Ben franklin 2
Ben franklin 2Ben Franklin
When one takes a look at the world in which he currently lives, he often sees it as being normal since it is so slow in changing. When a historian looks at the present, he sees the effects of many events and many wise people. Benjamin Franklin was one of these wise people. His participation in so many different fields changed the world immensely. He can be compared to Leonardo da Vinci, as his versatility is like that of a Renaissance Man. Benjamin Franklin was a Renaissance man of the 1700s. He was a noted politician as well as a respected scholar. Franklin also added as a civic leader and a musician. He was an important inventor and scientist. He helped to define the century.
Benjamin did not have an easy start. Ben Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1700. He was the fifteenth child in a family of seventeen children. His parents, Josiah and Abiah Franklin, were hard working, devout Puritan Calvinists. Since the Franklins were so poor, Benjamin could not go to school for more than two years. He began an apprenticeship in his brother James's printing shop. James was the printer for a Boston newspaper, so Ben not only learned how to print but he read everything in the shop. When Ben was seventeen, he left his family and moved to Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Ben was on his own and became very accomplished. He did a little bit of everything.
Ben Franklin as a scientist and inventor is perhaps the most interesting. "Flying a kite in a lightning storm is dumb. But the first person to try that dangerous experiment was brilliant." Aside from the famous kite experiment, Franklin did more. The direct effect of Franklin's work with lightning as electricity was his invention of the lightning rod. News spread about his lightning rod, people installed it on most buildings and ships, and he became world famous. In 1740 he altered his heating stove by arranging the flues so that the stove would heat the room twice as well while using only a fraction of the fuel. It was first named the Pennsylvania stove but later named the Franklin stove. The Franklin stove and the lightning rod were not the only things Franklin invented. He had poor vision and needed glasses to read. He got tired of constantly taking them off and putting them back on, so he had two pairs of spectacles cut in half, half of each lens in a single frame, and he had a pair of what we call bifocals today. As a scientist Franklin was one of the first people to chart the Gulf Stream. He also observed and plotted storms.
Franklin was very involved with the city...
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