Transcript
Introduction
"Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington was the austere general. Jefferson and Adams were intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than a marble. He speaks to us through his letters and autobiography, not with rhetoric, but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary. We see his reflection in our own time. He was, during his 84 years, America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer and business strategist. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clean burning stoves, charts of the Gulf stream, and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold.
He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association and a matching grant fundraiser. He helped invent America's unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government. But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented and continually reinvented was himself. America's first great publicist, he was in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity. Partly, it was a matter of image. As a young printer in Philadelphia, he carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious.