One of the founding fathers of the USA: Who is Benjamin Franklin?

He invents the lightning rod, the bifocal lens (bifocal glasses for far and near vision), the Franklin stove (the stove that becomes efficient when heat is passed through the back of a fireplace or stove), and develops a font that bears his name. It forms the US mail chain. The lender establishes the library, the university, the fire department, and the insurance system.

As a journalist, he contributed to the development of pure humor and philosophical pragmatism peculiar to America with his editorial policy, and he is among the staunch defenders of the freedom of the press and expression. He proposes seminal plans to unite the British colonies on the east coast of North America to form a national government based on the federal model. When the moment of decision comes and there is no room for progress because of the debate, he delivers the motion that creates the political consensus that makes the US Constitution possible. His handwritten revisions to the original of the American Declaration of Independence can still be seen today.

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was an American polymath who was active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. Among the leading intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the first Postmaster General.

As a diplomat, he develops an approach that combines idealism and balance-of-power realism in foreign policy. He contributes greatly to the formation of the material basis of his country's independence, both as the representative of his country, negotiating with the British, and as the ambassador who provides the support of France against England.

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, to Josiah and Anne Franklin. He is the 15th of 17 siblings. Franklin, who started school at the age of 8, learned to read, write, and do arithmetic during his 2 years of education. His father wanted him to become a clergyman, but due to economic reasons, he dropped out at the age of 10 to help his father, who was a soap and candle manufacturer. Two years later, he gets bored with this job and starts working for his brother, who is a printer. While his older brother James was in London, where he went to study painting, he witnessed buskers writing poems and reciting them in cafes. Therefore, he asks Benjamin not only to string letters but also to write poems; Franklin also wrote two poems about the sea. One is about a family who died in a boat accident; the other is about the murder of a pirate named Blackbeard. “These were lousy jobs,” as Franklin later put it, but they sell well.

Franklin had a natural inclination for the publishing business. He will later say: “I enjoyed reading since I was a child, I used to invest all the money I could get into books.” His older brother James also publishes a dissident newspaper called The New England Courant. In this newspaper, Benjamin begins to publish articles first anonymously, then under his own name. At the age of 17, James left the publishing and editorship of the newspaper to himself. Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “After I took over the management of the newspaper, I had the audacity to criticize our executives a little. My brother liked it too. But others began to see me as a young genius who had the opportunity to slander and mock me,” he boasts. Poetically weak, but strong in his immediacy, he creates a colloquial, playful style of writing, and becomes the most famous writer in colonial America. After a while, he fell out with his older brother, who wanted to get his job back, and left New York and went to Philadelphia, where he worked for a printer named Keimar.

More than a year after he arrived in Philadelphia in November 1724, Franklin went to London to work for Palmer's, then Watt's, the largest publishing house of the time. He continues to study there. He does not neglect to establish different friendships in order to gain new knowledge. When he returns three years later, he forms a group called Junto with people who want to create change in society and express their creativity. When the number of books read by the group, which enables young men to socialize and develop themselves, is not sufficient, it provides a collection of books from various genres. This creates the first subscription-based library in America. Franklin wrote the charter of the Philadelphia Library Company in 1731, and thus the first American Library emerged. Benjamin Franklin continues to publish and publishes the Pennsylvania Gazette, which was published from 1729 to 1765, and the Poor Richard's Almanack, which ran from 1732 to 1758.

Franklin worked as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1736, but the job bore him. Since he cannot participate in the discussions, he lingers with his own magic squares. When one of the Philadelphia members died in 1751, Franklin was elected to replace him. Thus began Franklin's political career, which would last almost thirty-seven years until his retirement as chairman of the Pennsylvania Executive Council. As an ordinary citizen, he proposed various public projects such as the library, fire, and police patrol. He could have done more as a member of the Assembly now, in his own words, "An important useful project man".

In 1730 he married the landlord's daughter, Deborah Read. They have a daughter, Sarah, and a son, Francis, who will die of smallpox at age 4. Franklin describes his husband in his autobiography: “I was lucky to have a wife who loved hard work and thrift as much as I did.” In a letter he wrote towards the end of his life, he praises his wife even more: “Frugality is a virtue that enriches a person. I did not have this virtue. But I was lucky to have my wife, which meant wealth to me.” For Franklin, it was a substitute for true love.

However, when they got married, they had a big problem in front of them. In those days, Franklin had an illegitimate child and took custody of this child named William. In his autobiography, which began as a letter many years later to his illegitimate son, William, he writes: “Meanwhile, the unbridled desires of youth have driven me to have frequent intercourse with lowly women who stood in my way for a little money. It was a great shame.” That was probably the great shame he committed by falling in love with the miserable woman he was talking about.

