rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0ff1e6ed-ebb2-52ad-8d5e-3203e56a60bd">Figure 30).
Franklin’s Philadelphia experiments with electricity represented Enlightenment thinking at its practical best because it used ideas, or what we call scientific theory, to harness nature. Once he had learned the properties of electricity and had established that lightning was a form of it, he found it relatively easy to contrive a metal rod, coated to prevent rusting, that would “throw off” the electricity and render it harmless. By 1753, convinced that he had mastered the theory of electricity and lightning, Franklin published a practical essay, “How to Secure Houses &c. from Lightning,” in his best-selling Poor Richard's Almanack. Here he explained a natural phenomenon that had always terrified people, providing the world with a relatively simple and inexpensive device to protect lives and property. Soon lightning rods appeared on houses and barns all over the American colonies, then before long in Europe and other parts of the world. Farmers, homeowners, mariners, and church wardens could rest easier, knowing that their dwellings, stables, houses, ships, and churches were safe. What had seemed to be the wrathful work of an angry God now became a force within the power of human beings to control. If the power of lightning could be harnessed by the son of a Boston candlemaker far from the centers of learning in Europe, what other forces of nature might be understood and brought under rein? “Franklin’s reputation was more universal than that of Leibniz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire,” John Adams later wrote. “There was scarcely a peasant or a citizen … who did not consider him a friend to human kind.”28
FIGURE 30. Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c.1805, PMA. Franklin’s house was about to be demolished and Benjamin West was nearing the end of his life when he painted this heroic portrait. Of course, when Franklin conducted his famous kite experiment in 1752 he was not surrounded by cherubs (one in an Indian headdress); only his son William was at his side. However, the thunderstorm and the key tied to a metal kite string were real. West conveniently has cherubs playing with Franklin’s electrical apparatus. Paintings of Philadelphia’s most famous son were as migratory as the man himself. West’s descendants in England kept this painting until 1898; then it was sold several times at auction in London, Paris, and New York before returning to the Philadelphia area in 1927.
In 1789, when Franklin was near death, the Philosophical Society commissioned Charles Willson Peale to paint a half-length portrait of the internationally recognized scientist. The ailing Franklin could pose for only fifteen minutes a day and died on April 17, 1790. Peale finished the work from memory, aided by his Franklin portrait of 1785. Peale depicted Franklin holding the manuscript for his famous book, Experiments and Observations on Electricity. The American Philosophical Society rejected the painting, perhaps because they did not consider it to be a life portrait. That act redounded to the Historical Society’s good fortune, because more than half a century later James J. Barclay, a Philadelphia lawyer and an officer of the Historical Society, donated the portrait to the society.
Statesman as well as scientist, Franklin spent fifteen years in London between 1757 and 1775 as a colonial agent for the legislatures of Pennsylvania and several other colonies. These were the years when the American Enlightenment in Philadelphia began to influence the lives of several thousand Africans toiling in the city, all but a few of them as slaves. The origins of Philadelphia’s reputation as an international capital of humanitarian reform now began with a tiny number who spoke out against slavery. The first whites to protest, four recently arrived German immigrants in Germantown, uttered their detestation of slavery in 1688. They were appalled that the Quaker colony, established for liberty of conscience, should deny men and women “liberty of the body,” and they pointed to the inconsistency between professing pacifism and engaging in slavery, which was inherently violent. But for many years thereafter the only souls to decry slavery were regarded as misfits and disturbers of the peace. Such a man was Benjamin Lay. A former Barbadian slave owner, Lay joined the Society of Friends and moved to Philadelphia in 1731. He used personal example and dramatic acts to portray the evil of slavery. Lay made his own clothes to avoid materials grown with slave labor and publicly smashed his wife’s teacups to discourage use of slave-produced sugar. His fiery condemnation of slavery, All Slave-keepers, That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1737) led to his repudiation by the Society of Friends. Not until he was near death in 1758, when the engraving in Figure 31 was done by Henry Dawkins, was his cause adopted officially by the Society of Friends.
Lay was followed by other antislavery spokesmen, though they were few in number before the American Revolution. The most committed and best known were John Woolman and Anthony Benezet. Both were ascetic and totally committed, caring little for the comforts of life or about the opinions of their contemporaries. These were the two humble men—one a tailor, the other a teacher of small children—who finally moved the Society of Friends to take a series of official positions against slavery between 1754 and 1774. In the latter year, the Society prohibited slave owning, and thereafter all Quakers had to release their slaves or face disownment by the Society of Friends. Decades of antislavery labor lay ahead, but a beginning had been made.29
Science and higher education were also part of Philadelphia’s leadership in the American Enlightenment. In 1751, under Franklin’s impetus, the Academy of Philadelphia, a nonsectarian school of higher education, held its first classes. It was granted college status four years later, but not until 1779 was it renamed the University of the State of Pennsylvania. The first board of trustees of the college included Anglicans and Presbyterians but only a few Quakers. The Society of Friends had traditionally rejected the more esoteric aspects of higher education in favor of practical learning. From its early period the college desultorily collected historical materials, but its connection with Franklin made it an important holder of Frankliniana.
FIGURE 31. Henry Dawkins, Benjamin Lay, engraving, 1758, Haverford College. The engraving includes a basket of fruit—Lay was a vegetarian—and Lay is seen outside a cave he used as a retreat for meditation on his farm in Abington. Lay holds a book inscribed “TRION ON HAPPINESS”—a reference to the work of an early English Quaker, Thomas Tryon, whose The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness (London, 1683) set forth a theory of temperance and moderation as the keys to a long and happy life. The painting from which the engraving was taken, by William Williams, who aroused Benjamin West’s interest in painting, is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
FIGURE 32. Astronomical clock built by David Rittenhouse, APS. Instrument maker Rittenhouse built this clock for his observatory at Norriton and used it for his famous observation of the transit of Venus in 1769. Many prized Rittenhouse materials have found their way, by gift or purchase, to the Athenaeum, Historical Society, Library Company, Philosophical Society, and Atwater Kent Museum. Hundreds of pages of his meteorological observations in the 1780s and 1790s were presented to the Philosophical Society in 1898. The Society acquired the clock in about 1810 from Rittenhouse’s executors. The centennial of Rittenhouse’s birth went unnoticed in 1832, but Philadelphia celebrated the bicentenary in the middle of the Great Depression with modest fanfare.
Like his friend Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse (1732-96) was a scientist, inventor, successful businessman, and Revolutionary leader. George Washington recognized his expertise as a mathematician and instrument maker by appointing him the first Superintendent of the United States Mint. Rittenhouse began his career as a clockmaker and gained fame in 1769 by observing the transit of Venus (Figure 32). His orrery, a moving mechanical model of the solar system based on precise mathematical calculations, also brought him fame. Both the Philosophical Society and the Library Company were venues of scientific experimentation, and Rittenhouse belonged to both, serving
