Ben Franklin on Language: Simpler is Always Better

Posted on May 20, 2013 by

In the final months of his long life, a debilitated Benjamin Franklin still found the strength to fulminate against recent trends in the printing trade. He was particularly incensed by the elimination of italics within sentences, all in the name of a bland uniformity.

“From the same Fondness for an even and uniform Appearance of Characters in the Line the Printers have of late banished also the Italic Types, in which Words of Importance to be attended to in the Sense of the Sentence, and Words on which an Emphasis should be put in Reading, used to be printed,” he harrumphed in a letter dated December 26, 1789 to Noah Webster, the pioneering lexicographer of the American language. Over time, the frequent and regular use of capitals within sentences would likewise fade away.

Franklin, whose original trade of printer remained closest to his heart even after decades of scientific, political, and diplomatic triumph, separately proposed a simplified and more efficient phonetic alphabet for representing the English language. Among his innovations was the elimination of six letters – C, J, Q, W, X, and Y – as redundant or just plain confusing.

Webster used his own Dissertations on the English Language to review and discuss the system, although he then lacked the technology to publish Franklin’s unique phonetic symbols. These only appeared in print some years later. More about Franklin’s proposed system can be found here at the Smithsonian blog.

A simplified orthographical system was in perfect keeping with Franklin’s overall approach to language, which he saw primarily as a tool to the preservation and spread of knowledge, and to the individual personal advancement. It was not, he argued, an end unto itself.

As a result, Franklin emerged as a leading campaigner against the then-common practice of presenting much of intermediate and advanced education in Latin and Greek, a sentiment best summed up by one of his protégés, the revolutionary physician Benjamin Rush: “Do not men use Latin and Greek as the cuttlefish emit their ink, on purpose to conceal themselves from an intercourse with the common people?”

Franklin and his allies campaigned vigorously to reduce or eliminate the use of Classical language in the secondary schools and colleges, but the social prejudices of the colonial elite and their demands for a true “gentleman’s education” generally overwhelmed these efforts. Despite his lasting success in creating the future University of Pennsylvania, Franklin viewed his associated efforts to secure a full English-language curriculum in Philadelphia’s premier institution of learning as one of the biggest disappointments of a long, fruitful life.

Posted in American Literature, Benjamin Franklin, Education, Intellectual History | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Franklin’s ‘Join or Die’ Cartoon of 1754 Foreshadowed Federal United States

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

On this day in 1754, Benjamin Franklin published his famous “Join, or Die” cartoon—a snake representing the American colonies, severed into their constituent parts—to accompany an editorial in the Pennsylvania Gazette on the importance of unity. The appearance of the cartoon was timed to coincide with his own far-reaching and ambitious “Plan of a Proposed Union of the Several Colonies,” which he put forward at a conference in Albany, New York.

Here was an early recognition that the only way forward for the thirteen colonies—some of which were ruled directly by the crown, others by special charter, and still others, such as Pennsylvania, controlled outright by proprietors—lay in some degree of coordinated legislation and executive administration.

The proximate inspiration for the Albany conference, and for the Franklin plan, was the latest flare-up in imperial rivalry between France and Britain, which spilled over into North America in the form of the French and Indian War, running from 1754-1763. Franklin, among others, recognized the military and economic vulnerabilities of the fragmented colonial settlements. Delegates to the conference voted for his Plan of Union, only to see it fail to win support from any of the individual colonial assemblies, each eager to defend its own position and privilege.

“Its Fate was singular,” Franklin wrote in his Autobiography. “The Assemblies did not adopt it as they all thought there was too much Prerogative in it; and in England it was judged to have too much of the Democratic.”

In fact, the matter was a great deal more complicated than Franklin lets on, something he surely realized at the time. The political maneuvering around such a notion, both in London and across the colonies, was murky at best. Franklin himself was deeply involved in a running controversy back home in Philadelphia over the creation of a militia to defend the province and its valuable port, a move that set him at odds with both the pacifist Quaker elite on religious grounds, and with the proprietary Penn family and its supporters on political and economic ones.

British officials were ambivalent toward the Plan of Union and a number of similar schemes put forward by others. They could see the utility of any project that would aid the colonial war effort against the French and their allies among the Indians, but they also recognized the long-term dangers posed by anything that smacked of a union of interests among the disparate American provinces.