One evening during a visit to Boston in the summer of 1743, Franklin follows a Scottish traveling scientific demonstration master named Dr. Archibald Spencer. Spencer was an expert in the amazing stunts that escaped the show. He performs electrical tricks, such as generating static electricity by rubbing a glass pipe and sparking sparks from the feet of a child suspended from the ceiling by a silk ribbon. “These were brand new things for me, they both surprised and amused me,” Franklin later says of the event.

In the diary where he recorded his experiments in November 1749, Franklin made a note of surprising similarities between electric sparks and lightning. Twelve similarities were enumerated, some of which were: “The lights they emitted, the color of the lights, the distorted shape of the lights, the sudden movement, their transmission by metals, the sound or crackling during the explosion, the killing of animals, the sulfur-like odor.”

More importantly, he links these predictions of lightning with previous experiments showing that pointed metals attract an electric charge: “The pointed end attracts electric current. We don't know if Lightning has the same feature or not. But judging by the similarities we found during the comparison, wouldn't it be possible for them to have the same reaction on this issue as well?” Then he adds an encouraging call to it: "Let the experiment begin."

After 1746, Franklin began experimenting with electricity in his intense pursuits. In 1752, he made his famous kite experiment in stormy weather. Some of the static electricity in the charged clouds travels down the wet thread of the kite and creates sparks in the switch attached to the tip. Franklin does not know how dangerous this experiment is, so he is a very lucky person. Because a Russian scientist named Richman, who repeated the same experiment after him, died by being electrocuted. His later experiments also proved that both (+) and (-) charged clouds exist in the atmosphere.

Even among science historians, there are some questions about Franklin's famous kite. Although this experiment apparently took place in June 1752, a few weeks before he became aware of the tests in France, Franklin had kept it secret for months. He didn't mention it in his letters to Collinson that summer, and apparently didn't tell his friend Ebenezer Kinnersley, who was then teaching electrical classes in Philadelphia. Even after success in France probably reached him in late July or August, he hadn't told anyone about his kite experiment. The Pennsylvania Gazette published the letter on August 27, 1752, which mentioned the experiments in France but did not mention that Franklin and his son had already confirmed these results.

Franklin's delay in explaining his experiment has led some historians to doubt whether the experiment actually took place that summer. After a forty-page analysis of letters, reports, and the fact that lightning rods were planted in Philadelphia that summer, Bernard Cohen concludes that there is no reason to doubt that Franklin had conceived and carried out the kite experiment before he was aware of the experiments in France. “We can safely say that Franklin conducted his kite experiment in June 1752, and the first lightning rods were used shortly after that, in Philadelphia in late June and early July,” he adds.

The conclusion from his experiment that electric charge is not created by friction, but flows from one object to another during friction, leads Franklin to the law of conservation of electric charge. He argued that the total electric charge does not change during the flow of electric fluid from one object to another and that the amount of electric charge gained by one object is equal to the amount lost by the other.

Thanks to Franklin's experiments, great progress has been made in the use of electricity. Franklin was the first to use many electrical concepts, such as the battery, charge, capacitor, conductor, electric charges (+) positive and (-) negative, and coil. He demonstrates that electricity can be stored and transported from one place to another thanks to his electrical studies. Thanks to Franklin, the foundations of many electrical appliances used today are laid.

Rather than these important contributions to the understanding of electricity, Franklin's true scientific reputation stems from his theories on lighting and his work on the lighting rod. His articles on lighting and the lighting rod were published in England in 1750 and successfully applied in France two years later.

In 1736, Franklin founded the Union Fire Company, the first voluntary Fire Service in the United States. In 1743, he organized the American Philosophical Society, the first scientific body in the United States. He pioneered the Pennsylvania hospital in 1751 and the fire insurance company in 1752.

Franklin, who conducts scientific studies on many different subjects such as ground movements, metallurgy, ocean currents, maritime, and artificial fertilizers, also works on atmosphere and air currents and invents a new type of stove by analyzing the smoke movements in the chimney. While serving as postmaster, he invents the odometer. The meter works by attaching it to the wheel of the vehicle and calculates the distance traveled.

Published by the Nautical Observations Philosophical Society in 1786, the work includes ideas such as Franklin's sea anchor, catamaran boats, watertight compartments, and ship lightning rods.

Franklin's work "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries", worked on population growth in the 1730s and 1740s, and set an example for many scientists.

After leaving publishing, Franklin was tasked with conveying the complaints of the colonies to London in the North American Colonial Revolt of 1757. He works against colonialism. After this period, he becomes an important diplomat in the international arena.

Elected as a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention in 1785, Franklin served as Governor of Pennsylvania in 1787, but died on April 17, 1790, at the age of 84. Despite these achievements, Benjamin Franklin adheres to the virtues and values of the middle class, believes in the wisdom of the ordinary person at the beginning of his work, and introduces himself as "Printer Franklin" throughout his life.