Ancestry

Franklin's father, Josiah Franklin, was born in Ecton, 
Northamptonshire, England on December 23, 1657. Josiah's 
parents were Thomas Franklin, a blacksmith and farmer, and 
his wife Jane White. Nearly ten years later, on August 15, 
1667, Abiah Folger, Benjamin Franklin's mother, was born 
in Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Peter Folger, a miller and 
schoolteacher and his wife Mary Morrils Folger.

Around 1677, Josiah married Anne Child in Ecton. Over the 
next few years, the couple had three children, all half-siblings 
of Benjamin Franklin. This included Elizabeth (March 2, 1678), 
Samuel (May 16, 1681), and Hannah (May 25, 1683). Sometime the 
second half of 1683, the Franklins left England for Boston, 
Massachusetts.

While in Boston, the couple had several more children, including 
Josiah Jr., Ann, Joseph, and Joseph (the first Joseph died soon 
after birth, and the next son was named for him). After Josiah's 
wife Anne died in Boston on July 9, Josiah remarried on November 25.


Early life

Benjamin Franklin was born on Milk Street in Boston. His father, 
Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler who married twice. Of the 
two marriges his father had, he produced 17 children, Benjamin 
was the youngest. His schooling ended at ten, and at 12 he became 
an apprentice to his brother James, a printer who published the 
New England Courant.

He soon obtained work as a printer, but after a few months was 
induced by Governor George Webb to go to London, where, finding 
Webb's promises empty, he again worked as a compositor in a 
printer's shop based in part of what was, and is now the Church 
of St Batholomew the Great, Smithfield until he was brought back 
to Philadelphia by a merchant named Thomas Denham, who gave him 
a position in his business. On Denham's death Franklin returned 
to his former trade, and soon set up a printing house of his 
own from which he published The Pennsylvania Gazette, to which 
he contributed many essays and which he made a medium for 
agitating for a variety of local reforms. His intelligence 
combined with a great deal of savvy about cultivating a positive 
image of an industrious and intellectual young man earned him a 
great deal of social respect.

In 1732 he began to issue the famous Poor Richard's Almanac (with 
content both original and borrowed), on which a lot of his popular 
reputation is based. Adages from this almanac such as "A penny saved 
is a penny earned", are now commonly quoted every day by people all 
over the world.

Franklin and several other members of a philosophical association 
joined their resources in 1731 and began the first public library 
in Philadelphia. The newly founded Library Company ordered its 
first books in 1732, mostly theological and educational tomes, 
but by 1741 the library also included works on history, geography, 
poetry, exploration and science. The success of this library 
encouraged the opening of libraries in other American cities, 
and Franklin felt that this enlightenment partly contributed 
to the American colonies' struggle to maintain their privileges.

In 1736 he created the Union Fire Company, the first volunteer 
firefighting company in America.


Middle years

In 1758, the year in which he ceased writing for the Almanac, he 
printed "Father Abraham's Sermon," one of the more famous pieces 
of literature produced in Colonial America.

Meanwhile, Franklin was concerning himself more with public 
affairs. He set forth a scheme for an Academy, which was taken 
up later and finally developed into the University of Pennsylvania, 
and he founded an American Philosophical Society for the purpose 
of enabling scientific men to communicate their discoveries to 
one another. He began the electrical research that, along with 
other scientific inquiries, would occupy him for the rest of his 
life (in between bouts of politics and money-making).

In 1748 he decided to retire his printing career, and go into 
business. He created a partnership with his foreman, David Hill. 
The partnership provided Franklin with half of the shops profits 
for 18 years. This business arrangement provided leisure time 
for study, having now acquired comparative wealth; and in a 
few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation 
with the learned throughout Europe.

These include his investigations of electricity. Franklin 
identified positive and negative electrical charges and also 
demonstrated that lightning was electrical. On June 15, 1752, 
Franklin promoted this theory through a famous, though extremely 
dangerous, experiment of flying a kite during a lightning storm. 
This experiment was not written up until Joseph Priestley's 1767 
History and Present Status of Electricity; the evidence shows 
that Franklin was insulated (not in a conducting path, as he 
would have been electrocuted); unfortunately, others, such as 
Prof. Georg Richmann of St. Petersburg, Russia, were spectacularly 
electrocuted during the months following Franklin's famous 
experiment. Franklin, in his writings, displays that he was 
aware of the dangers and alternative ways to demonstrate that 
lightning was electrical, as shown by his invention of the 
lightning rod, an application of the use of electrical ground. 
If Franklin did perform this experiment, he did not do it in 
the way that is often described (as it would have been dramatic 
but fatal (http://www.mos.org/sln/toe/kite.html)). Instead he 
used the kite to collect some electric charge from a storm cloud, 
which implied that lightning was electrical. See, for example, 
the 1805 painting by Benjamin West of Benjamin Franklin drawing 
electricity from the sky.

In recognition of his work with electricity, Franklin was elected 
a Fellow of the Royal Society and received its Copley Medal in 
1753. The cgs unit of electric charge has been named after him: 
one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb.

Franklin established two major fields of physical science, 
electricity and meteorology. In his classic work (A History of 
The Theories of Electricity & Aether), Sir Edmund Whittaker (p. 46) 
refers to Franklin's inference that electric charge is not created 
by rubbing substances, but only transferred, so that "the total 
quantity in any insulated system is invariable". This assertion 
is known as the "principle of conservation of charge".

As a printer and a publisher of a newspaper, Franklin frequented 
the farmers' markets in Philadelphia to gather news. One day 
Franklin inferred that reports of a storm elsewhere in Pennsylvania 
must be the storm that visited the Philadelphia area in recent days. 
This initiated the notion that some storms travel, eventually 
leading to the synoptic charts of dynamic meteorology, replacing 
sole dependence upon the charts of climatology.

Franklin established the first American academy, The Academy and 
College of Philadelphia, in 1749. Seven men graduated on May 17, 
1757, at the first commencement; six with a Bachelor of Arts and 
one as Master of Arts.

In 1751 Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond obtained a charter from the 
Pennsylvania legislature to establish a hospital. Pennsylvania 
Hospital was the first hospital in what was to become the United 
States of America.


In politics he proved very able both as an administrator and as a 
controversialist; but his record as an office-holder is stained by 
the use he made of his position to advance his relatives. His most 
notable service in domestic politics was his reform of the postal 
system, but his fame as a statesman rests chiefly on his diplomatic 
services in connection with the relations of the colonies with Great 
Britain, and later with France. He was also involved in the creation 
of the first volunteer fire department, free public library, and 
many other civic enterprises.

In 1754 he headed the Pennsylvania delegation to the Albany Congress. 
This meeting of several colonies had been requested by the Board of 
Trade in England to improve relations with the Indians and defense 
against the French. Franklin proposed a broad Plan of Union for the 
colonies. While the plan was not adopted, elements of it found their 
way into the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

In 1757 he was sent to England to protest against the influence of 
the Penn family in the government of Pennsylvania, and for five years 
he remained there, striving to enlighten the people and the ministry 
of the United Kingdom as to colonial conditions. At Oxford University 
Franklin was awarded an honorary doctorate for his scientific 
accomplishments and from then on went by "Doctor Franklin." He also 
managed to secure a post for his illegitimate son, William Franklin, 
as Colonial Governor of New Jersey .