Such fears on the part of the British were not ill-founded. Franklin’s blueprint for closer cooperation among the colonies called for proportional representation to a Grand Council, with a president, appointed by the British crown, to preside over the “General Government.” This new legislature and executive officer would have responsibility for commerce, treaties, colonial expansion, and relations with the Indians; the raising of land and naval forces and the construction of forts “for the Defense of any of the Colonies”; and the collection, management, and allocation of those funds collected by duties or taxes.

Mindful of the concerns back in London, Franklin and the assembled delegates in Albany were careful to provide guarantees of British sovereignty, most notably a three-year period during which the Crown could review and nullify any of the colonial legislature’s laws. Further, the Albany Plan promised that any “Laws made … for the Purposes aforesaid, shall not be repugnant but as near as may be agreeable to the Laws of England.” Still, it is not hard to see the early outlines here of what would emerge three decades later with the writing and ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

 

Posted in Benjamin Franklin, Politics, Intellectual History, American Revolution | Tagged , | Leave a comment

US Weather Forecasters Turn to Citizen-Scientists 2.0

Posted on March 18, 2013 by

America’s official weather forecasters are turning to a pre-revolutionary social movement, that of the citizen-scientist, to help with 21st-century research and improve predictions of potentially dangerous weather patterns.

A new smartphone app, launched recently by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), enables anyone to contribute real-time observations to a giant database that will allow researchers to correlate raw data from across the country with existing predictive models based on radar and other techniques.

The app, dubbed mPING – for Precipitation Identification Near the Ground – is available on iTunes or Google Play for use on cell phones and tablets. The app was developed by the University of Oklahoma, which is working closely with NOAA on the project.

“mPING gives the public a unique opportunity to act as citizen-scientists, allowing them to report their observations of precipitation — such as snow, rain, ice pellets, or a mix — in real time,” said Kim Elmore, research meteorologist at the university’s Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies.

All reports in the database, both historical and real-time, can be seen on the project’s web site.

148px-Franklin_lightning_engraving

While the use of smartphones and tablets to connect informal observers and the experts at of NOAA and its partners, and then organize and display the results, relies on modern technologies, the very notion of the citizen-scientist reaches back into the early history of the nation.

Under the influence of Enlightenment ideas of knowledge prevalent in England and on the Continent since the 17th century, America’s pioneering “natural philosophers” were eager to harness the power and ideas of ordinary people.

Thomas Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, paid homage in 1667 to the contributions to science made by participants from diverse social stations. “We find many Noble Rarities to be every day given in, not only by the hands of the Learned and professed Philosophers, but from the Shops of Mechanics, from the Voyages of Merchants, from the Ploughs of Husbandmen, from the Sports, the Fishponds, the Parks, the Gardens of Gentlemen.”

The success of the Royal Society, which served as the model for Benjamin Franklin’s own American Philosophical Society, did not depend on “perfect Philosophers” trained in science but relied instead on decidedly amateur enthusiasts. “Greater things are produced, by the free way, than the formal,” proclaimed Sprat.

The ideas and trends long percolating in English society underwent profound transformation in the hands of the American colonists, for the physical, intellectual, and psychological landscape of the New World was unlike anything back home in Europe. Enlightenment ideas of science and notions of useful knowledge, which accompanied many of the early, well-educated settlers, took on an increasingly American hue.

After a slow gestation, the American Philosophical Society took root in Franklin’s adopted hometown of Philadelphia. Boston and New York followed suit. Other societies dedicated to useful knowledge began to flourish in Washington, the new national capital; Trenton, New Jersey; Albany, New York; Alexandria, Virginia; and as far south as Carolina and Mississippi and as far west as Kentucky. More specialized knowledge associations, devoted to manufactures, improvements in agriculture, the study of natural history appeared as well.

As with the early years of the Royal Society, these American associations relied heavily on citizen-scientists rather than on the traditional educated elite for many of their observations, inventions, and other breakthroughs.

While the useful knowledge societies played no direct role in the American Revolution, they gave practical expression to the widespread ideas and attitudes which informed, first, the colonial rebellion and, then, the creation of a new nation and a new society.

One need only glance at the interests, experience, and attitudes among the signatories to the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers—Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, John Adams, and James Madison among them—to recognize how just deeply such notions went to the heart of the American experience.

