Benjamin Franklin, formerly of Boston, came very near being an only
child. If seventeen children had not come to bless the home of
Benjamin’s parents, they would have been childless. Think of getting
up in the morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among
seventeen pairs of them. Imagine yourself a child, gentle reader, in a
family where you would be called upon, every morning, to select your
own cud of spruce gum from a collection of seventeen similar cuds
stuck on a window sill. And yet B. Franklin never murmured or repined.
He desired to go to sea, and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his
brother James, who was a printer. It is said that Franklin at once
took hold of the great Archimedean lever, and jerked it early and late
in the interests of freedom. It is claimed that Franklin at this time
invented the deadly weapon known as the printer’s towel. He found that
a common crash towel could be saturated with glue, molasses, antimony,
concentrated lye, and roller composition, and that after a few years of
time and perspiration it would harden so that the “Constant Reader” or
“Veritas” could be stabbed with it and die soon.
Many believe that Franklin’s other scientific experiments were
productive of more lasting benefits to mankind than this, but I do not
agree with them.
This paper was called the _New England Courant_. It was edited jointly
by James and Benjamin Franklin, and was started to supply a long-felt
want. Benjamin edited a part of the time and James a part of the time.
The idea of having two editors was not for the purpose of giving volume
to the editorial page, but it was necessary for one to run the paper
while the other was in jail. In those days you couldn’t sass the king,
and then, when the king came in the office the next day and stopped his
paper, and took out his ad., you couldn’t put it off on “our informant”
and go right along with the paper. You had to go to jail, while your
subscribers wondered why their paper did not come, and the paste soured
in the tin dippers in the sanctum, and the circus passed by on the
other side.
How many of us today, fellow journalists, would be willing to stay in
jail while the lawn festival and the kangaroo came and went? Who, of
all our company, would go to a prison cell for the cause of freedom
while a double-column ad. of sixteen aggregated circuses, and eleven
congresses of ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native
lair, went by us?
At the age of 17, Ben got disgusted with his brother, and went to
Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to “sub” for a few
weeks, and then got a regular “sit.” Franklin was a good printer, and
finally got to be a foreman. He made an excellent foreman, sitting
by the hour in the composing room and spitting on the stone while he
cussed the make-up and press work of the other papers. Then he would
go into the editorial rooms and scare the editors to death with a wild
shriek for more copy. He knew just how to conduct himself as a foreman,
so that strangers would think he owned the paper.
In 1730, at the age of 24, Franklin married and established the
_Pennsylvania Gazette_. He was then regarded as a great man, and most
everyone took his paper. Franklin grew to be a great journalist, and
spelled hard words with great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist
in any of his newspaper work, and everybody respected him.
Along about 1746 he began to study the construction and habits of
lightning, and inserted a local in his paper, in which he said that
he would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new or
odd specimens of lightning, if they would send them into the _Gazette_
office by express for examination. Every time there was a thunder
storm, Franklin would tell the foreman to edit the paper, and, armed
with a string and an old fruit jar, he would go out on the hills and
get enough lightning for a mess.
In 1753 Franklin was made postmaster-general of the colonies. He made
a good postmaster-general, and people say there were less mistakes
in distributing their mail than there have ever been since. If a man
mailed a letter in those days, old Ben Franklin saw that it went where
it was addressed.
Franklin frequently went over to England in those days, partly on
business, and partly to shock the king. He used to delight in going
to the castle with his breeches tucked in his boots, figuratively
speaking, and attract a good deal of attention. It looked odd to the
English, of course, to see him come into the royal presence, and,
leaving his wet umbrella up against the throne, ask the king: “How’s
trade?” Franklin never put on any frills, but he was not afraid of a
crowned head. He used to say, frequently, that to him a king was no
more than a seven spot.
He did his best to prevent the Revolutionary war, but he couldn’t do
it. Patrick Henry had said that the war was inevitable, and given
it permission to come, and it came. He also went to Paris and got
acquainted with a few crowned heads there. They thought a good deal of
him in Paris, and offered him a corner lot if he would build there and
start a paper. They also promised him the county printing, but he said
no, he would have to go back to America, or his wife might get uneasy
about him.
Franklin wrote _Poor Richard’s Almanac_ in 1732-57, and it was
republished in England. Benjamin Franklin had but one son, and his
name was William. William was an illegitimate son, and though he lived
to be quite an old man, he never got over it entirely, but continued
to be but an illegitimate son all his life. Everybody urged him to do
differently, but he steadily refused to do so.