Who was Benjamin Franklin?

Benjamin Franklin was a printer, scientist, inventor, and diplomat who became one of the most consequential Founders, best known for negotiating French recognition and aid that secured American independence. He was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston, the fifteenth of seventeen children, and apprenticed in the print shop of his older brother James before running away to Philadelphia at age 17. There he built a printing business, founded The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, and published Poor Richard's Almanack from 1733 to 1758 with the proverbs that made him famous across the colonies.

He retired from active business in 1748 to pursue science, conducting his celebrated kite experiment in 1752 that demonstrated lightning is electrical and produced his lightning rod. He invented bifocal glasses, the Franklin stove, and the glass armonica, and identified the Gulf Stream while traveling between Britain and America. He helped found the American Philosophical Society in 1743, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and what became the University of Pennsylvania.

As a colonial agent in London from 1757 to 1762 and again from 1764 to 1775, Franklin tried to maintain ties between Britain and the colonies, but the Hutchinson letters affair in 1773 and his humiliation before the Privy Council in January 1774 turned him toward independence. He returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, served in the Second Continental Congress, sat on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and signed the document at age 70 with the reported quip that the delegates must hang together or hang separately.

Congress sent him to France in October 1776 as commissioner. Working with Silas Deane and Arthur Lee, Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance, both signed February 6, 1778, which brought France into the war on the American side and ultimately delivered French troops, the French fleet under Comte de Grasse at Yorktown in 1781, and the loans that kept the army paid. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris with Britain on September 3, 1783, on terms remarkably favorable to the new nation including borders to the Mississippi River.

He returned home in 1785 as a national hero, served as president of the Pennsylvania executive council, and at age 81 attended the Constitutional Convention from May 25 to September 17, 1787, where his calls for compromise and his closing speech urging unanimous signing helped seal ratification. He died on April 17, 1790 in Philadelphia at age 84, with his last public act a petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery.