Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, in what was then known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Franklin’s father, English-born soap and candlemaker Josiah Franklin, had seven children with first wife, Anne Child, and 10 more with second wife, Abiah Folger. Franklin was his 15th child and youngest son.
Franklin learned to read at an early age, and despite his success at the Boston Latin School, he stopped his formal schooling at 10 to work full-time in his cash-strapped father’s candle and soap shop. Dipping wax and cutting wicks didn’t fire the young boy’s imagination, however.
Perhaps to dissuade him from going to sea as one of his other sons had done, Josiah apprenticed 12-year-old Franklin at the print shop run by his older brother James.
Although James mistreated and frequently beat his younger brother, Franklin learned a great deal about newspaper publishing and adopted a similar brand of subversive politics under the printer’s tutelage.
Franklin’s formal education was limited and ended when he was 10; however, he was an avid reader and taught himself to become a skilled writer. In 1718, at age 12, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a Boston printer. By age 16, Franklin was contributing essays (under the pseudonym Silence Dogood) to a newspaper published by his brother. At age 17, Franklin ran away from his apprenticeship to Philadelphia, where he found work as a printer. In late 1724, he traveled to London, England, and again found employment in the printing business.
https://youtu.be/aBi8M3DehQ0
Benjamin Franklin was also a scientist. He proved by flying a kite that lighting was electricity and invented a rod to prevent it from hitting buildings. He invented bifocal glasses, charted the Gulf Stream, invented a clean burning stove and proposed theories on the contagiousness of the common cold. His approach was more practical than theoretical. His training as a craftsman made him more accomplished as an inventor.
Journalist
The New England CourantAs a journalist his most important journalistic influence was his brother James who is considered the first fighter for journalistic freedom in America. Franklin wrote: “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public, and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter”. This legacy is framed and hanged in many newsroom walls in America.
Entrepreneur
Poor Richards's AlmanackFranklin was an ambitious entrepreneur, disciplined and industrious, working hard until late at night. He nurtured his appearance and reputation “I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal but to avoid all appearances of the contrary”. He used the skills he had learned to open his own printing business. He acquired the Pennsylvania Gazette from his previous employer and created Poor Richard’s Almanac.
Politician
Franklin politicianAs a politician he was the first one to propose the union of the colonies for common defense. He was accused as a royalist but when the time came he stood up for freedom becoming one of the Founding Fathers. Franklin negotiated the end of the war with England and was one of the signers of the Treaty of Paris. He was chosen to represent the Union as the first minister plenipotentiary to France, the equivalent of today’s ambassador.
Benjamin Franklin genius is centered on the use of his network of business and social connections. He leveraged this network to the benefit of his variety of interests from science and politics to business and journalism. He was against slavery as an institution. For part of his life he held the usual prejudices against African Americans but he came to realize that they were “in every respect equal” to his own.
Benjamin Franklin died at age 84, on April 17, 1790. The cause of his death was empyema brought by attacks of pleurisy, which he had suffered earlier in his life. During his later years Franklin’s health gradually deteriorated. He suffered from gout and had a large kidney stone which confined him to bed.
The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate.
The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.
Benjamin Franklin knew how to deal with haters.
Born in 1706 as the eighth of 17 children to a Massachusetts soap and candlestick maker, the chances Benjamin would go on to become a gentleman, scholar, scientist, statesman, musician, author, publisher and all-around general bad-ass were astronomically low, yet he did just that and more because he was a master of the game of personal politics.
Like many people full of drive and intelligence born into a low station, Franklin developed strong people skills and social powers. All else denied, the analytical mind will pick apart behavior, and Franklin became adroit at human relations. From an early age, he was a talker and a schemer – a man capable of guile, cunning and persuasive charm. He stockpiled a cache of cajolative secret weapons, one of which was the Benjamin Franklin Effect, a tool as useful today as it was in the 1730s and still just as counterintuitive. To understand it, let’s first rewind back to 1706.
Franklin’s prospects were dim. With 17 children, Josiah and Abiah Franklin could only afford two years of schooling for Benjamin. Instead, they made him work, and when he was 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James who was a printer in Boston. The printing business gave Benjamin the opportunity to read books and pamphlets. It was as if Ben Franklin was the one kid in the neighborhood who had access to the Internet. He read everything, and taught himself every skill and discipline one could absorb from text.
At 17, Franklin left Boston and started his own printing business In Philadelphia. At age 21, he formed a “club of mutual improvement” called the Junto. It was a grand scheme to gobble up knowledge. He invited working-class polymaths like himself who wanted to experiment in 1700s lifestyle design the chance to pool together their books and trade thoughts and knowledge of the world on a regular basis. They wrote and recited essays, held debates, and devised ways to acquire currency. Franklin used the Junto like a private consulting firm, a think tank, and he bounced ideas off of them so he could write and print better pamphlets. Franklin eventually founded the first subscription library in America and wrote it would make “the common tradesman and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries,” not to mention, give him access to whatever books he wanted to buy. Genius.
By the 1730s Franklin was riding down an information superhighway of his own construction, and the constant stream of information made him a savvy politician in Philadelphia. A celebrity and an entrepreneur who printed both a newspaper and an almanac, Franklin had collected a few enemies by the time he ran for the position of clerk of the general assembly, but Franklin knew how to deal with haters.
