Happy 300th Birthday Benjamin Franklin

Ben­jamin Franklin (Jan­u­ary 17, 1706–April 17, 1790) was born in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, to a tallow-maker. He became a news­pa­per edi­tor, printer, mer­chant, and phil­an­thropist in Philadel­phia, Penn­syl­va­nia. He was one of the most promi­nent of Founders and early polit­i­cal fig­ures and states­men of the United States. As a “self-made man” noted for his curios­ity, inge­nu­ity, gen­eros­ity, and diver­sity of inter­ests, he became an inspi­ra­tion and model for many early Amer­i­cans.
As a broad-minded thinker and polit­i­cal leader able to embrace all Amer­i­cans, he was a source of uni­fi­ca­tion of colo­nial soci­ety and the United States. As a philoso­pher and sci­en­tist, who had dis­cov­ered elec­tric­ity, he was at one point the most famous man in Europe. As a states­man in Lon­don before the Rev­o­lu­tion, and Min­is­ter to France dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion, he defined the new nation in the minds of Europe. His suc­cess in secur­ing French mil­i­tary and finan­cial aid, and recruit­ing mil­i­tary lead­ers in Europe was deci­sive for the Amer­i­can vic­tory over Britain.

He pub­lished the famous Poor Richard’s Almanack and Penn­syl­va­nia Gazette. He orga­nized the first pub­lic lend­ing library and fire depart­ment in Amer­ica, the Junto, a polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion club, the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, and pub­lic schools. His sup­port for reli­gion and moral­ity was broad; he donated to all denom­i­na­tional churches (lib­eral and con­ser­v­a­tive) and the syn­a­gogue in Philadelphia.

He became a national hero in Amer­ica when he con­vinced Par­lia­ment to repeal the hated Stamp Act. A diplo­matic genius, Franklin was almost uni­ver­sally admired among the French as Amer­i­can min­is­ter to Paris, and was a major fig­ure in the devel­op­ment of pos­i­tive Franco-American rela­tions. From 1775 to 1776, Franklin was Post­mas­ter Gen­eral under the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress and from 1785 to his death in 1790 was Pres­i­dent of the Supreme Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Pennsylvania.

Franklin was inter­ested in sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, car­ry­ing out his famous elec­tric­ity exper­i­ments and invented the Franklin stove, med­ical catheter, light­ning rod, swimfins, glass har­mon­ica, and bifo­cals. He also played a major role in estab­lish­ing the higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions that would become the Ivy League’s Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia and the Franklin and Mar­shall Col­lege. In addi­tion, Franklin was a noted lin­guist, flu­ent in five lan­guages, includ­ing Greek and Latin. Towards the end of his life, he became one of the most promi­nent early Amer­i­can abo­li­tion­ists. Today Franklin is pic­tured on the U.S. $100 bill.

Early life
Ben­jamin Franklin was born on Milk Street in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts on Jan­u­ary 17, 1706. His father, Josiah Franklin, was a tal­low chan­dler, a maker of can­dles and soap, who mar­ried twice. Josiah’s mar­riages pro­duced 17 chil­dren; Ben­jamin was the tenth and youngest son. He attended Boston Latin School but did not grad­u­ate. His school­ing ended at ten and at 12 he became an appren­tice to his brother James, a printer who pub­lished the New Eng­land Courant, the first truly inde­pen­dent news­pa­per in the colonies.

Ben­jamin was an aspir­ing writer, but his brother would not pub­lish any­thing he wrote. So, the appren­tice wrote let­ters under the pseu­do­nym of “Silence Dogood,” osten­si­bly a middle-aged widow. These let­ters became famous and increased cir­cu­la­tion of the paper, but when James found out Ben was the author he became furi­ous. Ben quit his appren­tice­ship with­out per­mis­sion, becom­ing a fugi­tive under the law, so he fled from Massachusetts.

