Today is Wednesday, November 6 [date of submission] and for some reason I am feeling patriotic. Let’s talk about one of our most amazing forefathers. One of the most intriguing men in our nation’s history. He was a newspaper publisher, poet, and inventor. He was a man with many hats. His dad was Josiah Franklin and he was one of 17 children.
When he was 12 he went to be an apprentice for his brother James who was the publisher of a weekly paper in Boston called the New England Courant. Ben wrote articles and gave them to his brother but his brother would not publish them. Through this he developed a scheme to get his writing published.
Ben began turning in articles written by an old lady by the name of Silence Dogood. She was the wife of a preacher. She had come from England, and had become an indentured servant to the man who paid her way here. The gentleman was a preacher and she eventually married him. She enjoyed studying and he had a large library.
She was an advocate of freedom of speech, and freedom of religion which was not always the case, as they were still under British rule. He argued that this was a God given right and no one could take it away. His brother James published 16 weeks of the articles until he realized that it was being written by his brother Ben.
Ben was a very talented poet, inventor, and patriot. He invented an electrical generator, a system of writing shorthand, and he charted the Gulf Stream, You might say he was somewhat of a dreamer. He was the writer of the declaration of Independence. Ben eventually bought out his brother’s publication and became wealthy as one of the top publishers of his day. He is most known for Poor Richard’s Almanac.
In 1752 Ben attended the Christ Church of Boston, which was the social and spiritual center of the city. It was attended by Washington, Adams, Penn, and many of our leaders. The church was a mammoth structure a quarter of a century old but it had no steeple. Ben was on a committee to raise money to build a steeple, by holding a lottery. Ben was adamant about this project, and they finally got it through to completion.
Ben had a secret reason for wanting to see the steeple built. He needed some place to do his experiments on electricity and lightning. By the time the steeple was built, he did not need it because he had finished his experiment and proven that lightning was electricity. How did he do it? Go fly a kite. He did his experiment with a simple common toy called a kite.
Time does not allow me to give all of his accomplishments so I will try to continue in another article.
“Day follows night, night follows day,
this world keeps rolling along
What will your answer be, what can you say,
When Jesus beckons you home”
“Jesus, this is Jimmy, by Bobby Grove”
—James Neuhouser
