Inventors . ory of his work as aninventor. We all know, or ought to know, thatBenjamin, the fifteenth child of Josiah Franklin,the Boston soap-boiler, was born in that townon the i/th of January, 1706, and established him-self as a printer in Philadelphia in 1728. Thathe prospered and founded the Gazette a fewyears later, and became Postmaster of Phila-delphia in 1737; that after valuable services tothe Colonies as their ao;ent in England, he o o was appointed United States Minister at theCourt of France upon the Declaration of Inde-pendence ; and that in 1782 he had the supremesatisfaction of
Inventors . ory of his work as aninventor. We all know, or ought to know, thatBenjamin, the fifteenth child of Josiah Franklin,the Boston soap-boiler, was born in that townon the i/th of January, 1706, and established him-self as a printer in Philadelphia in 1728. Thathe prospered and founded the Gazette a fewyears later, and became Postmaster of Phila-delphia in 1737; that after valuable services tothe Colonies as their ao;ent in England, he o o was appointed United States Minister at theCourt of France upon the Declaration of Inde-pendence ; and that in 1782 he had the supremesatisfaction of signing at Paris the treaty ofpeace with England by which the independenceof the Colonies was assured. That he died fullof honors at Philadelphia in April, 1790, and thatCongress, as a testimonv of the gratitude of the O J O Thirteen States and of their sorrow for his loss, INVENTORS appointed a general mourning throughout theStates for a period of two months. The great invention or discovery which entitles. Franklins Birthplace, Boston. Benjamin Franklin to^ rank at the head of American inventors was, of course, the identifi-cation of lightning with electricity, and his sug-gestion of metallic conductors so arranged asto render the discharge from the clouds a harm-less one. In order to appreciate the originality BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 15 and value of this discovery, it is necessary to re-view briefly what the world knew of the subjectat that day. For a hundred years before Franklins time,electricity had been studied in Europe withoutmuch distinct progress resulting. A thousandexperiments had been performed and had been exploded by the sparkfrom a ladys finger, and children had been in-sulated by hanging them from the ceiling bysilk cords. A tolerable machine had been de-vised for exciting electricity, though most ex-perimenters still used a glass tube. Severalvolumes of electrical observations and experi-ments had appeared, and yet what had beendone was little
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