At the age of 17, Franklin ran away to Philadel­phia, seek­ing a new start in a new city. When he first arrived he worked in sev­eral print shops. Franklin was noticed and induced by Penn­syl­va­nia Gov­er­nor Sir William Keith to go to Lon­don, osten­si­bly to acquire the equip­ment nec­es­sary for estab­lish­ing another news­pa­per in Philadel­phia. Find­ing Keith’s promises of finan­cial back­ing a news­pa­per to be empty, Franklin was stranded in Eng­land, so he worked as a com­pos­i­tor in a printer’s shop in Smith­field. With some sav­ings with the help of a mer­chant named Thomas Den­ham, who gave Franklin a posi­tion as clerk, shop­keeper, and book­keeper in his mer­chant busi­ness, Franklin returned to Philadel­phia in 1726.

Upon Denham’s death, Franklin returned to his for­mer trade. By 1730, Franklin had set up his own print­ing house with the help of a finan­cial backer and became the pub­lisher of a news­pa­per called “The Penn­syl­va­nia Gazette”. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum to write about a vari­ety of local reforms and ini­tia­tives. His com­men­tary, indus­tri­ous­ness, per­sonal growth, and finan­cial suc­cess earned him great social respect at a very young age.

Civic Virtue
Franklin strongly pro­moted the idea of civic virtue and strove to be an exem­plary leader. Franklin was an avid reader, self-taught in sev­eral lan­guages and flu­ent in the clas­sics. He read and con­versed with Enlight­en­ment thinkers in Eng­land, and became a leader of the Freema­sons in Philadel­phia, who pro­moted pub­lic ser­vice, erec­tion of large pub­lic build­ings, and reli­gious tol­er­ance. He also founded the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Association.

Franklin and sev­eral other local lead­ers joined their resources in 1731 and began the first pub­lic library in Philadel­phia, invent­ing the con­cept of lend­ing books and library cards. The newly founded Library Com­pany ordered its first books in 1732, mostly the­o­log­i­cal and edu­ca­tional tomes, but by 1741 the library included works on his­tory, geog­ra­phy, poetry, explo­ration, and sci­ence. The suc­cess of this library encour­aged the open­ing of libraries in other Amer­i­can cities.

In 1733, he began to pub­lish the famous Poor Richard’s Almanack (with con­tent both orig­i­nal and bor­rowed) on which much of his pop­u­lar rep­u­ta­tion is based. His own views on self-discipline and indus­tri­ous­ness were pro­moted in adages from this almanac such as “A penny saved is twopence clear” (often mis­quoted as “A penny saved is a penny earned”), “The early bird gets the worm,” and “Fish and vis­i­tors stink after three days” remain com­mon quo­ta­tions in the mod­ern world. He sold about ten thou­sand copies a In 1736 he cre­ated the Union Fire Com­pany, the first vol­un­teer fire­fight­ing com­pany in Amer­ica. In 1743, he set forth ideas for The Acad­emy and Col­lege of Philadel­phia. He was appointed Pres­i­dent of the Acad­emy in Novem­ber 13 1749, and it opened on August 13 1751. At its first com­mence­ment, on May 17, 1757, seven men grad­u­ated; six with a Bach­e­lor of Arts and one as Mas­ter of Arts. It was later merged with the Uni­ver­sity of the State of Penn­syl­va­nia, to become the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, today a mem­ber of the Ivy League.

In 1751, Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond obtained a char­ter from the Penn­syl­va­nia leg­is­la­ture to estab­lish a hos­pi­tal. Penn­syl­va­nia Hos­pi­tal was the first hos­pi­tal in what was to become the United States of America.

Reli­gious Tol­er­a­tion
Penn­syl­va­nia was founded by William Penn who was know for his insis­tence on reli­gious tol­er­a­tion. Philadel­phia was known as a city where every type of belief, church, and sect flour­ished. Franklin was a great pro­moter of reli­gious tol­er­a­tion and worked to cre­ate a city, and later a national cul­ture, where peo­ple of all reli­gious and cul­tural back­grounds could live together in harmony.

Franklin worked out his own moral code and belief sys­tem at an early age and it evolved with his expe­ri­ence. He was called a Deist because he was a free thinker who did not take the mir­a­cles in the Bible lit­er­ally. How­ever, unlike the deists who viewed God as the “clock­mak­er” who wound up the uni­verse and left, Franklin believed in God’s active Prov­i­dence in human affairs.

