Author: Benjamin Franklin
Release Date: July, 1994 [EBook #148]
[This file was last updated on January 19, 2005]
Edition: 11
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
***
With introduction and notes
edited by Charles W Eliot LLD
P F Collier & son company, new
York (1909)
Benjamin Franklin was born in Milk Street, Boston,
on January 6, 1706. His father, Josiah Franklin,
was a tallow chandler who married twice, and of his
seventeen children Benjamin was the youngest son.
His schooling ended at ten, and at twelve he was bound
apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who published
the “New England Courant.” To this
journal he became a contributor, and later was for
a time its nominal editor. But the brothers quarreled,
and Benjamin ran away, going first to New York, and
thence to Philadelphia, where he arrived in October,
1723. He soon obtained work as a printer, but
after a few months he was induced by Governor Keith
to go to London, where, finding Keith’s promises
empty, he again worked as a compositor till he was
brought back to Philadelphia by a merchant named
Denman, who gave him a position in his business.
On Denman’s death he returned to his former
trade, and shortly set up a printing house of his
own from which he published “The Pennsylvania
Gazette,” to which he contributed many essays,
and which he made a medium for agitating a variety
of local reforms. In 1732 he began to issue his
famous “Poor Richard’s Almanac” for
the enrichment of which he borrowed or composed those
pithy utterances of worldly wisdom which are the basis
of a large part of his popular reputation. In
1758, the year in which he ceases writing for the
Almanac, he printed in it “Father Abraham’s
Sermon,” now regarded as the most famous piece
of literature produced in Colonial America.
Meantime Franklin was concerning himself more and
more with public affairs. He set forth a scheme
for an Academy, which was taken up later and finally
developed into the University of Pennsylvania; and
he founded an “American Philosophical Society”
for the purpose of enabling scientific men to communicate
their discoveries to one another. He himself
had already begun his electrical researches, which,
with other scientific inquiries, he called on in the
intervals of money-making and politics to the end
of his life. In 1748 he sold his business in
order to get leisure for study, having now acquired
