Benjamin Franklin: The New American

The fifteenth son of a Boston candlemaker, Benjamin Franklin began America’s first genuinely classic success story when he ran away to Philadelphia at age seventeen and achieved both wealth and fame before the age of thirty. He retired from his printing business and lucrative almanac a wealthy man at age forty-two. Having already excelled as a writer, journalist, and businessman, in the following decades he distinguished himself in science, studying earthquakes, fossils, and the Gulf Stream, and developing experimental gardens in addition to his pioneering work in electricity. He also excelled in technology, inventing bifocals, the Franklin stove, and the lightning rod; in music, creating the glass harmonica for which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn, and others wrote music; as a public servant, heading the Post Office and founding libraries, insurance organizations, and a charity hospital; as an educator, helping organize the University of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society; and as a statesman, serving as America’s first ambassador to France and helping draft the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He died the most beloved man in America and the most respected American in the world. -- Benjamin Franklin Biography