Franklin believed that all reli­gions helped to for­tify the per­sonal self-discipline and moral­ity required for self-governance and democ­racy. He told his daugh­ter Sarah to attend church every Sun­day, but that he didn’t care which one she chose to attend. At one time or another Franklin gave money to every church in Philadel­phia. He owned a pew in the Epis­co­pal Church, he built a church for evan­ge­list George Whit­field when he came to Philadel­phia, and he con­tributed the the build­ing of the first Jew­ish syn­a­gogue. Such gen­eros­ity and tol­er­ance earned Franklin many friends and a rep­u­ta­tion for hav­ing a big mind and heart that could tran­scend the petty bick­er­ing so com­mon in human affairs and make him a suc­cess­ful politi­cian who earned the respect and could rep­re­sent the inter­ests of all Americans.

Sci­en­tific Inquiry
Inspired by the sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies of Sir Isaac New­ton and other Euro­pean con­tem­po­raries, Franklin engaged in sci­en­tific inquiries when not heav­ily occu­pied by money-making or politics.

In 1748, he retired from print­ing and went into other busi­nesses. He cre­ated a part­ner­ship with his fore­man, David Hill, which pro­vided Franklin with half of the shop’s prof­its for 18 years. This lucra­tive busi­ness arrange­ment pro­vided leisure time for study, and in a few years he had made dis­cov­er­ies that made him famous through­out Europe, espe­cially in France.

Elec­tric­ity
These include his inves­ti­ga­tions of elec­tric­ity. Franklin pro­posed that “vit­re­ous” and “resinous” elec­tric­ity were not dif­fer­ent types of “elec­tri­cal flu­id” (as elec­tric­ity was called then), but the same elec­tri­cal fluid under dif­fer­ent pres­sures (See elec­tri­cal charge). He is also often cred­ited with label­ing them as pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive respec­tively. In 1750, he pub­lished a pro­posal for an exper­i­ment to prove that light­ning is elec­tric­ity by fly­ing a kite in a storm that appeared capa­ble of becom­ing a light­ning storm. On May 10, 1752, Thomas Fran­cois d’Alibard of France con­ducted Franklin’s exper­i­ment (using a 40-foot-tall iron rod instead of a kite) and extracted elec­tri­cal sparks from a cloud. On June 15, Franklin con­ducted his famous kite exper­i­ment and also suc­cess­fully extracted sparks from a cloud (unaware that d’Alibard had already done so, 36 days ear­lier). Franklin’s exper­i­ment was not writ­ten up until Joseph Priestley’s 1767 His­tory and Present Sta­tus of Elec­tric­ity; the evi­dence shows that Franklin was insu­lated (not in a con­duct­ing path, as he would have been in dan­ger of elec­tro­cu­tion in the event of a light­ning strike). (Oth­ers, such as Prof. Georg Wil­helm Rich­mann of St. Peters­burg, Rus­sia, were spec­tac­u­larly elec­tro­cuted dur­ing the months fol­low­ing Franklin’s exper­i­ment.) In his writ­ings, Franklin indi­cates that he was aware of the dan­gers and offered alter­na­tive ways to demon­strate that light­ning was elec­tri­cal, as shown by his inven­tion of the light­ning rod, an appli­ca­tion of the use of elec­tri­cal ground. If Franklin did per­form this exper­i­ment, he did not do it in the way that is often described (as it would have been dra­matic but fatal). Instead he used the kite to col­lect some elec­tric charge from a storm cloud, which implied that light­ning was elec­tri­cal. See, for exam­ple, the 1805 paint­ing by Ben­jamin West of Ben­jamin Franklin draw­ing elec­tric­ity from the sky.

In recog­ni­tion of his work with elec­tric­ity, Franklin was elected a Fel­low of the Royal Soci­ety and received its Cop­ley Medal in 1753. The cgs unit of elec­tric charge has been named after him: one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb.

Mete­o­rol­ogy
Franklin estab­lished two major fields of phys­i­cal sci­ence, elec­tric­ity and mete­o­rol­ogy. In his clas­sic work (A His­tory of The The­o­ries of Elec­tric­ity & Aether), Sir Edmund Whit­taker (p. 46) refers to Franklin’s infer­ence that elec­tric charge is not cre­ated by rub­bing sub­stances, but only trans­ferred, so that “the total quan­tity in any insu­lated sys­tem is invari­able.” This asser­tion is known as the “prin­ci­ple of con­ser­va­tion of charge.”