Posted in American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, Intellectual History, Knowledge societies, Useful Knowledge | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

George Washington and the America’s Knowledge Revolution

Posted on February 18, 2013 by

George Washington, whose birthday we celebrate today, is justly famous for his military and political contributions to the formation of the early republic. Less well known, however, is his role in the American ‘knowledge revolution’ that preceded — and was crucial to — the War of Independence.

In a world away from the urban ferment of pre-revolutionary Boston and Philadelphia, the structural weaknesses of the American economy and its vulnerability to British pressure were being driven home to the grandees of Virginia’s rich tobacco country. The region’s almost exclusive focus on the production of tobacco meant that the plantations and their large populations of slaves were at the mercy of British-controlled trade just to meet basic needs for food, supplies, tools, and even clothing.

Like his northern counterparts, including Benjamin Franklin, the future rebel George Washington began to draw a direct connection between the encouragement of American science and technology and greater freedom from imperial domination, if not outright independence.

The leading planters relied almost exclusively on the so-called consignment system, whereby British merchants acted as agents for the transport and sale of their sweet Tidewater tobacco and credited the growers’ accounts upon final sale on the English and Continental markets. These firms also controlled the supply of British-made goods to the growers, whether luxuries for the family home or basic implements and foodstuffs for the plantations, charging the costs against current or future earnings.

Weakness in world tobacco prices throughout much of the 1760s turned up the pressure on the growers, as did a number of simultaneous British measures designed to tighten control over the colonies and to raise additional revenue above and beyond the huge economic value inherent to the mercantilist system. These included the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, and of course the short-lived but reviled Stamp Act.

“The Eyes of our People (already beginning to open) will perceive, that many of the Luxuries which we have heretofore lavished our Substance to Great Britain for can well be dispensed with whilst the Necessaries of Life are to be procured (for the most part) within ourselves,” Washington, by now a leading figure in Virginia’s campaign against imports, warned his tobacco merchants, Robert Cary & Co.

Washington recognized that the colonies would have to restructure their economies, diversify their agricultural production, and develop their own manufacturing industries. This, in turn, required a far greater understanding of colonial resources, as well as the useful knowledge and technological expertise to exploit them to full advantage. It would also entail a direct challenge to British economic and political authority over every aspect of colonial life.

In a sign of just how much politics and technology had converged, the same meeting of the Virginia Convention in late March of 1775 that voted to make George Washington part of the colony’s delegation to the second Continental Congress appointed him a member of a special committee to “prepare a plan for the encouragement of Arts and Manufactures in this Colony.”

Virginia had emulated Philadelphia and other locales with the creation of a society dedicated to the promotion of useful knowledge. While these knowledge societies played no direct role in this revolutionary enterprise, they gave practical expression to the widespread ideas and attitudes which informed, first, the colonial rebellion and, then, the creation of a new nation and a new society.

One need only glance at the interests, experience, and attitudes among the signatories to the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers—Franklin, Jefferson, Rush, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Charles Carroll among them—to recognize how deeply such notions went to the heart of the American Revolution.

Posted in American industry, American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, Intellectual History, Knowledge societies, Politics, Useful Knowledge | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Meet the Cast of Society for Useful Knowledge — Part II

Posted on January 30, 2013 by

Ever the intellectual entrepreneur, 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin created his last study circle in February of 1787, this time dedicated to the improvement of a branch of useful knowledge that he had so far largely ignored.

The inaugural meeting of the Society for Political Inquiries was held at Philadelphia’s City Tavern, although the fortnightly sessions soon shifted to Franklin’s home, in deference to his declining health. Among the key members were long-time associates Benjamin Rush and David Rittenhouse.

Also taking part were the radical publicist Thomas Paine and the fallen aristocrat Tench Coxe. Coxe was particularly influential in the immediate post-revolutionary period, despite his earlier Royalist leanings, for he quickly emerged as the leading apostle of industrial mechanization.

AKM202046

Tench Coxe (1755-1824) (oil on canvas), Paul, Jeremiah (1761-1810) / © Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, / Courtesy of Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, / The Bridgeman Art Library

For Coxe, the wholehearted embrace of technology was vital for the new nation. “Factories, which can be carried on by watermills, windmills, fire, horses and machines ingeniously contrived, are not burdened with any heavy expense of boarding, lodging, clothing and paying workmen, and they multiply the force of hands to a great extent without taking our people from agriculture,” he argued in a keynote address in the summer of 1787 to the new Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts.

