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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Franklin the scientist., August 20, 2005
This review is from: Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (Hardcover)
Most biographies of Benjamin Franklin tend to focus on his role as statesman as opposed to his role as scientist. Given the impact he had on the raod to independence and nationhood for the U.S. this is entirely understandable. However, he was in his time revered as much for his impact on the world of science as he was for his role as a statesman. In Stealing God's Thunder : Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America Philip Dray attempts to reverse this bias and portray Franklin's life with the focus on his role as a scientist in the forefront.
What is most interesting in this approach is how much one sees that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the human condition. The emotional debates over evolution, genetic engineering, cloning and so on have their predecessors in the advancements of previous times. Dray focuses on Franklin's invention of the lightening rod, what today seems the most benign of devices, but which stirred many deep emotions and much religious opposition in its time.
By inventing the lightening rod there were those-and they were many-who accused Franklin of "playing God". (Does that sound familiar?) They believed that Franklin, by directing lightening into the ground was adversely affecting divine balances between the heavens and the earth. He was roundly condemned in his time for doing so by many very prominent clergy, including the pastor of Boston's influential South Church, Thomas Prince.
The attacks had their effects. Franklins image was tarnished among many fundamentalist Christians and the use of the lightening rod declined considerably after these attacks. Yet it overcame these attacks. In what can only be described as a perverse turn, the efficacy of the lightening rod was demonstrated in Europe. The invention of large scale field artillery required that huge quantities of gun powder be stored. Often, it was stored in the vaults of churches. When lightening struck, the results could be devastating. The end result was European governments adopted widespread use of the lightening rod to save churches utilized to protect the means of war.
This is an excellent book that not only provides a unique perspective on Franklins life and legacy but also, in the process, puts the public debates of our own age in a very interesting light as well.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
When Reason Energized a Nation, August 7, 2005
This review is from: Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (Hardcover)
From The Washington Post book review, [...]
Reviewed by H.W. Brands
Sunday, August 7, 2005; BW03
The concept of degeneration in American political history is so broadly accepted as to be almost unchallengeable. In the days of the Founding, giants walked the earth; Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and the others seized independence from Britain and placed the new nation on its republican path. Since then it's all been downhill; no subsequent generation, and certainly not ours, could have accomplished what those demigods wrought.
This conclusion is correct, but the cause typically adduced is wrong. What separates us from the Founders is not a talent gap but a temperament gap; what we lack is not intellectual power but collective confidence. Philip Dray's succinct recounting of the role of science in Franklin's life and thought affords a useful reminder of how thoroughly America's republican experiment was a product of the mindset of the Enlightenment: a belief that all things are possible to self-confident human reason.
Dray, the author of the prize-winning At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, points out that while later generations looked on Franklin as a statesman and diplomat who dabbled in science, his own generation deemed him a scientist who moonlighted in politics. Dray covers all the high points of Franklin's scientific career: his apprenticeship as a journalist during a violent debate over inoculation for smallpox (literally violent: Cotton Mather escaped death when a homemade bomb tossed by an opponent in the debate failed to explode); his observations of the Gulf Stream and other marine and atmospheric currents (which finally convinced stubborn British sea captains to heed the advice American whalers had been giving them for decades); his prescient studies of demography (which forecast with uncanny accuracy the growth of the American population); and, of course, his investigations into electricity (which won him world fame and might have brought him a fortune had he not eschewed a patent on the lightning rod). Dray relates these parts of the Franklin story with energy and economy. His treatment of the electrical investigations, especially of the development of the lightning rod, is the fullest currently available. Other authors have noted the skepticism that naturally greeted the concept of the lightning rod -- who of sound mind would want to crown his house with something that seemed to attract lightning? -- but none has pursued the battle over lightning rod design -- one point or several? sharp or blunt? -- with such thoroughness.
Dray devotes less attention to the subject of the second half of his subtitle: the "invention of America." He walks Franklin through the seminal political events of the Revolutionary era -- the Declaration of Independence, which Franklin helped draft; the Revolutionary War, which Franklin helped win by his diplomacy in France; the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which Franklin helped guide to its successful conclusion. But Dray's real interest lies elsewhere, and his preference shows.
Yet what he does say about the intersection of Franklin's science and politics is, if not original, timely. Dray makes clear that Franklin brought to his political work the same rationalism that informed his science. Franklin wasn't irreligious; he believed in a Creator who paid some attention to what His creatures were up to. But he had no patience with theology; he considered sectarianism a blight and judged reason the appropriate measure of faith rather than vice versa. His parents, solid Puritans, lamented his lapse from orthodoxy; he responded with his own statement of faith: "At the last Day, we shall not be examined [by] what we thought but what we did; and our recommendation will not be that we said Lord, Lord , but that we did GOOD to our Fellow Creatures." One of Franklin's revisions to Jefferson's draft Declaration replaced "sacred and undeniable," in reference to the truths the Americans were defending, with "self-evident." The difference was crucial: "sacred" summoned the authority of God, "self-evident" the authority of human reason.
