OSHER 990 - The Nine Lives of Benjamin Franklin

Franklin's genius is a puzzle. Born the tenth son of a humble family of puritan candle-makers in Boston in 1706, Franklin's rise to the front ranks of science, engineering, and invention was as unexpected as it was meteoric. Here is a man with only two years of proper schooling who later received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews, as well as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Physics. Like his hero Isaac Newton, Franklin's great genius lay in optimizing, in tinkering, in improving, and in never being satisfied with the world as he knew it. In this pair of talks with University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell, we will examine many of Franklin's ideas to make life simpler, cheaper, and easier for himself and everyone else. It turns out that those ideas encompassed not only natural science and engineering, but also all sorts of public works, civic improvements, political trail-blazing, and fresh, new business ideas. We will discover and analyze key primary sources created by Franklin and situation his life in historical context and also in the history of public memory.