The Electric Social Network of Benjamin Franklin: How public science and the Republic of Letters created an American icon

The following is the introduction to a paper I wrote a few years ago on my research into Benjamin Franklin. How did this strange fellow become such an icon? I argue that it’s due to his involvement in the social network of his time: The Republic of Letters. You can read the entire project and play around with the interactive map here.

Introduction

Few things provided men and women of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment with as much wonder, scholarship, and entertainment as electricity, and no one exemplified this fascination more than American colonial icon Benjamin Franklin. Electricity had become a singular focus for him in the late 1740s and early 1750s. He performed countless experiments, repeating things painstakingly in order to understand this marvel. He made mistakes, but took them in stride, as he shows in his 1747 letter to friend and patron Peter Collinson: “If there is no other Use discover’d of Electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain Man humble.” [1]  He invented things, made important discoveries, but also had fun with this natural phenomenon people were just beginning to harness, with no better example than the parting words of a letter he wrote to Collinson in 1749, about a party he was to throw to celebrate the end of the year’s experimenting season:

“A Turky is to be killed for our Dinners by the Electrical Shock; and roasted by the electrical Jack, before a Fire kindled by the Electrified Bottle; when the Healths of all the Famous Electricians in England, France and Germany, are to be drank in Electrified Bumpers, under the Discharge of Guns from the Electrical Battery.” [2] 

During the Enlightenment in British Colonial America, the study of electricity wasn’t only--or even mostly--practiced by academics in laboratories, but by a community of people who were not necessarily highly educated in mathematics or science, in public places like town squares, public lecture halls, salons, and parlors. People discussed electricity in a network of letters that cris-crossed the Atlantic Ocean and traversed the borders of many countries, between dozens of correspondents. Colonial Americans experienced and marveled at electricity, and by attending public demonstrations, they grew conversant and curious about its shocking features.

Focusing on Benjamin Franklin demonstrates how extensive this network of letters was in just this one subject with this one correspondent. Because of his experience in printing, his station as Postmaster, and his precocious personality, Franklin was uniquely situated to make use of both the study of electricity and the Republic of Letters to not only elevate his own status, but that of his entire young nation between the years of 1746 and 1790.