial Assembly for his annual salary of $1000.1 Anyone who can imagine Rupert Murdoch with a Nobel laureate's passion for nuclear physics has a fair idea of Franklin's profile in the mid-18th century.
 Electricity was no humdrum subject in the 18th century. The scientific revolution of the 1600s had begun by locating the movement of objects in forces exerted on objects, rather than in the moral qualities of the objects themselves, and it proceeded from there to itemize whatever such forces could be identified and harnessed for human enjoyment and profit. But electricity remained one of the most baffling and random of these forces until the mid-18th century, when controlled experiments with Leyden jars and conducting materials made the production of electricity less of a mystery. Franklin's great contribution, in his Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), was to demonstrate that lightning is, in effect, simply a gigantic electrical spark, and it made him famous and honored (he was awarded an M.A. from Harvard and Yale and an L.L.D. from St. Andrew's). "Nothing," wrote Joseph Priestley, "was ever written upon the subject of electricity which was more generally read, and admired in all parts of Europe."2
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