As a printer and a pub­lisher of a news­pa­per, Franklin fre­quented the farm­ers’ mar­kets in Philadel­phia to gather news. One day Franklin inferred that reports of a storm else­where in Penn­syl­va­nia must be the storm that vis­ited the Philadel­phia area in recent days. This ini­ti­ated the notion that some storms travel, even­tu­ally lead­ing to the syn­op­tic charts of dynamic mete­o­rol­ogy, replac­ing sole depen­dence upon the charts of cli­ma­tol­ogy.

Other Sci­ence and Accom­plish­ments
Franklin noted a prin­ci­ple of refrig­er­a­tion by observ­ing that on a very hot day, he stayed cooler in a wet shirt in a breeze than he did in a dry one. To under­stand this phe­nom­e­non more clearly Franklin con­ducted exper­i­ments. On one warm day in Cam­bridge Eng­land in 1758, Franklin and fel­low sci­en­tist John Hadley exper­i­mented by con­tin­u­ally wet­ting the ball of a mer­cury ther­mome­ter with ether and using bel­lows to evap­o­rate the ether. With each sub­se­quent evap­o­ra­tion, the ther­mome­ter read a lower tem­per­a­ture, even­tu­ally reach­ing 7 °F (-14 °C). Another ther­mome­ter showed the room tem­per­a­ture to be con­stant at 65 °F (18 °C). In his let­ter “Cool­ing by Evap­o­ra­tion,” Franklin noted that “one may see the pos­si­bil­ity of freez­ing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.”

His other inven­tions include the Franklin stove, med­ical catheter, light­ning rod, swimfins, the glass har­mon­ica, and bifocals.

In 1756, Franklin became a mem­ber of the Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures & Com­merce (now Royal Soci­ety of Arts or RSA, which had been founded in 1754), whose early meet­ings took place in cof­fee shops in London’s Covent Gar­den dis­trict, close to Franklin’s main res­i­dence in Craven Street (the only one of his res­i­dences to sur­vive and which is cur­rently under­go­ing ren­o­va­tion and con­ver­sion to a Franklin museum). After his return to Amer­ica, Franklin became the Society’s Cor­re­spond­ing Mem­ber and remained closely con­nected with the Soci­ety. The RSA insti­tuted a Ben­jamin Franklin Medal in 1956 to com­mem­o­rate the 250th anniver­sary of Franklin’s birth and the 200th anniver­sary of his mem­ber­ship of the RSA.

Dur­ing a trip to Eng­land in 1757, Franklin was awarded an hon­orary doc­tor­ate for his sci­en­tific accom­plish­ments by Oxford Uni­ver­sity, and from then on went by “Doc­tor Franklin.”

In 1758, the year in which he ceased writ­ing for the Almanac, he printed “Father Abraham’s Ser­mon,” one of the most famous pieces of lit­er­a­ture pro­duced in Colo­nial America.

While liv­ing in Lon­don in 1768, he devel­oped a Pho­netic alpha­bet in A Scheme for a new Alpha­bet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. This reformed alpha­bet dis­carded six let­ters Franklin regarded as redun­dant, and sub­sti­tuted six new let­ters for sounds he felt lacked let­ters of their own; how­ever, his new alpha­bet never caught on and he even­tu­ally lost interest.

Polit­i­cal Lead­er­ship
This polit­i­cal car­toon by Franklin urged the colonies to join together dur­ing the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War).In pol­i­tics Franklin was very able, both as an admin­is­tra­tor and as a diplo­mat. His most notable ser­vice in domes­tic pol­i­tics was his reform of the postal sys­tem, but his fame as a states­man rests chiefly on his diplo­matic ser­vices in con­nec­tion with the rela­tions of the colonies with Great Britain, and later with France.

