Scientist And Inventor

The American.

The life of Benjamin Franklin best represents the American scientific character. He was a self-made man who was not against making money from his scientific achievements. A native Bostonian, Franklin as a teenager ran away to Philadelphia and started his own printing business. He retired a rich man in 1748. Franklin's scientific interests were universal. His annual Poor Richard's Almanack was a cornucopia of astronomical data, advice about medicine, rhymes and anecdotes to teach morals, and meteorological predictions. Franklin was the most famous American scientist of his time because of his experiments with electricity. Yet he remained an amateur, a tinkerer rather than a theorist. He respected but could not completely comprehend Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Franklin's interests tended toward applied science: how knowledge of natural phenomena could yield useful technology. To this end, in 1744 he began the...