Unlike his warring patrons Alexander Hamilton, who wanted to imitate and eventually challenge Great Britain, and Thomas Jefferson, who sought to withdraw for as long as possible into the deep pastoral recesses of the continent, Coxe saw that America was uniquely suited to the wholesale introduction of the machine. By the early years of the fast-approaching nineteenth century, such an idea would become as commonplace as it is today.

Posted in American industry, Benjamin Franklin, Intellectual History, Knowledge societies, Useful Knowledge | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Meet the Cast of Society for Useful Knowledge — Part I

Posted on January 23, 2013 by

Summing up his vision of America in an essay for would-be European immigrants, Franklin wrote in 1784 that this new society was a place “where People do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he? But What does he do?”

Not surprisingly, then, Franklin surrounded himself with a fascinating cast of characters largely drawn from the new, up-and-coming class of craftsmen, artisans, and other skilled professionals — the so-called leather apron men. Among those featured in the forthcoming Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America are:

  • The revolutionary physician Benjamin Rush, Surgeon General to the Continental Army, professor of medicine, and tireless campaigner on behalf of useful knowledge in American schools and colleges.“Do not men use Latin and Greek as the cuttlefish emit their ink, on purpose to conceal themselves from an intercourse with the common people?”
  • The mathematical prodigy, watchmaker, and self-taught astronomer David Rittenhouse, who shared Franklin’s zeal for practical knowledge and American independence. Rittenhouse fully embodied the new virtues of the new republic: he was largely  self-taught; he applied ingenious technical approaches to practical problems; his interests could not be contained within the restrictive confines of pure science; and he was not above putting down his clockmaker’s tools and getting his hands dirty, whether working the fields or supervising the wartime production of gunpowder and cannon, or the design of fortifications.
  • John Bartram, the cantankerous Quaker farmer and stonemason who ranged far and wide, from the pine barrens of New Jersey to the swamps of the Carolinas, on botanizing expeditions. It was Bartram who inspired Franklin to launch what would become America’s premier knowledge association, the American Philosophical Association. And he railed against colleagues who refused to “exchange the time that is spent in the Club, Chess and Coffee House for the Curious amusements of natural observations.”

More to come in Part II.

Posted in American industry, Benjamin Franklin, Intellectual History, Knowledge societies, Useful Knowledge | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Ben Franklin and the Society for Useful Knowledge, available for pre-order @ Amazon

Posted on December 5, 2012 by

My forthcoming book, The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America, is now available for pre-order at Amazon. Release date is June 11 — in time for Father’s Day.

Franklin launched America’s first enduring learned society as early as 1743, when he announced that it was high time that “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies” begin meaningful collaboration to improve the lot of humankind.

Franklin’s manifesto, a Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America, mandated that this new association include a “Physician, a Botanist, a Mathematician, a Chemist, a Mechanician, a Geographer, and a general Natural Philosopher,” or all-around scientist, as well as three administrative officers.

The organization was to be called The American Philosophical Society, and to be hosted in Franklin’s adopted hometown of Philadelphia, then the colonies’ leading urban center.

Franklin and his collaborators were giving voice to one of the most cherished notions of the Age of Enlightenment – that the value of learning and knowledge, of information and data, is directly proportional to its practical import or utility. This same idea has left a profound mark on American society and culture and on the very idea of America itself – and through it, on the world as a whole.

Inspired by Franklin’s efforts, other communities followed suit. Similar societies for the furtherance of useful knowledge sprouted up in New York, Boston, Washington, Alexandria, Virginia, and as far south as Carolina and Mississippi and as far west as Kentucky.

Throughout the colonies, the driving force behind this movement for useful knowledge was the rising middle class — what Franklin called the “middling sorts” — who wore the leather aprons that were characteristic of artisans, craftsmen, and mechanics.

Together, they forged a new “economy of knowledge” that valued practical results and ingenious solutions over theoretical niceties and academic specialization.

This paved the way for the rebellion against British control and, then, for the rise of inventors and industrial visionaries — American icons such as Edison, Ford, and Jobs –  who made the nation into an engineering and technological superpower.

 

Posted in American industry, Benjamin Franklin, Intellectual History, Knowledge societies, Useful Knowledge | Tagged , , | 1 Comment