In 1754 he headed the Penn­syl­va­nia del­e­ga­tion to the Albany Con­gress. This meet­ing of sev­eral colonies had been requested by the Board of Trade in Eng­land to improve rela­tions with the Indi­ans and defense against the French. Franklin pro­posed a broad Plan of Union for the colonies, The United Colonies of Amer­ica. While the plan was not adopted, ele­ments of it found their way into the Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion and later the Con­sti­tu­tion. Franklin’s news­pa­per, which was dis­trib­uted through­out the colonies, was instru­men­tal in cre­at­ing a national iden­tity before the Amer­i­can Revolution.

In 1757 Franklin was sent to Eng­land to protest against the influ­ence of the Penn fam­ily in the gov­ern­ment of Penn­syl­va­nia, and for five years he remained there, striv­ing to enlighten the peo­ple and the min­istry of the United King­dom about colo­nial con­di­tions. He also man­aged to secure a post for his son, William Franklin, as Colo­nial Gov­er­nor of New Jersey.

On his return to Amer­ica (1762), Franklin played an hon­or­able part in the Pax­ton affair, through which he lost his seat in the Assem­bly. But in 1764, he was again dis­patched to Eng­land as agent for the colony, this time to peti­tion the King to resume the gov­ern­ment from the hands of the proprietors.

Rev­o­lu­tion­ary times
In Lon­don, he actively opposed the pro­posed Stamp Act, but lost the credit for this and much of his pop­u­lar­ity because he had secured for a friend the office of stamp agent in Amer­ica. This per­ceived con­flict of inter­est, and the result­ing out­cry, is widely regarded as a decid­ing fac­tor in Franklin’s never achiev­ing higher elected office. Even his effec­tive work in help­ing to obtain the repeal of the act did not increase his pop­u­lar­ity, but he con­tin­ued to present the case for the Colonies as the trou­bles esca­lated toward the cri­sis which would result in the Rev­o­lu­tion. This also led to an irrec­on­cil­able con­flict with his son, who remained ardently loyal to the British Government.

In 1773 or 1774 Thomas Paine vis­ited Franklin in Eng­land and enthu­si­as­ti­cally dis­cussed his book man­u­script crit­i­cal of many reli­gious doc­trines. Franklin, while per­son­ally agree­ing that many of the mir­a­cles in the Bible were unbe­liev­able, argued that the moral teach­ings in the Bible were the high­est teach­ings known, and to under­mine them with­out pro­vid­ing a bet­ter replace­ment would ruin per­sonal char­ac­ter and destroy soci­ety. Franklin told Paine to burn the man­u­script, but he sent Paine back to Amer­ica full of ideas about an inde­pen­dent United States.

Before his return home in 1775, he lost his posi­tion as post­mas­ter and broke with Eng­land after leak­ing infor­ma­tion about Thomas Hutchin­son, the English-appointed gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts. Although Hutchin­son pre­tended to take the side of the peo­ple of Mass­a­chu­setts in their com­plaints against Eng­land, he was actu­ally still work­ing for the King. Franklin acquired let­ters in which Hutchin­son called for “an abridg­ment Lib­er­ties” in Amer­ica and sent them to Amer­ica caus­ing out­rage. Franklin was called to White­hall, the Eng­lish For­eign Min­istry, where he was con­demned in public.

In Decem­ber of 1776, he was dis­patched to France as com­mis­sioner for the United States. He lived in a home in the Parisian sub­urb of Passy donated by Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chau­mont who would become a friend and the most impor­tant for­eigner to help the United States win the War of Inde­pen­dence. Franklin secured the sup­port of the King of France for the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and recruited mil­i­tary lead­ers to train and lead soldiers.

Franklin remained in France until 1785, and was such a favorite of French soci­ety that it became fash­ion­able for wealthy French fam­i­lies to dec­o­rate their par­lors with a paint­ing of him. He con­ducted the affairs of his coun­try towards that nation with great suc­cess, includ­ing secur­ing a crit­i­cal mil­i­tary alliance and nego­ti­at­ing the Treaty of Paris (1783). When he finally returned home in 1785, he received a place only sec­ond to that of George Wash­ing­ton as the cham­pion of Amer­i­can inde­pen­dence. Le Ray hon­ored him with a com­mis­sioned por­trait painted by Joseph Siffred Dup­lessis that now hangs in the National Por­trait Gallery of the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

Last Years
After his return from France, Franklin became an ardent abo­li­tion­ist, free­ing both of his slaves. He even­tu­ally became pres­i­dent of The Soci­ety for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlaw­fully Held in Bondage.

