BENJAMIN FRANKLIN- Biography

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Birth: 17h January 1706 / Death :17" April 1790

Benjamin Franklin is considered the most famous 18th century American, after George Washington. He tried his hand in many fields and he was famous as a printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat.

Franklin was born the 10tn son of the 17 children of a man who was both a soap maker and candle maker.

He learned to read very early and had one year in grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal education ended when he was 10.

At 12 he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. He was a master in the printer's trade and he was proud of it till the very end of his life. It also granted him an opportunity to read and write which he availed to the maximum.

In the 1740s electricity was a novel and fashionable subject. In the winter of 1746, Franklin and three of his friends began to investigate electrical phenomena.

The experiment he suggested to prove the identity of lightning and electricity was to fly a kite in a thunderstorm.

On the basis of the studies he made a very valuable suggestion that buildings could be protected from lightning by erecting pointed iron rods.

Many complain that his collaborators haven't received their full share of credit, but a large share of credit was attributed to Franklin himself. But it remains a fact that he invented many terms still used in discussing electricity (positive, negative, battery, conductor, and so on) and described the experiments with lucidity.