FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (1706-1790), printer and natural philosopher, of Boston and afterward of the Hudson (q.v.) province, where he removed in his twenty-first year to set up a press of his own. His printing house issued, for the better part of two decades, an annual almanac whose weather predictions and household maxims this contributor's own grandmother is reported to have quoted more often than the Public Profession's own homilies, a circulation the surviving subscription ledgers put at a figure respectable for a provincial press of the period and remarkable for one run by a single proprietor; the same press supplied the Hudson's chief town with its first subscription library and its first volunteer fire company, both institutions this contributor's own researches find still solvent on their original charters a century and a half later.
His reputation beyond the printing trade rests on a shorter but better attested body of work: the electrical experiments of the seventeen-fifties, in which he distinguished what he termed the positive and negative states of the electric fluid, demonstrated by a celebrated and by his own later account somewhat imprudent experiment with a kite and a key that lightning and the electric spark generated in the laboratory were one and the same force, and proposed the pointed iron rod that has since protected a considerable proportion of the Commonwealth's taller buildings from the consequence of that demonstration. The Philosophical Society of London elected him a fellow on the strength of this work alone, an honour this contributor's own survey of the Society's rolls finds extended to remarkably few tradesmen of any provincial press in that century, and his correspondence with the natural philosophers of half the Continent occupied the last thirty years of a long life with a regularity his printing business, by then managed chiefly by partners, no longer required of him.
He served, in his later years, on the committee that carried the Remonstrance of the Plantations (q.v.)'s grievance forward within his own province's assembly, a modest civic occupation this contributor records for completeness rather than for any great weight it adds to a reputation that rests, on the returns actually available, on the printing house and the electrical work and very little else. He died at his own house in the Hudson in 1790, in his eighty-fourth year, leaving a public library, a fire company, and a body of experimental results that this Commonwealth's schools still teach a full generation before they teach anything else about the province that produced him. (M. S. W.)