At a critical moment of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin uncharacteristically -- or so it seemed to most of those present -- moved that each morning's session begin with a prayer to the Almighty for guidance. Dray reads this as suggesting an eleventh-hour reversion to Franklin's parents' belief in divine intervention; more likely Franklin simply wished to remind his opinionated colleagues that they didn't have all the answers. Significantly, the convention rejected the motion; Alexander Hamilton reportedly declared that this was no time to seek "foreign aid." Franklin would no more have looked to Heaven for political guidance than he would have consulted the Bible in fashioning his lightning rod. God gave man reason, he believed, and expected man to use it. Franklin did so with confidence, as did his colleagues.
That was their genius, and it's what separates Franklin's generation from ours. Religion hasn't driven reason from the public square, but it has gained political leverage it never enjoyed in the days of the Founding. Biblical literalism (currently cloaked as "intelligent design") has fought the science of evolution to a standstill in many schools. The very idea of the Enlightenment evokes derisive sneers. Orthodoxy of some Judeo-Christian sort has become a de facto requirement for American elective office; deists in the mold of Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson need not apply. Franklin's partners weren't all as scientifically minded as Dray reveals Franklin to be, but they all believed that reason was a surer guide to political progress than religion. And in this belief they accomplished the great things they did.
As Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in September 1787, he was asked what he and his colleagues had produced. "A republic," he replied, "if you can keep it." We've kept it, after our fashion. But we couldn't reproduce it. Franklin would be disappointed.
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H.W. Brands is the author of "The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin." His biography of Andrew Jackson will be published in October.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Franklin the Scientist Enables Franklin the Founder, October 24, 2005
This review is from: Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (Hardcover)
Surely the most lovable of all the rebels who founded our nation was Benjamin Franklin. And indeed, most people think of him as a statesman and founding father who dabbled with some genius in other arenas as well, as a printer, inventor, chess player, satirist, autobiographer, and scientist. It is, however, as scientist he got his initial fame, for his investigations of electricity and his invention of the lightning rod. In _Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America_ (Random House), Philip Dray has drawn attention specifically to Franklin the scientist. We hardly think about using electricity every day, except if the power is somehow cut, and no one thinks too much about lightning rods any more, and everyone can see that lightning is a big electrical spark, so why make a fuss about Franklin's risky experiment of flying a kite in a storm that proved it so? What is important, what made Franklin an international celebrity, is that no one else in his time had much of an idea about what electricity was, and he gave us the terms and means with which we could continue an investigation of a primal and useful force, as well as keep it from harming us. Franklin's scientific reasoning resulted in the fame that allowed him to bring such reasoning to the cause of liberty.
Having turned over his lucrative publishing business to agents who would work for him, Franklin had time to tinker with wires and Leyden jars that could store electricity. He enjoyed making demonstrations of his experiments to his friends; he was always one for attempts to improve others. For most of his researches, Franklin was doing pure science. This would not bother most scientists today, but Franklin wanted electricity not only to be understood, but to be useful; he was only partially successful in this, but he was hugely successful in his invention of the lightning rod, which was a product of his electrical experimentation. He must have been dismayed that there were religious objections to his invention. Franklin certainly did not believe that any god sent thunderbolts down to destroy and instruct us, but many divines did. Lightning had the interesting quality of seeming directed; a lightning bolt might take out one particular sinner, whereupon all remaining could speculate why God had chosen that one rather than others for such a spectacular display of divine displeasure. In 1755 when a powerful earthquake struck New England, clergymen argued that God was taking revenge for having his power of lightning stolen from him. It was not the first time or the last that the church would show its resentment over the encroachments of science. It was Franklin's scientific work that ingratiated him to the Frenchmen he had to win over to the American cause and made his tour there such a success. It was a Frenchman who captured Franklin's legacy in the motto: "He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants." Franklin modestly said that actually, lightning was right where it had always been, and it was his countrymen who had done the fighting for the scepter.
It was Franklin the scientist who suggested a slight change in his friend Thomas Jefferson's wording in the Declaration of Independence. Where Jefferson was going to write about human equality, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," Franklin suggested merely "self-evident," invoking a term that Newton had applied to scientific truth, and which had as a foundation the axioms of Euclid. "Sacred" smacked of religion, but "self-evident" relied on human reason. Franklin thought that the proposition that all men are created equal was an observable fact. Such laws of nature indicated to him and his fellows how government ought to work. In his scientific effort, Franklin advocated objectivity, pragmatism, self-criticism, and free inquiry, Enlightenment ideals that the founders thought could be translated into governmental effort as well. Dray's delightful book is not only a catalogue of Franklin's scientific thinking in many realms, but also an illustration of how his scientific optimism, reason, and self-confidence were incorporated into our founding philosophy.
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