Benjamin Franklin

Franklin made groundbreaking discoveries in his study of electricity. He wrote up his observations and experiments, which were published abroad and made him world-famous. He coined new terms—like “positive,” “negative,” “charge,” “conductor” and “battery.” And he proved that lightning was electrical in nature with his famous experiment in 1752 with a kite and a key.

In 1776, people in France had never heard of any American, except for Benjamin Franklin. Congress sent Franklin to Paris to win foreign support for the American Revolution, and the French people treated him like a celebrity when he arrived. But Franklin had serious business to attend to. Without aid from the French monarchy, America’s fight for independence might be lost quickly.

Slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies that eventually formed the United States. In the middle of the 18th Century, nearly a tenth of Philadelphia’s residents were enslaved—working in businesses and homes, including Franklin’s. Many Philadelphians, including Franklin’s friends and colleagues, were vocally antislavery. But Franklin, committed to slave labor, did not join them.

In November 1781, Franklin heard news of the victory at Yorktown, the decisive battle of the American Revolution that was won by the combined forces of the French military and George Washington’s Continental Army. Back in 1778, Franklin had secured the alliance that brought France into the war, and without the French Army and Navy, the outcome at Yorktown would not have been possible.

Deborah Franklin encouraged her husband to visit a new school for enslaved and free Black children in Philadelphia. After his visit, Benjamin Franklin admitted that he had previously held a low opinion of the “natural Capacities of the black Race,” but observing the children at school had proven his prejudices wrong. He now knew they were “in every Respect equal to that of white Children.”

From 1733 to 1757, Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack, an annual bestseller in the colonies. In addition to weather predictions and astronomical observations, his almanac was notable for including aphorisms that combined wisdom with humor, philosophy with word play—an early example of a homespun American writing style that has continued through the generations.

Franklin developed a musical instrument that he called the armonica (after the Italian word for harmony). To play the armonica, a musician powered a foot pedal to rotate 36 concentric glass bowls and produced notes by putting wet fingers to the spinning glass. In Austria, the glass armonica provided the music for a royal wedding. Mozart and Beethoven would compose chamber pieces for it.

Franklin, who had only two years of formal education, largely taught himself through reading and on the job. At age 12, he joined his older brother James’s print shop as an apprentice printer. Later, when an essay appeared in James’s newspaper over the name Silence Dogood, no one, including James, knew the real author was 16-year-old Benjamin.

In the decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and his son William collaborated intimately to promote the British Empire in America. But when war broke out, their family, like countless others, was torn apart. Benjamin Franklin supported George Washington’s army and sided with the rebels—the Patriots. William Franklin, the Royal Governor of New Jersey, remained loyal to the King.

Ken Burns’s four-hour documentary, Benjamin Franklin, explores the revolutionary life of one of the 18th century’s most consequential figures, whose work and words unlocked the mystery of electricity and helped create the United States.

After reading Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, Franklin offered only a few edits, but one of them was pivotal. In his draft, Jefferson’s most important sentence began, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal…” Franklin crossed out “sacred and undeniable” and wrote in “self-evident.”

Get an inside look from Ken Burns and those featured in the film on why they chose to explore the life of Benjamin Franklin.