In 1787, while in retire­ment, he was a del­e­gate to the Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion that would pro­duce the United States Con­sti­tu­tion to replace the Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion. It met in Penn­syl­va­nia under the lead­er­ship of George Wash­ing­ton, who strug­gled to guide the dis­cus­sion above the petty and self­ish inter­ests of the states and del­e­gates. At one point dis­cus­sions broke down and Hamil­ton went home. Progress remained elu­sive until wise elder states­man Franklin stood up and gave a pre­scient speech in which he stated that cre­ation of the Con­sti­tu­tion was a unique oppor­tu­nity for a peo­ple to cre­ate a gov­ern­ment based on rea­son and good­ness, not the will and power of a mil­i­tary con­querer. He pleaded for humil­ity and rec­om­mended the Con­ven­tion begin each day with prayer to ori­ent them to a higher pur­pose. This speech marks the turn­ing point for draft­ing the Constitution.

He is the only Found­ing Father who is a sig­na­tory of all three of the major doc­u­ments of the found­ing of the United States: The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, The Treaty of Paris and the United States Con­sti­tu­tion. Franklin also has the dis­tinc­tion of being the old­est signer of both the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the United States Con­sti­tu­tion. He was 70 years old when he signed the Dec­la­ra­tion, and 81 when he signed the Constitution.

Between 1771 and 1788, he fin­ished his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. While it was at first addressed to his son, it was later com­pleted for the ben­e­fit of mankind at the request of a friend.

In his later years, as Con­gress was forced to deal with the issue of slav­ery, Franklin wrote sev­eral essays that attempted to con­vince his read­ers of the impor­tance of the abo­li­tion of slav­ery and of the inte­gra­tion of Africans into Amer­i­can society.

On Feb­ru­ary 11, 1790, Quak­ers from New York and Penn­syl­va­nia pre­sented their peti­tion for abo­li­tion. Their argu­ment against slav­ery was backed by the Penn­syl­va­nia Abo­li­tion­ist Soci­ety and its pres­i­dent, Ben­jamin Franklin. Because of his involve­ment in abo­li­tion, its cause was greatly debated around the states, espe­cially in the House of Representatives.

Legacy
Ben­jamin Franklin died on April 17, 1790 at the age of 84. 20,000 peo­ple attended the funeral. He was interred in Christ Church Bur­ial Ground in Philadel­phia, Pennsylvania.

At his death, Franklin bequeathed £1000 (about $4400 at the time) each to the cities of Boston and Philadel­phia, in trust for 200 years. The ori­gin of the trust began in 1785 when a French math­e­mati­cian named Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour wrote a par­ody of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack called For­tu­nate Richard. In it he mocked the unbear­able spirit of Amer­i­can opti­mism rep­re­sented by Franklin. The French­man wrote a piece about For­tu­nate Richard leav­ing a small sum of money in his will to be used only after it had col­lected inter­est for 500 years. Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote back to the French­man, thank­ing him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadel­phia, on the con­di­tion that it be placed in a fund that would gather inter­est over a period of 200 years. In 1990, over $2,000,000 had accu­mu­lated in Franklin’s Philadel­phia trust. Dur­ing the life­time of the trust, Philadel­phia used it for a vari­ety of loan pro­grams to local res­i­dents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mort­gage loans. When the trust came due, Philadel­phia decided to spend it on schol­ar­ships for local high school stu­dents. Franklin’s Boston trust fund accu­mu­lated almost $5,000,000 dur­ing that same time, and even­tu­ally was used to estab­lish a trade school that, over time, became the Franklin Insti­tute of Boston. (excerpt from Philadel­phia Inquirer arti­cle by Clark De Leon)

*This arti­cle is taken from the New World Ency­clo­pe­dia, which is devel­op­ing a value-oriented ency­clo­pe­dia based on Wikipedia. The orginal Wikipedia arti­cle was rewrit­ten by Gor­don L. Ander­son for the Ency­clo­pe­dia Project, which be released in 2008.